Understanding comprehensive environmental decision making with navigational aids for the 1990s and beyond

Abstract

The Comprehensive Environmental Decision Making (CEDM) paradigm developed through this research conceptualizes CEDM through a particular way of seeing a commitment to man's relationship with his environment. Previous research has explored CEDK but the idea remains ill-defined. The challenge in this research is to reestablish the guiding ideas of the government-environment-citizens matrix, while at the same time describe a meaning and means of operation suitable for environmental professionals working in industry today, where the man-environment commitment is critical to economic growth and environmental quality. In this research a meaning and means of operation begins with Lynton K. Caldwell's guiding ideas. As an avenue of implementation, government structures established through The National Environmental Policy Act and the Pollution Prevention Act provide policy reinforcement. Accepting policy as a CEDM avenue the requirements of environmental understanding, information and perception are developed through aspects of the environment and sustainable development with rational ecology ultimately providing the guideposts and criteria whereby CEDM may be judged. Citizens are those environmental professionals where an ethic is shaped through systems learning with the Environmental Management System used as a framework to establish the CEDM network of relationships in the workplace. The professional's socially binding value is hypothesized as an obligation not to do harm. With this value orientation, rational ethics and systems thinking provide guidelines that direct the professional in evaluating and optimizing policy and business structures. The CEDM paradigm is illustrated as a social choice mechanism suited to the 1990s and beyond by using case studies to apply policy directions.