In addition to the international effort to control the pollution of the seas, there have been significant national actions to prevent marine pollution. Most public policy is based on concern for the anticipated effects of contaminants that enter the ocean. This concern was the basis for the marine environmental legislation in the United States in the 1970s (Spiller, 1986, p.390). The United States has the most extensive network of such domestic regulations in effect, with thirteen pieces of legislation: the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972), the Deepwater Ports Act (1972), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Marine Protection Research and Sancturies Act (1972), the Fedearl Water Pollution Control Act Amendments (1972), the Endagered Species Act (1973), the Deep Water Port Act (1974), the Fisheries, Conservation, and Management Act (1976) and so on. Many of these acts are quite similar to one another (King, 1986, p. 308). These laws were anticipatory in nature. That means that they tried to prescribe in advance a policy for conditions determined by analysts to lead to depletion, destruction, or scarcity of marine resources. The legislative records of these acts reflect a “clear bias toward the furture” (King, 1986, p. 308). The laws also share a concern for the ocean as a resource. The intent of the legislation was to ensure a supply of energy and raw materials for the future. Thus, the future orientation of policy makers was directed not so much toward environmental quality or the ecosystem as toward economic objectives.
Inaddition to national legislation, the United States have taken initiatives to conserve the marine environment. Eleven of the 23 coastal states have adopted laws to prohibit some uses of nonbiodegradable plastics. Chesapeake Bay states are a good example of other efforts; Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the District of Columbia signed an agreement in 1987 to limit the amount of runoff and point source discharge into the Chesapeake Bay. Individual state programs are also important. The state of Washington has an ambitious program to clean up pollution along its shoreline. The state established Puget Sound Water Quality Authority, which has developed plans for reductin commercial, urban, and agricultural discharge. A cigarette tax provides revenue for the program (Kite-Powell, 1998, p. 378).
Given this policy response, it is hard to determine whether there is still a real threat to the ocean. The ocean is a complex biotic system with adaptaion capacities that are little known by scientists. Additionally, monitoring of the marine environment is of recent origin (National Research Council, 1990). Responsibility for marine monitoring in the United States is fragmented among several agaencies, including the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior. Authority for marine moniroting is scattered through 25 legislative acts. This fragmentations has produced substantial problems. The National Research Council concluded that “lack of communication and coordination among the entities sponsoring or conduction monitoring and making environmental management decisions inhibits proper design of monitoring programs and limits the usefulness of monitoring results” (1990, 15).
As with most other environmental problems, there is considerable uncertainty relative to the situation. There are idicators that substantial problems exist. The ocean is still seriously polluted in some specific locations, a process that continues to occur. This may be explained through the theory of pluralism.
Pluralsim is the idea that the individual’s influence in society is negligible, so interest groups and parties act as intermediaries. Groups compete for members and supporters. From this, cross-cutting cleavages are formed. People may have conflicting loyalty. Different groups also become active in different policy areas. There is no majority, only larger or smaller factions (Smith, April, 2003). According to Walter Stone (1990), these interest groups are “‘linkage’ organizations for pluralists” because they link the interests of citizens to government, and they can help citizens understand how government activity affects their interests (p. 124).
According to George Crowder (2002), pluralism has four major components. The first is that pluralists claim that there are certain fudamental universal values. These values range from the satisfaction of survival needs to the social and political values that frame individual lives. Such values may be understood in different ways in different cultureal or material circumstances. For instance, a developer seeking to dispose of waste in the most economical way might want to dump it into the ocean, whereas a person enjoying the beach would strongly oppose dumping. Second, Crowder claims that the things that are valuable for human beings are plural or several. Many different goods are requiered for human flourishing, not just one. Values are themselves internally comples, containing distinct components that add further to moral diversity. The third component says that values are not only plural but that they are incommensurable with one another. The good of justice is a radically different thing from the good of nourishment because each makes its own distinctive claim . Lastly, these plural and incommensurable values may in particular cases come into conflict with one another. They may be incompatible or mutually exclusive, meaning that one can only be had at the cost of sacrificing another (p. 2). For example, diminishing waste dumping into the ocean is only obtainable by sacrificing a corporation’s right to dump their waste.
