Environmental Planning Research Paper

Environmental planning embraces those activities of government agencies and private organizations whose primary purpose is to manage the impacts of the human use of land on the natural environment, by taking thought for the future and choosing courses of action that promote appropriate goals. In parallel with environmental planning, environmental pollution control, usually in the form of media-specific laws such as the United States’ Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, seeks to control discharges, emissions, and environmental pollution in general by a variety of means, the most important of which will be summarized below. While obviously important, cultural, social, psychological, and economic considerations are not the focus of environmental planning.

Because of the scope and complexity of the activities it addresses and their far-reaching and variable impacts, the field of environmental planning defies easy definition. Furthermore, conceptions of the relationships between humanity and the environment change over time, so that the character, goals, methods, and, indeed, the ethical foundations of environmental planning, are continuously evolving. At the beginning of the twenty-first century environmental planners carry out such varied responsibilities as analysis of the natural environment as a component for comprehensive plans; the preparation of environmental impact statements for governmental programs; the drafting of plans for recreational areas, parks, and other types of open space; and the development policies for the protection of prime farmland, wetlands, flood plains, and other natural resource areas.

1. Brief History Of Environmental Planning

Although the term ‘environmental planning’ is of relatively recent origin, humankind has undertaken the activities it now embraces for millennia. At least five thousand years ago, the earliest urban civilizations—the ‘hydraulic’ societies of Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus Valley—undertook major programs to harness natural forces. Large-scale irrigation projects provided the water needed to supply the broad agricultural foundation on which the urban civilizations were built. Certainly, the Romans engaged in a substantial amount of what we would today include in environmental planning as they built extensive public works, such as the dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and sewerage systems that served their far-flung cities.

In Islamic cities from Morocco to Iran, abattoirs, tanneries, and textile dyeing operations were relegated to the outer, downstream, edges of the medina (the old city), far from the Grand Mosque, the central souk (market), and the principal residential areas. Across the Islamic world after the seventh century, gardens were associated with paradise, and many palaces contained elaborate gardens that gave their owners respite from the harshness of the climate. Superb examples such as the fourteenth century Alhambra palace of the Nasrid caliph, Yusuf I, in Grenada, Spain, (Hoag 1977), are creations that fall within the broad definition of environmental planning.

In eleventh-and twelth-century Europe, after a long hiatus following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Italian cities adopted municipal codes that regulated both the disposal of wastes (forbidding, for example, their discharge within the town) and the number and location of pollution-generating activities (Zupko and Laures 1996). A growing interest in nature found expression in the Renaissance gardens of Florence, Rome, and Tivoli (McHarg 1992). Here, in the sixteenth century, artists such as Bramante, Raphael, and Palladio imposed a simple geometry on the forms of nature. A century later, landscape gardeners such as Andre Le Notre developed formal Baroque gardens at Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, that ‘testified to the divinity of man and his supremacy over a base and subject nature’ (McHarg 1992). A strongly divergent tradition developed in England in the eighteenth century. Landscape gardeners such as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and William Kent created the famed English landscape for their aristocratic clients, a setting for their manor houses that appeared natural but was as much an artifice of the human mind as the formal gardens of Paris and Rome (McHarg 1992). Nature and its forms became something to be respected and idealized.

In the nineteenth century, interest in public health mounted, especially in the link between sewage discharges from rapidly growing cities, pollution of their water supplies, and outbreaks of typhoid and dysentery. Many major cities undertook the construction of public water supply and sewerage systems. In 1872, responding to a growing interest in the conservation of critically important natural areas, during the administration of President Grant, the United States created Yellowstone National Park, the first in what was to become an impressive system of parks. Frederick Law Olmsted designed a number of parks, the best known of which is Central Park in New York City.

