Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 163

One of the most notable defi ciencies of rational environmental gov-
ernance is its dispersed and fragmentary treatment of pollution, an ap-
proach that fails to acknowledge the complex character of environmental
problems. 15 Dryzek argues that “the very idea of holistic pollution control
fl ies in the face of Weberian administrative logic.” 16 The bureaucratiza-
tion of environmental management focuses on legislation to target single
pollutants, discrete sources, and single media because they are the most
accessible and soluble to government regulation. 17 In other words, rational
governance of environmental pollution loses the forest for the trees; there
is no systems view of environmental pollution but rather an emphasis
on isolated parcels. 18 Sustainable development theorist Mark Roseland
summarizes this critique: “Conventional wisdom considers the environ-
ment as an administrative problem, to be solved by better management—
understood as cutting the environment into bite-sized pieces. The approach
seems increasingly unable to deal effectively, sensitively, and comprehen-
sively with environmental complexities.” 19
Using terminology from chapter 2, rational governance can be under-
stood as forwarding a topographic view of the landscape, focusing on
discrete pollutants and land use activities rather than recognizing the in-
terconnectedness and complexity of human/nature relations. Furthermore,
this topographic understanding of environmental pollution tends to em-
phasize pollution control over prevention. 20 The underlying assumption is
that environmental degradation is an inevitable product of contemporary
society and that the role of environmental experts is to establish and main-
tain socially acceptable levels of contamination. When pollution measures
are put in place, these measures frequently involve shifting pollutants from
one medium to another (e.g., water to air) or from one geographic locale
to another, with low-income and minority communities often shouldering
the majority of environmental risks. 21
This is not to argue that rational politics is completely ineffective or that
it should be abandoned outright. To be sure, regulation and the control
of pollution has resulted in substantial gains in environmental quality
and human health since the nineteenth century, particularly with respect
to point sources of pollution and the so-called low-hanging fruit that
can be addressed with relative ease via state-led bureaucratic manage-
ment. However, the approach has been less effective with more complex
environmental problems such as nonpoint source pollution and climate
change in which dispersed sources confound compartmentalized bureau-
cratic regulations.