I. Introduction and Summary: Meeting the Environmental Challenges of the 21st Century

Meeting the Environmental Challenges of the 21st Century
The Series on the Environment in the 21st Century has tackled what business, environmental, government, and community and environmental justice leaders agree is a critical need: developing new, more effective ways of protecting and enhancing the environment.

The United States has accomplished a tremendous amount over the last 25 years. Our nation's air, land and water are, in many cases, significantly cleaner than they were only a few decades ago. At the same time, some environmental problems are getting worse, and much more remains to be done. This state of affairs is the driving force behind the Aspen Series on the Environment.

Different Perspectives-Shared Vision
The diverse group of participants in the Series, most of whom have years of experience in dealing with environmental issues, approached the question of how to improve our environmental policies from very different perspectives. They found, however, that representatives of one sector or point of view could often agree with key aspects of another sector's description of problems with the current system. And in addition, they shared a common belief-that successfully protecting and enhancing the environment in future years depends on finding new approaches.

Several strongly held views, initially articulated in three separate caucuses of business, government, and environmental and community representatives, were found to resonate among the entire group:

• There are more effective approaches that can reduce environmental impacts in ways that reduce costs and inefficiencies and encourage innovation and technological advances.
• Greater environmental gains could be achieved through a process oriented toward pollution prevention and more meaningful engagement of all interested and affected stakeholders.
• The current regulatory system often looks like the great wall-an impenetrable barrier to participation by many people and organizations in decisions that directly affect their lives.
• Resources are increasingly constrained, making it imperative to identify ways of achieving environmental goals more effectively and efficiently.

The group began its work by exploring concepts, needs, and ideas. These discussions generated agreement on the following overarching goal: To develop a new way to protect and enhance the environment consistent with a sustainable society characterized by a vibrant economy, protection of public health and the natural environment, and social and environmental justice.

This goal guides the Aspen Series to this day.

The Aspen Principles

The Series then defined a set of broad, underlying principles for achieving the goal; these have become known as the Aspen Principles (Chapter II). These principles involve

• setting clear goals;
• establishing priorities for the use of resources and minimizing costs of achieving these goals;
• the need for flexibility and innovation, broad environmental literacy, and the integration of environmental concerns with other policies;
• the use of science and integrated systems approaches;
• increased stakeholder participation;
• recognizing the limits of natural systems; and
• the inclusion of social and environmental justice as a goal of environmental and other policies.

Having established the overarching goal and broad principles for an environmental protection and management system of the future, the group decided to focus its efforts on a specific segment of that system. This would allow the group to test and refine the broad concepts in a more specific application-the Alternative Path (Chapter III).

Simply stated, the Alternative Path is an alternative to the current system of environmental regulation. Its key element is a basic quid pro quo:

A company or other regulated entity choosing to operate under the Alternative Path may design a tailored, more efficient environmental management plan with increased flexibility as to how the environmental goals are achieved. This may involve waivers of some currently applicable regulatory requirements. In return, however, the plan must be developed in an open, transparent, consensus-based stakeholder process; it must ensure the attainment of better environmental performance than would be achieved under the traditional regulatory process; and it must not result in a significant increase in risk to any exposed population or shift risks appreciably from one population to another.

Based on this conceptual consensus, the group then worked to resolve or provide guidance on some of the thorny issues involved in implementing the Alternative Path, including :

• a definition of superior environmental performance (Chapter IV),
• suggestions for the process of involving stakeholders (Chapter V),
• methods of incorporating pollution prevention and continuous improvement (Chapter VI), and
• the role of government regulators in the new system (Chapter VII).