The American city planning movement, which began in the early twentieth century, drew inspiration from the public health, housing, and City Beautiful movements, and from early German efforts to zone land according to its most appropriate land use. But it was concerned more with the management of new development than it was with the moderation of human impacts on the natural environment and the conservation of natural areas. Environmental concerns took a back seat during World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, and the reconstruction and normalization years immediately thereafter. After World War II, Aldo Leopold called for a new kind of ethic that called on humankind to serve as the steward of nature, not its sovereign (Leopold 1949), and in 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring fired the American imagination with her chronicle of the devastation that country’s profligate waste disposal, pesticide use, and weak environmental policies were wreaking on its environment (Carson 1962). Ian McHarg, winner of the prestigious 1999 Japan Prize for City Planning, argued eloquently and persuasively that plans for the development and redevelopment of rural and urban areas must be based on a comprehensive inventory of ecological data that presents a complete picture of the geological, hydrological, pedological, limnological, physiographic, climatological, and biological systems in the area that is the subject of the plan (McHarg 1992).

It was not until the 1960s and the early 1970s that a newly felt concern for the environment, and a deepening awareness of the damage that humankind was inflicting on it, resonated with something deep in people’s souls. This found expression in the United States and across the world, in the enactment of a substantial body of environmental protection laws. More than in any preceding era, public and private decision-makers have been called upon to take into account the environmental impacts of the various policies and infrastructural systems they propose.

2. The Intellectual Context Of Environmental Planning

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, environmental planning lies at the juncture of two major fields of policy formulation and implementation: comprehensive growth management and environmental pollution control.

Comprehensive growth management seeks to advance a broad spectrum of goals and objectives. It addresses the location, density, use, height and bulk, and phasing or timing of urban development and redevelopment, and the provision of various infrastructural systems. At the same time, it seeks to protect critically important natural resources, such as farmland, flood plains, marshes, and other areas of critical ecological concern. Since 1970, nation after nation and governmental jurisdiction after governmental jurisdiction have come to recognize that any effort to manage urban and regional development and redevelopment must be grounded in an understanding of the natural environment within which they are occurring. Comprehensive planning takes into account the underlying geology of the area, the impact of proposed development on ground water, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and coastal waters, the impact of manufacturing and transportation activities on air quality, the effects of urbanization on the natural biota, the impacts of suburban development on the supply of prime agricultural land, and the effects of solid and liquid waste disposal on the natural environment. Environmental planning is a key component of comprehensive growth management.

Environmental pollution control policies are broadly concerned with air, water, and earth pollution, and such global problems as loss of biodiversity, global warming, and depletion of the stratospheric ozone level. Decades of contemporary efforts to protect the environment and reduce environmental pollution have confirmed that humanity and the natural environment are interdependent. Changes in the natural environment can cycle back and cause serious harm to mankind. Transportation, land development, and land use affect environmental quality, whether it be by covering over wetlands, changing the hydrological characteristics of watersheds so as to increase flooding and aggravate drought conditions, converting farm land to residential developments and shopping centers, or creating automobile-dominated transportation systems that generate a major proportion of dangerous environmental pollutants. Environmental pollution controls often include the management of land development and the design of transportation systems so as to reduce pollution. Environmental planning, the management of land development, and the design of transportation systems are key components of environmental pollution control.

3. Emphasis In Current Theory And Research

In the field of environmental planning, there are a number of areas of research that are attracting interest from academics and practitioners.

3.1 Research On The Scientific Basis Of Environmental Planning

Considerable work is being done in the natural sciences and ecology to strengthen the scientific underpinnings of an effective environmental planning effort. Some subjects are fairly specific, such as determining a river’s flood plains for differing flood recurrence intervals, or developing more cost-effective ways to clean polluted industrial sites. Others are much broader, such as determining whether the global warming that the world is currently experiencing is the cause of the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, or vice versa, and determining the nature and probability of the effect of various hazardous materials on the human body.

3.2 Implementing Environmental Planning

Environmental planning embraces more than the various studies that environmental planners perform in the process of preparing a comprehensive plan. It includes a careful assessment and selection of the most appropriate strategies of implementing the various goals of environmental planning and protection. Among the most important, with examples from the American experience, are:

3.2.1 Strategies Based On Disclosure. Environment assessment and impact statements such as those mandated by the United States’ National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), and numerous state counterparts, with respect to major governmental programs have a significant effect on the environment. This enables affected governmental agencies and citizen groups to find out about proposed actions and to assert their influence to modify their outcome.

