Britain, France, and the European Union - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 97

harm. The department was supposed to pay attention to city planning.
However, in fact, the coordination did not take place.
Unlike the United States and Germany, Britain has a unitary govern-
ment, meaning that it is not a federation of many states or provinces, but
governed directly from London. DEFRA does have regional offices for
administrative convenience, but the decisions and rules are the same for
all parts of the kingdom. Presumably this is a more rational and efficient
system than that found in federations. The unitary form has been slightly
fragmented, however, by the devolution of power that was a campaign
promise of Labour in the 1997 election. This is the permanent delegation
of power to Scotland and Wales. In response to longtime demands by
the Scots, the central government authorized the recreation of a Scottish
Parliament for the first time since 1707. It has authority in designated areas
such as housing, education, and the environment. Hence, there is now a
Scottish Environment Protection Agency, responsible for air and water
pollution, water supplies, and sewerage, land use planning, and the natural
land heritage. They do not include energy, authority for which remains in
London. Wales also received a devolution of power, but to a lesser extent,
reflecting its nine centuries of integration with England.
Great Britain has a long tradition of excellence in science. Gilbert
White and Charles Darwin were naturalists of the 18th and 19th centu-
ries. In the 20th century, J. B. S. Haldane, James Lovelock, and Francis
Crick were prominent. While many worked at universities like Oxford
and Cambridge, their research was often sponsored by the government.
British scientists were in the forefront of research on both the ozone hole
and global warming. The hole was reported in 1985 by British scientists
in Antarctica. A team led by Joseph Farman combined ground obser-
vations from Halley Bay with a satellite-borne spectrometer to discover
that the layer had thinned every September until one year it disappeared.
A Welshman, Sir John Houghton, was a leader in studies of global warm-
ing, chairing the technical portion of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change for many years. He was a professor at Oxford and later
served as head of the British Meteorological Office. The Hadley Centre for
Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter is one of the best in the world.
Britain has a range of interest groups concerned with environmental
policy. The oldest, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, began
more than a century ago to counter the trade in grebe feathers. Today,
the society has more than a million members, making it the largest wild-
life organization in Europe. Besides lobbying, research, and education,