TABLE OF CONTENTS Although not perfect reflections of the problems they need to solve, the missions of government agencies often reflect the public challenges of their time. With regard to environmental protection, the lineage of laws, rules, and court cases differs considerably by environmental media; for example, air quality, drinking water, surface water and groundwater protection, solid and hazardous waste, consumer products, pesticides, nuclear wastes, ecological risks, habitat loss, soil loss and contamination, sediment contamination, stratospheric ozone destruction, and global climate change. In many aspects, agencies that address this panoply of environmental problems are less organic entities and more confederations. For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), two of the most important environmental agencies in the United States, were created as a reorganization of parts of agencies in existence at the time of the reorganization (see Appendix 2), meaning that many of the remnants of these older agencies still exist today, hence the characterization of environmental confederations. This means that there can be little incentive to address cross-cutting issues, especially if such issues fall outside the environmental media of a particular office. The agencies that first addressed environmental problems differed considerably from each other, depending on the "media." That is, air programs tended to grow from a public health perspective, soil and pesticide programs...
