This book illustrates the critical roles played, challenges faced, and choices made by public managers in the development of environmental policy in the United States, and that will confront them if sustainability is to become a central animating principle of governance in the United States. It is broad in intellectual scope, balanced in perspective, and written in accessible prose. Readers new to the fields of public administration or environmental governance will gain a basic a sense for major issues and actors in each, how the two relate to each other, and how both fit into historical debates over the proper role of the government in a democratic republic. They will also appreciate that linking the two to advance sustainability will not be a task for the timid, impatient, or strategically-challenged in our Madisonian system.

Robert F. Durant, American University

In this lucid and broad sweeping introduction to the US environmental movement, Martinez introduces the reader to the political and economic institutions undergirding the nation as necessary to understanding the environmental movement and the quest for sustainability. It is equally suited for college and advanced secondary school introductory classes and the lay reader as an approachable primer to the myriad of ideas, institutions, and seminal figures involved from the conservation movement of the early 20th century to the modern environmental and sustainability movement today.

Daniel A. Mazmanian, University of Southern California