Spinning the wheels: Americans and the environmental politics of transportation, 1943-2007
Date
2021
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
What historical factors explain an American society that wants both SUVs and clean air, that seeks low fuel prices and high environmental quality? Answering this question means examining the national environmental politics of transportation that emerged and evolved in the United States in the latter twentieth century. Diverse sets of Americans attempted to reconcile the tension between fast, convenient, fossil-fueled mobility and healthy bodies and ecosystems. Their politics influenced the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, shaped energy and economic debates in the 1970s, and shifted as global trade and anthropogenic climate change entered the national stage in the 1980s and 1990s. Various stakeholders devised new regulations, technologies, and habits to abate the environmental costs of moving people and goods. Yet despite these developments, U.S. transport remained fundamentally unsustainable. A complex set of political, economic, and cultural factors explains why the environmental politics of transportation generated only incremental and piecemeal reform. This history suggests why Americans today find themselves endowed with a light-green mobility, huge fleets of SUVs, and looming climate crisis. ☐ This dissertation offers the only environmental history of U.S. transportation politics and policy in the latter twentieth century. It approaches the topic in a multimodal fashion, placing automobiles, trucks, railroads, public transit, and other modes together in one narrative frame. Doing so highlights the centrality of cross-cutting mobility issues to U.S. environmental thought and the environmental-management state. It also explores the regulatory reform movement, calls for free trade, and debates over “green” energy taxes, all features of what many scholars describe as the emergence of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. Chapters on the North American Free Trade Agreement and global warming offer insight into relatively recent and under-examined historical topics. The dissertation focuses primarily on four key groups of actors who shaped the national environmental politics of transportation: scientific and economic experts, environmental and social activists, businesspeople and their advocates, and policymakers. It draws heavily on archival sources, including documents from the National Archives and five presidential libraries, as well as a diverse range of articles, reports, and other published materials.
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Keywords
Environmental history, Mobility, Multimodal, Policy, Transportation regulation