Environmental policy is a pattern of action, purposefully taken or not taken to administer human undertakings.
Its vision is to avoid, decrease, or alleviate destructive effects on environment, and natural reserves and guaranteeing that, artificial alterations to the environs do not have damaging consequences on humans. Environmental policy encompasses two main terms: policy and environment (Taylor, 1984). Environment principally denotes to the ecological aspect (ecosystems), but then can similarly take a version of the social aspect (quality of natural life), and an economic aspect (resource controlling). Policy can be described as a "path of action or belief embraced or projected by a regime, business, party or individual". Therefore, environmental policy emphasizes on glitches, resulting from human influence on the environs, which reacts on human community by having a destructive consequence on human standards; for instance, virtuous health or the ‘uncontaminated and green' surroundings (McMichael, 2003).
The environmental policy (guiding principle) of the United States is a state governmental act to control undertakings, which contain an ecological collision in the United States. The objective of environmental policy is to safeguard the environs for forthcoming generations, while meddling as slightly as possible, with the efficacy of commerce or the freedom of the populaces, and to lessen imbalance in who is hampered with environmental expenses (Taylor, 1984). This policy developed out of the environmental crusade, in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, through which a number of environmental regulations were approved, controlling air and water contamination and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Partly owing to the high outlays related with these protocols, there has been a criticism from political and business conformist interests, restricting upturns to environmental supervisory budgets, and slackening attempts to safeguard the environment (McMichael, 2003). Ever since the 1970s, in spite of numerous legislative snarl-ups, there have been momentous accomplishments in environmental directive, including upsurges in water and air quality and, to a slighter degree, regulation of harmful waste. Owing to increasing scientific agreement on global warming and political pressure from ecological groups, alterations to the United States energy policy and restrictions on glasshouse gas emanation have been suggested, but such exertions have made narrow progress.
Environmental concerns commonly tackled by environmental policy, comprise (although are not limited to) water and air effluence, waste controlling, ecosystem managing, biodiversity safeguard, and the fortification of natural reserves, flora and fauna and endangered species. Comparatively lately, environmental policy has similarly attended to the transmission of environmental concerns (McMichael, 2003).
