ABSTRACT
Environmental experts in the science and design arts are handicapped in the extent of their assistance to public officials on environmental issues because of this incongruity between traditional assumptions and unprecedented problems. The thesis of the transition now underway may be most simply but abstractly stated as a change from societies based on open-system assumptions to new social arrangements based on closed-system necessities. The literature of environmental policy and administration has provided the decision-maker with little more than historical background and descriptions of comparative organization and procedure. Environmental science provides no built-in guidance for policy implementation; behavioral science has seldom offered such guidance, and the instances of effective application have been relatively infrequent–with an important exception. The formal commitment of many governments and of the United Nations to policies of environmental quality and protection is established fact. The environmental movement has often been misunderstood as relating solely to wild nature and the aesthetics of natural beauty.