Because there are so many interests in society, all trying to reap benefits from the government, groups “inevitably come into conflict with each other” (Stone, p. 124). In the case of environmental policy, industrial interests tend to shy away from environmental regulations. Enviornmentalists complain about being outmaneuvered by industry during rulemaking and implementaion (King, 1986, p.303). The problem exists outside the EPA as well. In a study tracking the use of 500 million dollars in funds targeted for environmental studies, Freudenburg and Gramling (1994) found that the additional opportunites for input stemming from an open decision-making process did not prevent industry domination of decision making. As a result, “bureaucratic slipage” occurred and the braoad policy goals of environmental quality were “altered by successive reinterpretatation, such that implimentation bore little resemblance to the stated policies” (p. 3).
Therefore, progress is unlikely without a significant transfer of authority from business managers to government officials and direct intrusion on mangerial prerogatives through rules that “democratized the decision process and put something other than profit into the equation” (Weber, 1998, p. 47). This message was clear with the spurt of environmental policy action in the 1970s which was conveyed by the new regulatory order to industry. The costs of cleanup were not to be a factor in the choice of pollution control arrangements. Such an approach directly challenged the two overarching goals of business organizations, which are profit maximization and autonomy of control over organizational decision making (Weber, p. 47). It spurred a strong countermobilization effort by industry, whose purpose was a reversal of envirionmentalists’ gains and a return to the pre-1970 status quo through a strategy “of maximum feasible resistance and minimum feasible retreat” (Wells, 1996, p. 57). The adoption of such a high-cost, confrontational strategy was based in part on corporate America’s perception that the battle to roll back environmentalism would be both successful and short.
Although the business community obviously understood the significance of the environmental movement’s political successes, it was not clear that they perceived these successess as anything other than temporary (Weber, 1998, p. 47). Conventional wisdom among the vast majority of social scientists, political pundits, and the general public at the time treated social movements and their accompanying issues as short-lived phenomena, soon to be swallowed up by some other issues (p. 146).
There also emerged a broader political backwash to the environmental regulation during the late 1970s. Some of this oppostion stemmed from the growing concern over the excessive costs, arbitrariness, ineffectiveness, and large informational requirements associated with social regulations in general (Crowder, 2002, p. 88). Prior to this surge of environmental policy action, the ocean had been regarded as the world’s ultimate disposal site. Historically, the ocean was viewed as an appropriate method of municipal waste disposal. Part of this was because it was easy, convenient, and economical. With the passage of laws such as the Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988, businesses suddenly found themselves having to seek alternative means. This is exactly why businesses sought to block environmental policy. It became a matter of recongnizing that environmental interests were themselves a new type of “special” interest, rather than a legitimate claimant on the boader public interest (Crowder, 2002, p. 65). These criticisms found their strongest voice in the resurgent right wing of the American political spectrum under Ronald Regan and became a part of the braoder shift in the idealogical cimate toward deregulation during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Wells, 1996, p. 46). When combined with the growing prospect of a Republican president in 1980, these developments signaled to business that the chance for significant regulatory relief and a reversal of the environmental gains of the 1970s were right around the corner (Gorczynski, 1991, p. 54).
