Activity 4.1- US Environmental History and Major Regulations

 The environmental thought has been going around for many years. It first became known towards the end of the 1900s. This time period witnessed the growth in understanding the globe and the environmental issues that were occurring. Everyone during this time period was starting to learn more and more about the environment and what dangers have been created. This began the evolution of environmental policy in the United States. "Most environmental historians who have studied U.S. policy have discerned at least three distinct periods during which new concepts and ideas, scientific understandings, technological advances, political institutions, and laws and regulations came or were brought into being in order to understand and manage human impacts on the environment" (Tomkin, 2018). These three were the American conservation movement, the rise of environmental risk management as a basis for policy, and the integration of social and economic factors to create what refer to as the sustainability paradigm. 

Elaborating on this paragraph, everyone during the late1900s were learning about the environmental risks that have been occurring in our world. There is a clear picture as to what time periods did not know much about environmental issues. Those people involved in the early to mid 1900s, such as 1900-1960s, did not know anything about environmental thought or what was happening to the environment around them. However, around the 1970s to the late 1990s, people were starting to gain an understanding of what was harming the environment around them and how to decrease the actions that are negatively affecting it. For example, the colonists that migrated to North America, had no concept of what wastage was. Since they did not exactly know what wastage meant, you can imagine what their land looked like and how many resources were going to waste. Once these Europeans continued to settle at their land, there were major physical signs of environmental degradation and harmful consequences to their land, water, and even animal life in their environment. "These attitudes persisted well into the 19th century and aspects of them are still active in the present day. While such practices could hardly be said to constitute and "environmental policy", they did serve the purpose of constellating a number of groups into rethinking the way we went about managing various aspects of our lives, in particular our relationship to the land and the resources it contained or provided" (Tomkin, 2018). With that being said, as the years went on, these colonists began to realize what they were doing to their environment. Since they did not acknowledge waste, it built up on their land and harmful consequences were created, such as pollution to the water, endangerment of wildlife, decreasing of natural resources, and much more. During the 19th century, the American society was ready to listen to the messages that were delivered from many groups of people about their concerns of the impacts on the growth of society. These individuals delivered their thoughts of what they thought of themselves in relation to the environment, their policies and land, and on providing goods and services to grow the population. This opened the eyes of many, and this was a huge step in the realization of what affects the environment in a negative and positive way. 

Resources

Theis, T., & Tomkin, J. (Eds). (2018). Sustainability: A comprehensive foundation. OpenStax CNX.