Expert Tells How to Make Red, White and Blue Democracy More Green

Note to Journalists: A publication-quality photograph of Robert V. Bartlett is available at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/images/+2005/bartlett-r05.jpg. This fall, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which is a plan to conserve natural resources, especially oil, and improve the efficiency of American energy and resource use. At the end of September, the House of Representatives also amended the Endangered Species Acts of 1973. Government officials also are expected to address clean air measures and global climate changes during this legislative session.

Newswise — Preserving the environment will happen only when more policy decisions come from average citizens instead of just being left to government leaders, says a Purdue University environmental policy expert.

"Decisions about policy are not just made in government buildings," says Robert V. Bartlett, associate professor of political science. "People may not realize it, but policy can be created at a local church, bowling league or garden club. It can start with something as simple as members of a recreational softball team making it a policy to recycle their bottles and cans after their games."

These civil groups provide a great place where people can participate in "deliberate" democracy for the environment, Bartlett says. If people take ownership by talking and working with people about what needs to be done for the environment, then their attitudes about preservation are more likely to improve, he says.

Bartlett co-authored "Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality" with Walter F. Baber, an associate professor in the Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University in Long Beach. The book ($24), published in October by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Press, connects political theory with the shaping and implementing of environmental policy.

"We already see this deliberative approach internationally, in the way that members of the United Nations have agreed upon environmental issues affecting air and water pollution and global climate change," Bartlett says. "In this global setting, we have a very diverse group of people who have worked toward policies and regulations that cannot be enforced."

However, because a consensus was reached, these individual nations are more likely to comply, Bartlett says.

"Americans are not inclined to change their behavior when they are ordered to do things," he says. "People are more likely to follow a law if they take ownership of how that policy came to be. They take ownership when they acknowledge the reasons that others give and they themselves in turn offer reasons that others can consider in the discussions that produce a policy."

Bartlett, who is affiliated with Purdue's Center for the Environment, says that many United States environmental laws, even though well-intended, are not always complete because they don't address the entire problem.

"Even years ago, it was thought that Yellowstone National Park would be protected by designating it a national park," Bartlett says. "But some of the largest threats to Yellowstone today are global warming, pesticides and the introduction of exotic plant and insect species. These are problems that can be successfully addressed only through deliberatively democratic policy processes."

Related Web sites:

Purdue Department of Political Science: http://www.polsci.purdue.edu/

Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10646