The regulatory strategies of corporate management impacted the strength of the environmental movement, indicating the conflict between groups in American society. The limits of a conflictory, reactionary strategy were strikingly evident. Given the best poltical conditions in years with a Republican president and senate, the environmental opposition was unable to inflict anything other than short-term damage to an increasingly institutionalized regulatory regime (Melnick, 1983). Conflict during rule making and implementation phases of the policy process, such as litigation by environmentalists or the exponential rise in the use of citizen suits against polluters during the 1980s negatively impacted corporate planning and investment activities by increasing the uncertainty associated with final outcomes (Weber, 1998, p. 57). The incentive was to find methods of mangaing the conflict so as to reduce the probability of ex post facto challenges. But the offsetting power of the environmental lobby and the cumulative weight of existing environmental statutes signaled that rationalization, as well as any transfer of decision-making authority from the public to the private sector, if they were to occur at all, would have to include consulation and collaboration with regulators as well as environmental advocates. By defintion, managing conflict implied the inclusion of those members of the pollution control policy network with a stake in the outcome of power to affect the level of uncertainty (Gorczynski, 1991, p. 53).
While the environmental lobby was stronger, the opposing strength of business was sufficient to block most environmental initiatives. The legislative stalemate that has dominated the past fifteen years of pollution control meant that limited environmental gains were being made. Yet with each passing day the evidence mounted that the environment could not wiat for political solutions (Kiss, 1991, p. 34 ). For example, the fact that beaches were closing down and people were contracting diseases from swimming in contaminated shore lines was cause for concern. Envirionmentalists and regulators thus had considerable incentive to search for alternatives to command and control that might prove capable of not only bridging congress, thereby expanding the scope and scale of envirionmental protection measures, but also improving the effectiveness of existing cleanup efforts (Weber, 1996, p. 58).
There is no doubt that environmentalists have gained the upper hand by passing a number of legislative acts to deter ocean dumping and pollution in general. However, the industrial minority has succeeded in watering down bills passed through Congress. Many businesses have found way sto bipass the recent legislation regarding ocean dumping. Texaco and Carnival Cruisline are a few major companies who have been found illegally dumping ( ). They were forced to pay large sums of money for lawsuits, but the fact remains that the damage has been done. These laws are not adequatly enforced, loosly worded, and all together weak. Federal law prohibits cruise ships from releasing untreated sewage less than three miles from the shore, but permits them to dump up to 30,000 gallons of untreated sewage beyond that point. The National Environmental Policy Act no longer is applied to waters 3 miles beyond our shores as of 2002 (Reynolds).
Furthermore, the Ocean Dumping Act says that treated material can still be dumped and that companies merely need to obtain permits to dump. However, there is no system in effect to monitor the practice of cities worldwide. Beyond doubt, many cities still dump their waste directly into the ocean or into estuaries that lead into the ocean. Additionally, commercial vessels release nearly all their waste into the ocean. These practices could produce the astonishing volume of 7 million tons per year (Weber, 1996, p. 139).
Pluralism, in essence, captures the reasoning behind legislation and enforcement of environmental policy. Opposing factions, or interest groups are pitted against one another causing conflict. These groups, in the case of ocean dumping, are the idustrialists and the environmentalists. Both groups perceive the ocean as something of value, but because of different material circumstances they understand the value of it in different ways from one another. Idustrialists see the ocean as an economical, efficient disposal sight. It is the ultimate repository of virtually all pollutants and an appropriate method of municipal waste disposal, simply because of its convenience. Environmentalist value the ocean as a recreational or aesthetic treasure in which people should be able to enjoy without the hazards of pollution and dumping waste. Both groups are in conflict with each other over the issue of ocean dumping because both groups understand the value of the ocean differently. Many times, groups come to decisions on issues based on the costs that they will have to bare. It is obvious that large businesses will have to increase expenditures in order to find alternate means of waste disposal. Since bureaucracy is extremely influential towards policy development, it is not wonder that legislation on environmental policy gets watered down in Congress. Congress may incorporate impending fees for companies who don’t comply with anti-dumping regulations, in spite of the fact that large coorporations can easily pay the fines and often times find that to be less costly than alternate means of waste disposal. Laws are also amended, such as the Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988, to provide easier access to ocean dumping rights. Recently, the Act was amended so that with the acquisition of a permit, sewage could still be dumped. Therefore, it is the conflict between opposing environmental groups and industrial groups that has shaped the policy of ocean dumping.
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