3.2.2 Strategies Based On Increased Intergovernmental Coordination, often accompanied by greater public participation in the decision-making process. For instance, the American Intergovernmental Coordination Act and NEPA call for collaboration among the various governmental agencies with responsibilities in a particular region.

3.2.3 Command And Control Strategies. These approaches have long been the workhorse of environmental planning and protection. A government establishes a regulation that restricts private activity, such as a flood plain zoning ordinance or a statute seeking to reduce air pollution by setting permissible emission levels. This regulation sets a standard with which the private actor must comply, and then applies sanctions to those who violate the standard. Command and control strategies may take a number of forms, from simply specifying certain environmental standards, to controlling market access, to prohibiting certain kinds of actions, to requiring that firms internalize formerly externalized environmental costs.

3.2.4 Strategies Based On Market-Based Incentives. Many American jurisdictions have experimented with techniques that seek to influence private actors’ behavior by providing economic incentives or disincentives that induce citizens to change their behavior simply because it is more profitable. ‘Transferable development rights’ (TDR) systems allow landowners whose land has been severely regulated to sell to other landowners the right to build at somewhat higher density than they would be permitted to without the TDRs (see Sect. 3.4). Also, the 1990 amendments to the United States’ Clean Air Act established a system for trading emissions allowance for oxides of sulfur (SO_x) and nitrogen (NO_x) that permits electric utilities to meet statutory requirements either by reducing their emissions by installing more effective air pollution control devices or by buying emission rights from other producers, whose emissions are well below their assigned level (see Sect. 3.4). Finally, many nations have created tax incentives that seek to increase after-tax income of individuals and companies that engage in conduct that is either environ- mentally protective or environmentally enhancing.

3.3 Sustainability

The 1989 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (The Brundtland Commission) proposed a summary definition of sustainable development: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ This oft-quoted exemplary statement articulates the basic principle that we should live off the income of our natural capital and not consume non-renewable resources in a profligate manner. As such, it focused heavily on the natural environment and called for a policy of wise stewardship of the world’s natural resources and a reduction in the amount of pollution that humankind was discharging into the environment. The concept of sustainability has since been expanded to include profound social, political, and equitable considerations, such as (Newman and Kenworthy 1999; see also, Beatley and Manning 1997):

(a) ‘The elimination of poverty, especially in the Third World, is necessary not just on human grounds, but also for environmental reasons.’ Third World economic and social development, with the attendant reduction in rates of population increase and a reduction in international strife, is a necessary pre- requisite for achieving a just and balanced steady world state.

(b) ‘The First World must reduce its consumption of resources and the production of wastes.’ First World citizens consume many times as many natural resources and discharge much greater amounts of pollutants into the environment than do their Third World counterparts. If Third World standards of living are raised without a corresponding lowering of the material consumption of the First World, the effects on the environment will be devastating.

(c) ‘Global cooperation on environmental issues is no longer a soft option.’ We have already recorded potentially irreversible changes in the environment, such as the loss of a number of species and a decrease in biodiversity, and the reduction in the stratospheric ozone layer. One respected scientist has predicted that, unless we drastically change our policies toward tropical rain forests, as many as one-quarter of the world’s species will have become extinct by the year 2020 (Wilson 1992). Humanity must make difficult decisions or risk devastating systemic changes in the environment that could well lead to the extinction of the human race.

(d) ‘Change toward sustainability can occur only with community-based approaches that take local cultures seriously.’ Many of the activities that have adverse impacts on the environment are managed locally, so that local environmental planning strategies comprise a critical and fundamental element of a policy that moves toward sustainability.

The growing recognition of the central importance of achieving a policy of sustainable development so that human activities do not irretrievably disrupt basic ecological systems is reflected in the creation of governmental institutions such as the United States’ President’s Commission on Sustainable Development and in numerous United Nations and international conferences, such as the Rio Declaration, coming out of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

More and more, environmental planning will be premised on principles of sustainable development at all scales. For instance, the automobile-based urban sprawl that characterized late twentieth-century urban development in many countries is profligate in that it consumes much more prime farmland and areas of critical environmental concern than a more compact, mass-transit-oriented pattern of development would. It requires the use of resources to construct new infrastructure systems, at the periphery of our metropolitan areas, while under-utilizing the installed capacity that already exists in our inner cities. Here environmental plans are critical components of comprehensive growth management systems for designing and creating new urban communities.

