In 1891 Benjamin Harrison, the first president engaged in conservation, had to have this new area of public policy explained to him by members of the Boone and Crockett Club. This didn’t take long, as he was only asked to sign a few papers setting aside federal timberland. But from such small moments great social movements grow, and the course of natural resource protection policy through 22 presidents has altered Americans’ relationship to the natural world in then almost unimaginable ways. Presidents and the American Environment charts this course. Exploring the ways in which every president from Harrison to Obama has engaged the expanding agenda of the Nature protection impulse, the book offers a clear, close-up view of the shifting and nation shaping mosaic of both “green” and “brown” policy directions over more than a century. While the history of conservation generally focuses on the work of intellectuals such as Muir, Leopold, and Carson, such efforts could only succeed or fail on a large scale with the involvement of the government, and it is this side of the story that Presidents and the American Environment tells. On the one hand, we find a ready environmental engagement, as in Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of Pelican Island bird refuge upon being informed that the Constitution did not explicitly forbid it. On the other hand, we have leaders like Calvin Coolidge, playing hide-and-seek games in the Oval Office while ignoring reports of coastal industrial pollution. The book moves from early cautious sponsors of the idea of preserving public lands to crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt, from the environmental implications of the New Deal to the politics of pollution in the boom times of the forties and fifties, from the emergence of “environmentalism” to recent presidential detractors of the cause. From Harrison’s act, which established the American system of National Forests, to Barack Obama’s efforts on curbing climate change, presidents have mattered as they resisted or used the ever-changing tools and objectives of environmentalism. In fact, with a near even split between “browns” and “greens” over those 22 administrations, the role of president has often been decisive. How, and how much, distinguished historian Otis L. Graham, Jr., describes in in full for the first time, in this important contribution to American environmental history.

Examines how the modern presidency has responded to environmental concerns.

The Presidents and the Planet recounts the story of the world’s greatest environmental dilemma through the eyes of early climate change pioneers. It begins in the 1950s, when American scientists first warned about the risks of pollution altering the natural climate in dramatic ways, the national media began covering the matter, and experts first offered testimony to congressional committees on the topic. The story ends in the early 1990s, by which time global efforts to confront the challenge were advancing, while political turmoil had begun to undermine U.S. leadership’s ability to address current and future environmental threats. While some early proponents endorsing climate action are well known, many of the major players have gone largely unrecognized. The oceanographer Roger Revelle exerted influence on eight White Houses during his life and even one after his death, when his former student Al Gore assumed the office of vice president. William Nordhaus had already written seminal studies on climate change when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the Council of Economic Advisors. Four decades later, the Yale professor won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on the subject. John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, chaired the Senate’s first committee on the problem and provided concrete solutions to face the dangers of a warming planet during the Reagan administration. The drama reached a full pitch during the George H. W. Bush years, as vocal advocates for climate action and staunch foes of government regulation wrestled over the direction of U.S. energy and environmental policy. To better trace the evolving climate debate in America, author Jay Hakes inspected the archives and writings of prominent scientists and the pivotal reports of the National Academy of Sciences, and traveled to presidential libraries to discover how commanders-in-chief and their science, economic, and political advisors addressed the issue. The Presidents and the Planet affords fresh perspectives that will alter the public’s understanding of when officials first grasped the dire consequences of climate change.

The Environmental Presidency develops a systematic understanding of how presidents have influenced the development of environmental and natural resource policy through an examination of environmental behavior and interaction patterns between the president and the American people. Looking at five presidential roles -- Commander in Chief, Chief Diplomat, Opinion and Party Leader, Chief Legislator, and Chief Executive -- the authors show how the modern presidency has redefined the relative strengths of each role in response to the political salience of the environment.

Presidents and their administrations since the 1960s have become increasingly active in environmental politics, despite their touted lack of expertise and their apparent frequent discomfort with the issue. In White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, Byron W. Daynes and Glen Sussman study the multitude of resources presidents can use in their attempts to set the public agenda. They also provide a framework for considering the environmental direction and impact of U.S. presidents during the last seven decades, permitting an assessment of each president in terms of how his administration either aided or hindered the advancement of environmental issues. Employing four factors—political communication, legislative leadership, administrative actions, and environmental diplomacy—as a matrix for examining the environmental records of the presidents, Daynes and Sussman’s analysis and discussion allow them to sort each of the twelve occupants of the White House included in this study into one of three categories, ranging from less to more environmentally friendly. Environmental leaders and public policy professionals will appreciate White House Politics and the Environment for its thorough and wide-ranging examination of how presidential resources have been brought to bear on environmental issues.

The environment figures prominently in American political debate of the twentieth century. Issues of wilderness and wetlands preservation, clean air and clean water, and the sustainable use of natural resources attract passionate advocacy and demands for national as well as local action. Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have addressed these issues, rhetorically (though not always prominently) in their public addresses and pragmatically in their policies and appointments to pertinent positions. Green Talk in the White House gathers an array of approaches to studying environmental rhetoric and the presidency, covering a range of presidential administrations and a diversity of viewpoints on how the concept of the “rhetorical presidency” may be modified in this policy area. Tarla Rai Peterson’s introduction discusses both methodological and substantive issues in studying presidential rhetoric on the environment. In subsequent chapters, noted scholars examine various aspects of half a dozen modern presidencies to shed light not only on those administrations but also on the study of environmental rhetoric itself. The final section of the book then directs attention to the future of presidential rhetoric and environmental governance, with looks “in” at state-level environmental issues and looks “out” at the international context of environmentalism. As a whole, the volume is ideal for those looking to better understand the particular intersection of presidency, policy, and rhetorical studies.

The growth of the administrative state and legislative gridlock has placed the White House at the center of environmental policymaking. Every recent president has continued the trend of relying upon administrative tools and unilateral actions to either advance or roll back environmental protection policies. From natural resources to climate change and pollution control, presidents have more been willing to test the limits of their authority, and the role of Congress has been one of reacting to presidential initiatives. In The Administrative Presidency and the Environment: Policy Leadership and Retrenchment from Clinton to Trump, David M. Shafie draws upon staff communications, speeches and other primary sources. Key features include detailed case studies in public land management, water quality, toxics, and climate policy, with particular attention to the role of science in decisionmaking. Finally, he identifies the techniques from previous administrations that made Trump’s administrative presidency possible. Shafie’s combination of qualitative analysis and topical case studies offers advanced undergraduate students and researchers alike important insights for understanding the interactions between environmental groups and the executive branch as well as implications for future policymaking.