Planning as an educative process : the development of solid waste policy in the St. Louis area
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"The central contention of this study is that environmental management policy formation is more dependent on the planning process than upon the formal plan resulting from the process. As used in this study, environmental management relates to human activities which broadly impinge on natural environments, involves a plurality of decision making processes, and is of a continuing nature inherent in the immediate and recurrent necessities of human maintenance. We are concerned with those basic and recognized necessities which are the last to be sacrificed. Potable water supplies, food resources, sewage controls, solid waste controls, warmth and housing are among these necessities. The growth of the human population, the increase of human demands for goods and services, and increased human mobility in a reduced time frame have lent a dynamic character to these basic necessities. Environmental management is being recognized as important to the continuation of a quality standard of living. In his article "The Planning Syndrome in Western Culture", Christopher Tunnard recognizes this condition while at the same time stressing that planning has a humanist function in process which is at least as important as its scientific function. Policy formation tends to follow, we believe, the dynamics of the pressures, possibilities, and demands of the physical and human environment to the extent the policy making mechanisms are attuned to these forces. There is, therefore, an aspect of latency or discovery of potential in policy formation through the planning process. In the formation of a solid waste policy in the St. Louis area, we find an aspect of latency. This latency of policy is a product of the complex nature of the region's political and economic systems and its technological possibilities and problems. It embodies both possibilities and constraints, some of which became evident during the process of planning for a regional solid waste system. The planning process was particularly important in this respect because it became sensitive to possibility and restriction which otherwise might have gone unrecognized or ignored."--Introduction.
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