Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ironically, while populist politics are frequently anti-governmental, they
often stimulate the creation of new rational legislation aimed at righting
the social wrongs created by earlier legislation.
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A feedback loop be-
tween rational and populist environmental governance emerges to correct
for intentional as well as unintended effects of top-down environmental
regulation. This feedback loop of rational/populist politics is evident in
both the Austin and Seattle case studies. Northgate community activists
translated their populist political energies into rational environmental leg-
islation through the Yes for Seattle campaign, an approach that ultimately
failed due to legal and legislative barriers. And the protest activities of East
Austin community members succeeded in shifting municipal policy to ad-
dress the uneven environmental and social conditions in their community.
Similar to rational politics, populist politics is an important approach
to reworking urban nature. Populist political activities challenge techno-
managerial governance by forwarding alternative understandings of
nature/culture confl icts that are not considered by rational political actors.
The inclusion of alternative perspectives is ultimately a call for more demo-
cratic forms of politics that reject the apolitical stance of technomanagerial
governance. Unlike rational politics, the approach understands human
populations as embedded in their material surroundings and recognizes
that human/nature relations need to be a part of environmental decision-
making processes.
However, populist politics is similar to rational politics because it em-
braces a topographic perspective of environmental problems, recognizing
human/nature relations in particular locales, but fails to connect the lo-
cal perspective with other parts of the city. Whereas rational politics re-
inforces the dichotomy of humans and nature, populist politics sacrifi ces
the broader purview of technomanagerial governance for a decidedly local
perspective. East Austin activists addressed the symptoms of uneven urban
development in their neighborhoods but did not tackle the larger problems
of urban growth, economic inequity, and other similar issues that created
these symptoms in the city as a whole. Likewise, the Northgate controversy
resulted in a design solution to ease the tensions between local stakehold-
ers but did not connect this work with either upstream or downstream
portions of Thornton Creek or other Seattle creeks. The outcomes of these
projects will arguably benefi t the specifi c locales in question, but they do
little to address similar issues in other neighborhoods.
In addition to its topographic interpretation of environmental manage-
ment, a signifi cant drawback of populist politics is that it often fails to pro-
duce long-lasting changes to environmental governance. Environmental
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