Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 167

justice scholar Julian Agyeman writes, “Grassroots environmental justice
groups are often lacking in their ability to frame the issue, seize on political
opportunities, and mobilize the political and fi nancial resources needed to
be more proactive, that is, heading off problems before they arise.” 33 In
other words, populist politics tends to be reactionary, leaving the larger
structure of technomanagerial governance in place. 34 Like rational politics,
there is no questioning of the state as the ultimate manager of human/
nature relations.
So is there a way out of this feedback loop of rational and populist
politics? Is this tension between government and the people the “natural”
and unavoidable reality of contemporary politics? Or is there the potential
for what Gandy refers to as “a new kind of environmental politics that
can respond to the co-evolutionary dynamics of social and bio-physical
systems”? 35 Can a relational perspective of urban nature be transformed
into constructive action?
Building Relations, Finding Society: Civic Politics as Topological Practice
The U.S. environmental legislation of the 1970s is often heralded as a
triumph of the environmental movement to institutionalize environmental
protection and has undoubtedly led to signifi cant improvement in envi-
ronmental conditions, particularly for easy-to-control pollution problems
from industrial and municipal point sources. However, the 1980s repre-
sented a new era of federal environmental politics, as the conservative ad-
ministration of Ronald Reagan attempted to weaken and overturn 1970s
environmental regulations and the U.S. Congress was mired in deadlock
over the promulgation of new environmental regulations. The U.S. Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency was established as a separate governmental
unit from the natural resources units of the federal government such as the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Land Management, and the
Bureau of Reclamation; environmental protection was thus not integral
to all government agencies but was instead yet another layer of federal
technomanagerial regulation. 36 During this era, it became commonplace
to pit polluters against protectors of the environment and to frame envi-
ronmental protection as a zero-sum game of jobs versus environmental
protection. 37
Amid this dichotomous political atmosphere of the 1980s, a new form
of environmental politics began to take shape. The term “civic environ-
mentalism” was coined by political scientist DeWitt John to refer to inno-
vative approaches to environmental politics and governance characterized