Jaimie:
Have you read John Gray's works: "Men are from Mars, Women are
from Venus", or "Men, Women and Relationships"? I read the latter,
and it rang a lot of bells with descriptions of the strikingly
different ways men and women approach things. Men focus more and
are reductionist. Women think more expansively. Those kinds of
things. They correllate quite well with the differences in
approach to the economy, the environment, etc. What can we learn
from this? Surely each approach is useful in different situations.
And we all have some degree of BOTH masculine and feminine thought
patterns. How can we optimize it?
Please forgive me for name-dropping here, but I work for the agency
that Carol Browner ran before she took over the U.S. EPA. I was
here when she came on board in 1991, and the positive change in
this agency's morale was incredible. The previous agency head was
male, and had a rather uptight and elitist way of running things.
Carol was the opposite - very casual and open. Now, significant
environmental progress was made in Florida under both. But the
differences in approach were interesting.
Clearly the differences between the way men and women think are
partly biological (there is a growing body of scientific evidence,
such as differences in hormones; differences in the size of the
connection between the two hemispheres of the brain - larger in
females, suggesting more communication between the two hemispheres,
suggesting a reason for greater expansive type thinking in women;
etc.) and partly social (espec. the way our culture treats females
as they're growing up). It's hard to sort out. But as time goes
on, I find myself leaning more toward feminine (not necessarily
feminist) approaches.
Jackie:
LBJ wasn't much of an environmentalist (although Hubert Humphrey
was), but he did suggest an approach to pollution control I wish
we'd gone with. He suggested effluent fees, i.e., making
dischargers pay "by the pound" for what they put into the
environment. Instead, we went with a command-and-control system
(permitting/compliance/enforcement) that, frankly, is in a real
mess today. An enormous amount of money is spent taking polluters
to court to get relatively (in most cases) small penalties. Very
inefficient. The effluent fees idea, if applied correctly, would
have avoided a lot of paperwork and legal costs. (I have a
proposal for the NPDES program along these lines, if you're
interested.)
aVr
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. Environmental enforcement in Florida went WAY UP when Carol took
over.