3.4. Market-Based Incentives: Economic Dimensions Of Environmental Planning

Another area that is the subject of considerable research and experimentation is the realignment of economic incentives to encourage actions that conserve the environment and discourage actions that damage it. At the national and international scale, analysts such as Daly and Cobb (1989) and Repetto and McGrath (1989) advocate the revision of the system of national accounts that is used to determine gross domestic product. Late twentieth-century practices do not create national capital asset accounts that include natural resources, such as forests, minerals, and prime agricultural land. Nor do they depreciate these assets when timber is harvested, minerals extracted, or rich soil lost to erosion. Instead, the wood, coal, iron ore, and other raw materials are registered as income when they are sold, with no corresponding entry for the draw down in the capital asset. This is in stark contrast to buildings and other man-made capital assets, which are depreciated each year because their cost is an important input into production. Other proposals include the imposition of ‘green taxes’ on activities that pollute the atmosphere. The idea is to shift the incidence of major taxes from ‘goods,’ such as income and real property, to ‘bads,’ such as environmental pollution and energy derived from nonrenewable natural resources (Hawken 1993). Along the same lines is the successful American program for reducing emission of oxides of sulfur and nitrogen by large electric power generating plants by setting up a market on which emissions allowances for these pollutants may be traded. In an effort to introduce more decisional flexibility than has been possible under traditional ‘command and control’ methods of regulation air emissions, the US Environmental Protection Agency assigned each of some 111 utilities in the Midwest and East regions of the country a maximum emission level of tons of SO_x and NO_x per million BTUs of energy produced. If a company was able to reduce its emissions below the prescribed level, it could sell the balance of its permissible emissions to a company that was producing more than its allotment, permitting the latter to exceed that level by the amount of the emissions purchased. The program introduces decisional flexibility because plant managers are enabled to calculate the most efficient way to meet tightening environmental standards. This pro- gram has been widely credited with making it possible for electric utilities to reduce their emissions of these two pollutants by more than 50 percent in the ten years since the program was set up. The 1997 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at Kyoto produced a Protocol that proposed to apply these ideas to emissions of carbon dioxide and other so- called ‘greenhouse gases,’ in an effort to address the build-up of these gases in the atmosphere.

In the field of environmental planning, TDR programs, which exhibit certain similarities to the trading of emission allowances of SO_x and NO_x, have been used in a number of jurisdictions to protect prime farmland and areas of special environmental significance, such as flood plains, beaches, and marshes. The local government imposes zoning limitations on key land such as farmland/or flood plains that reduce the density at which they may be developed and then assigns the owner a certain number of development rights, usually calculated on a per acre basis. The owner may sell these rights to a developer who owns property in an area where the government wishes to encourage more dense development. The developer will be able to develop at a higher density than would have been possible, had he not purchased the TDRs.

The general objective of these market-based incentives is to shift from primary reliance on the command and control system of managing urban growth and protecting environmental resource lands to an approach that uses economic incentives and disincentives to encourage environmentally beneficial activities, and discourage activities that despoil the natural ecosystem.

3.5 Environmental Justice

Another dimension of environmental planning that has long been of concern but has become more central in the last decade or so—and also adumbrated in the Brundtland Report—is that of equity: Are the environmental benefits and burdens of particular projects distributed evenly throughout the various segments of society? Or do the benefits tend to accrue to the more prosperous and powerful, and the burdens to the poor and those citizens who are members of disadvantaged minority groups? At the local level, this may involve the decision to locate a trash-to-steam plant near a poor African–American community. At the international level, it may concern the construction of a major waste tire disposal facility or of a ‘shipbreaking’ operation in a developing country that is in desperate need of international exchange.

Considerations of environmental justice lead to determining the range of the detrimental impacts from a proposed project, and then defining the various communities that exist within that range. If all or most of the people within the range are poor or members of minority groups, the actor should seek alternatives.

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