Tools to Aid Environmental Decision Making

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Overview

   • Mary R. English, Virginia H. Dale, Claire Van Riper-Geibig, Wendy Hudson Ramsey, Robin Gregory

   Pages 1-31

3. Identifying Environmental Values

   • Robin Gregory, Joseph W. Lewis

   Pages 32-61

4. Tools to Characterize the Environmental Setting

   • Virginia H. Dale, Robert V. O’Neill, William R. Miller III

   Pages 62-93

5. Tools for Understanding the Socioeconomic and Political Settings for Environmental Decision Making

   • William R. Freudenburg, Roy Silver, Ungar Natter, Chetan Talwalkar

   Pages 94-129

6. Characterizing the Regulatory and Judicial Setting

   • Mary L. Lyndon, Dean Hill Rivkin

   Pages 130-160

7. Integration of Geographic Information

   • Jeffrey P. Osleeb, Sami Kahn, Surya S. Prasad

   Pages 161-191

8. Forecasting for Environmental Decision Making

   • J. Scott Armstrong, Julia A. Trevarthen

   Pages 192-230

9. Assessment, Refinement, and Narrowing of Options

   • Miley W. Merkhofer, Lynn C. Maxwell

   Pages 231-284

10. Post-Decision Assessment

    • Gilbert Bergquist, Constance Bergquist, Katharine Jacobs

    Pages 285-316

11. Next Steps for Tools to Aid Environmental Decision Making

    • Mary R. English, Virginia H. Dale

    Pages 317-328

12. Back Matter

    Pages 329-342

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Environmental decision making is, like politics, mostly local. In fact, making decisions about the environment at the subnationallevel-in state, regional, and local jurisdictions-is a lot like politics. For resolving environ­ mental issues demands, but often resists, a balance between deeply held feelings and stark confrontations among opposing views. This volume describes tools that should make the decision maker's lot a bit more tolerable. The authors would be the last to suggest that these decision-aiding tools will somehow bring a benign order to issues that reach to people's fundamental values. What they can help do is to keep the debate focused on the important issues, to serve up useful options, and to narrow the range of disagreement. Even this is a challenging assignment. Still, why bother? The chief reason is that the locus of environmental decision making has, in the past decade or so, shifted from the national to the subnationallevel (a convenient, if colorless, term to denote the hurly­ burly of environmental controversy outside the Washington Beltway). For example, New England has taken a regional stand on tropospheric ozone control, and California requires automotive pollution controls that some other jurisdictions have partially adopted. This shift is a profound but not unexpected result of the way environmental policy has evolved since the modern environmental movement began around the late 1960s. Back then, the pendulum was swinging the other way.

• decision making
• environment
• environmental policy
• law

• Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, USA

  Virginia H. Dale

• Energy, Environment and Resources Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

  Mary R. English

Policies and ethics