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Author: Rachel Carson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9780618249060
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe essential, cornerstone book of modern environmentalism is now offered in a handsome 40th anniversary edition which features a new Introduction by activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new Afterword by Carson biographer Linda Lear.
Author: United States. Environmental Protection Agency. Management and Organization Division
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2011-09-08
Total Pages: 162
ISBN-13: 0309212553
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSustainability is based on a simple and long-recognized factual premise: Everything that humans require for their survival and well-being depends, directly or indirectly, on the natural environment. The environment provides the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Recognizing the importance of sustainability to its work, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working to create programs and applications in a variety of areas to better incorporate sustainability into decision-making at the agency. To further strengthen the scientific basis for sustainability as it applies to human health and environmental protection, the EPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to provide a framework for incorporating sustainability into the EPA's principles and decision-making. This framework, Sustainability and the U.S. EPA, provides recommendations for a sustainability approach that both incorporates and goes beyond an approach based on assessing and managing the risks posed by pollutants that has largely shaped environmental policy since the 1980s. Although risk-based methods have led to many successes and remain important tools, the report concludes that they are not adequate to address many of the complex problems that put current and future generations at risk, such as depletion of natural resources, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Moreover, sophisticated tools are increasingly available to address cross-cutting, complex, and challenging issues that go beyond risk management. The report recommends that EPA formally adopt as its sustainability paradigm the widely used "three pillars" approach, which means considering the environmental, social, and economic impacts of an action or decision. Health should be expressly included in the "social" pillar. EPA should also articulate its vision for sustainability and develop a set of sustainability principles that would underlie all agency policies and programs.
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2009-03-17
Total Pages: 611
ISBN-13: 0309125391
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rapid conversion of land to urban and suburban areas has profoundly altered how water flows during and following storm events, putting higher volumes of water and more pollutants into the nation's rivers, lakes, and estuaries. These changes have degraded water quality and habitat in virtually every urban stream system. The Clean Water Act regulatory framework for addressing sewage and industrial wastes is not well suited to the more difficult problem of stormwater discharges. This book calls for an entirely new permitting structure that would put authority and accountability for stormwater discharges at the municipal level. A number of additional actions, such as conserving natural areas, reducing hard surface cover (e.g., roads and parking lots), and retrofitting urban areas with features that hold and treat stormwater, are recommended.
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2017-04-10
Total Pages: 159
ISBN-13: 030945252X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a mission and regulatory responsibility to protect human health and the environment. EPA's pursuit of that goal includes a variety of research activities involving human subjects, such as epidemiologic studies and surveys. Those research activities also involve studies of individuals who volunteer to be exposed to air pollutants intentionally in controlled laboratory settings so that measurements can be made of transient and reversible biomarker or physiologic responses to those exposures that can indicate pathways of toxicity and mechanisms of air-pollution responses. The results of those controlled human inhalation exposure (CHIE) studies, also referred to as human clinical studies or human challenge studies, are used to inform policy decisions and help establish or revise standards to protect public health and improve air quality. Controlled Human Inhalation-Exposure Studies at EPA addresses scientific issues and provides guidance on the conduct of CHIE studies. This report assesses the utility of CHIE studies to inform and reduce uncertainties in setting air-pollution standards to protect public health and assess whether continuation of such studies is warranted. It also evaluates the potential health risks to test subjects who participated in recent studies of air pollutants at EPA's clinical research facility.
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2001-12-26
Total Pages: 242
ISBN-13: 0309076293
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHaving safe drinking water is important to all Americans. The Environmental Protection Agency's decision in the summer of 2001 to delay implementing a new, more stringent standard for the maximum allowable level for arsenic in drinking water generated a great deal of criticism and controversy. Ultimately at issue were newer data on arsenic beyond those that had been examined in a 1999 National Research Council report. EPA asked the National Research Council for an evaluation of the new data available. The committee's analyses and conclusions are presented in Arsenic in Drinking Water: 2001 Update. New epidemiological studies are critically evaluated, as are new experimental data that provide information on how and at what level arsenic in drinking water can lead to cancer. The report's findings are consistent with those of the 1999 report that found high risks of cancer at the previous federal standard of 50 parts per billion. In fact, the new report concludes that men and women who consume water containing 3 parts per billion of arsenic daily have about a 1 in 1,000 increased risk of developing bladder or lung cancer during their lifetime.
Author: David Demortain
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-01-21
Total Pages: 453
ISBN-13: 026253794X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow the US Environmental Protection Agency designed the governance of risk and forged its legitimacy over the course of four decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to protect the public health and environment, administering and enforcing a range of statutes and programs. Over four decades, the EPA has been a risk bureaucracy, formalizing many of the methods of the scientific governance of risk, from quantitative risk assessment to risk ranking. Demortain traces the creation of these methods for the governance of risk, the controversies to which they responded, and the controversies that they aroused in turn. He discusses the professional networks in which they were conceived; how they were used; and how they served to legitimize the EPA. Demortain argues that the EPA is structurally embedded in controversy, resulting in constant reevaluation of its credibility and fueling the evolution of the knowledge and technologies it uses to produce decisions and to create a legitimate image of how and why it acts on the environment. He describes the emergence and institutionalization of the risk assessment–risk management framework codified in the National Research Council's Red Book, and its subsequent unraveling as the agency's mission evolved toward environmental justice, ecological restoration, and sustainability, and as controversies over determining risk gained vigor in the 1990s. Through its rise and fall at the EPA, risk decision-making enshrines the science of a bureaucracy that learns how to make credible decisions and to reform itself, amid constant conflicts about the environment, risk, and its own legitimacy.
Author: United States. Environmental Protection Agency
Publisher:
Published: 1972
Total Pages: 90
ISBN-13:
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