Public Policy - #8 Feb/Mar 94

POLICY WATCH

PENDING ISSUES
AND THE
BIGGER PICTURE

This new section seeks to elevate the debate over pending issues beyond the surface level, and to benefit everyone from the political dabbler to the policy-maker.

Final Flight?
Arguments about individual ecological issues sometimes serve to pull attention away from the destruction of the Earth's ecosystems. The Jan-Feb issue of WorldWatch, from the institute of the same name, highlights one dimension of this crisis: the steady disappearance of hundreds of bird species.

In "Flying Into Trouble," author Howard Youth poses that disappearing birds are a measure of the degradation of larger ecosystems. About 70 percent of the world's 9,600 bird species are declining, and 100 species are threatened with extinction. The causes read like a catalog of humanity's ecological destructiveness:

Habitat destruction, particularly the destruction of wetlands and forests, takes away nesting sites.
Toxic effluents ranging from oil from the Exxon Valdez, and DDT, which is still used for malaria control in the tropics, kill birds directly or prevent their reproduction.
The introduction of non-native predators leads to decimation of populations. In many cases indigenous birds are replaced by the rats of the avian world, species such as starling and cowbirds which are able to live in disturbed or degraded environments.

There's some good news: efforts are underway to document and conserve bird populations, especially in the 2 percent of the Earth's surface where they are highly concentrated.

Questioning Incarceration
The United States has the highest rate of imprisonment in the industrialized world - 46 percent higher than South Africa. In 1992, 1.3 million men and women were locked up in this country. To support this lock-'em-up strategy, we spend $25 billion a year to build and run jails and prisons.

America Behind Bars, a report by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation of New York, lays out in punishing detail the breadth of our fascination with imprisonment. It also points out the contradiction between this fascination and 1) the lack of a clear correlation between crime rates and imprisonment rates, and 2) the high level of public opposition to our punishment-oriented correctional system.

Using detail and citing examples, the report discusses numerous alternatives. These include the traditional approaches of basic and supervised probation, house arrest, and restitution, as well as emerging options such as electronic monitoring, community service, client-specific planning, daily reporting, boot camps, sex-offender and drug-abuse treatment, and half-way houses.

Not only can money be saved through these options, the report says, but they offer hope and, in fact, they are supported in large measure by the public. In a 1992 national poll, 80 percent of the people favored such alternatives over prison for non-violent offenders. With government budgets busting, the report makes a strong case for more imaginative corrections policies.

Growing Small Business on the Peninsula
While the main protagonists in the Northwest forest controversy continue to battle it out, some quieter solutions are slowly emerging away from the media limelight.

One such effort is the Cascadia Revolving Fund's assistance to small business on the Olympic Peninsula, according to the December 1993 issue of The Changing Northwest, a publication of the Northwest Policy Center at the University of Washington. Cascadia, a Seattle-based development fund, has made about 70 loans since the mid-80s to women's, minority, and environmental organizations.

Peninsula locals originally resisted the involvement of Cascadia because of its environmental orientation, but the fund's willingness to adapt itself to the need of distressed timber communities eventually won their trust. Cascadia has approved six loans for projects ranging from specialty wood manufacturing to low- and moderate-income housing, to a drug and alcohol treatment center.

New Environmental Thought
In New Directions in Environmental Policy, authors from the University of Washington's Graduate School of Public Affairs discuss fundamental ways to bring environmental considerations into the heart of institutions and social practices.

Topics in New Directions include:

How lessons from the Northwest Forest Summit can help us approach other natural resource issues.
The importance of environmental education in reducing the destructiveness of the average American lifestyle.
Planned development in Bainbridge Island as a case study of the implementation of the state's Growth Management Act.
An environmental hot potato of the '90s and beyond: environmental racism.
And the latest management buzzword - "total quality management" - to bear on problems of pollution control.

These and other essays provide a good compendium on the latest thinking about solutions for both environmental and social ills.

Policy Resources:

WorldWatch - $15/year, P.O. Box 6991, Syracuse, NY 13217.
America Behind Bars - Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, 250 Park Ave., NY, NY 10177.
New Directions in Environmental Policy - Professor Clark Gaulding, Institute for Public Policy and Management, UW, (206) 543-0190.
The Changing Northwest - Northwest Policy Center, 327 Parrington Hall, DC-14, UW, Seattle 98195.

PolicyWatch is a new feature of Free Press Public Policy Project, which is: Mark Gardner, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Washington; and Free Press co-publisher Mark Worth, who frequently works with the Context Institute on Bainbridge Island, Wash.

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Contents on this page were published in the February/March, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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