The third Conservation movement was summoned to life between Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring (1962) and the Santa Barbara Oil Spill at the end of the movement-spawning Sixties, and would be called by a more nature-evoking term—environmentalism. Looking back from there, those of us with some historical memory were struck by how far we had come from the first Conservation crusade led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, or the second led by FDR in the 1930s. In those early days they thought the problem was loss of forests, soil erosion, water and air pollution, and that the solutions were National Parks and National Forests watched over by civil servants in their gray or tan-brown uniforms, along with a Soil Conservation Service for farmers.

Environmental policy and politics in the United States have changed dramatically over the past three decades. What began in the late 1960s as an heroic effort by an incipient environmental movement to conserve dwindling natural resources and prevent further deterioration of the air, water, and land has been transformed over more than three decades into an extraordinarily complex, diverse, and often controversial array of environmental policies. Those policies occupy a continuing position of high visibility on the political agenda at all levels of government, and environmental values are widely embraced by the American public. Yet throughout the 1990s environmental policies and programs were characterized as much by sharp political conflict as by the consensus over policy goals and means that reigned during the early to mid-1970s. As the twenty-first century approaches, there is considerable value in looking back at this exceptional period to under-stand the nature of the transformation and its implications for the future.

The emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s has stimulated much debate on the extent to which race and class have been or should become central concerns of modern environmentalism. Leaders in the environmental justice movement have charged that mainstream environmental organizations and, in turn, environmental policy have demonstrated a greater concern for preserving wilderness and animal habitats than addressing health hazards of humans, especially those living in cities; have embraced a “Save the Earth” perspective at the expense of saving people's lives and protecting their homes and backyards. Some advocates of environmental justice have gone so far as to dissociate their movement from American environmentalism altogether, rather identifying with a broader social justice heritage as imbedded in civil rights activities of the 1950s and 1960s.

This article examines the increasingly important and often contentious relationship between international trade and environmental regulation in the United States. It begins by explaining why these two policy areas have recently become more interdependent and then explores some of the specific controversies surrounding the contemporary linkages between trade policy and environmental regulation. The article concludes by analyzing the long-term political and economic impact of the relationship between trade and environmental policy.

In 1994 a young journalist with a sharp eye for social anxieties and a flair for dramatic prose wrote an article that described environmental change as “the national security issue of the early 21st century.” Robert Kaplan's thesis in “The Coming Anarchy” is fetchingly simple: combine weak political systems, burgeoning urban populations, grinding poverty, and a flood of cheap weapons, and society becomes highly volatile. This lethal mixture, Kaplan suggests, already is generating high levels of violence in West Africa; soon it will affect the rest of the planet. This will happen because at the root of social collapse in West Africa is environmental degradation—a problem the entire world is experiencing. The pathways to chaos may differ from one place to the next, but all of humankind is being pushed along them. The state of the environment, Kaplan concludes, has become a matter of national security.

The years surrounding 1970 marked the coming of age of the modern environmental movement. As that movement enters its fourth decade, perhaps the most striking change is the virtual abandonment by national environ-mental groups of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal.

Environmental policy is about fixing a problem—a large, complex, foundational problem. From the 1960s to the end of the century, the United States engaged this problem on a wider scale and with more energy than ever be-fore, as a part of a global, multinational effort in this direction. Seen from our experience and vantage, what are the prospects ahead of humanity and nature in the ongoing negotiation of our relationship?