| American environmental legislation cannot be fully explained under traditional interest-group theory, which emphasizes the success of well-financed, organized interests. One alternate explanation holds that the American public accepts a new environmental ethos that is protective of the natural world and human health. This study examines one hundred years of state-level ballot questions on environmental policy and empirically establishes the emergence and persistence of this new environmental ethos as well as the changing nature of American support for environmental policy. This ethos emerges in the early 1960s, as state legislatures respond to rising levels of pollution. In the intervening forty years, environmental policy-making of this type has been increasingly citizen-led, inclusive of a wider variety of environmental problems, while embracing a greater range of policy solutions including those premised on more radical notions of humanity's relationship with the natural world. |
