Discordant Scales: Federal Environmental Governance and Standardization

• In Event: Practicing Epistemologies: Knowledge Work in Everyday Environmental Management and Governance

Abstract

Federal environmental statutes, passed by Congress and enacted into law by presidential signing, operate nationally. Although various environmental permitting or natural resource protection programs can be delegated to the states and tribes, civil servants working in Washington, DC, are tasked with creating standards and regulations that apply across the country. But the United States is country of 3.8 million square miles that include not only diverse ecologies and terrains—mountains, deserts, forests, plains—but also different cultures that rely on and relate to natural resources differently. How are the often discordant scales of federal law and geographic diversity resolved? When undertaking the process of creating policies that span such diversity, civil servants rely on myriad sources and types of knowledge to make sure that the policy language they come up with applies the way it is intended to and that it applies consistently and with the same results across the country. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork completed with the U.S. EPA, this paper will illustrate how policymakers must navigate various ways of knowing “the environment” to produce something standardized that must, at the same time, anticipate and address future and unfolding environmental realities.

Author

• Chandra L Middleton, UC Irvine