Beginning July 1, we are the new co-Editors-in-Chief of Environmental Practice, journal of the National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP). We are excited to lead this journal, particularly during a time when the public appears to have a renewed interest in environmental issues. With a new President and Congress, the environment may become one of the salient domestic issues for the country.

There is no technological reason why significant reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels cannot be made in the United States over the next five to fifteen years at modest cost. Most of the technology required is now available and what is not is close to commercial development. Policies for internalizing external costs are also well known, have been thoroughly studied, and have been used effectively in other cases. Most lacking are effective political strategies for enacting pertinent public policies. Following are five political and policy proposals to help the United States address the global warming problem.

What choice should we make? In The Art of War, Sun Tzu taught us to visualize war, to approach battle intelligently, to defend territory until you can advance, to see in your mind the enemy you plan to conquer, to focus on your opposition's weaknesses, and finally, to seize the moment of victory. In Stewardship, Peter Block taught us that stewardship is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of others—your friends, your family, your community, our planet—by being in service, rather than by acting in control or out of self-interest. These are very interesting and diverse perspectives on human behavior and on how we should act and feel toward one another. In the “art of war,” we have the attitude of winning at all costs. In stewardship, we have the point of view of enriching all that is around us. In the following paragraphs, I discuss some of the aspects of the art of war currently ingrained in our culture and how shifting our horizon to a stewardship view could provide us, as environmental professionals, the opportunity to lead others toward a new way of being for the rest of the twenty-first century.

Environmental hazards in the home can contribute significantly to disease. These hazards disproportionately affect low-income, urban, and minority children. Childhood lead poisoning and asthma are prime examples of health concerns to which poor housing conditions may contribute. A community-academic partnership in Rochester, New York, created a model Healthy Home, an interactive museum in a typical city home, to help residents, property owners, contractors, and community groups reduce environmental hazards. The Healthy Home project educates visitors about home environmental health hazards, demonstrates low-cost methods for reducing home hazards, and helps visitors develop individualized strategies for action. In its first year of operation, over 700 people visited the Healthy Home. Evaluation surveys indicate that the Healthy Home experience motivated visitors to take action to reduce environmental hazards in their homes. Follow-up phone interviews indicate that most visitors took some action to reduce home environmental hazards. The Healthy Home has established a diverse Advisory Council to share its messages more broadly, invite input into future directions, and recruit visitors. This article presents experiences from the Healthy Home's first year, highlighting the partnership principles that guided its development and lessons learned from the process.

Environmental Practice 10:94–106 (2008)

From the time it appeared in the 1978 regulations implementing the United States' National Environmental Policy Act, agencies have struggled with the concept of cumulative impacts in their environmental analyses. Although the regulations touch on every aspect of environmental impact analysis, they merely define cumulative impacts and then refer to them only in other definitions in the Terminology section. Agencies have become fairly adept at analyzing direct and indirect effects, but cumulative impacts have posed more difficult methodological problems, giving rise to a host of legal challenges. The courts have attempted to sort out what is required for adequate cumulative impact analysis, causing agencies to reactively develop agency-specific, and often complex, methodologies. This article relates the basic concepts of cumulative impact assessment to emerging case law, focusing on US federal land management issues. From this basis, it proposes a novel approach to cumulative effects analysis that (1) uses the doctrine of proximate cause from tort law to ensure that there is a reasonable probability that a proposal will affect a resource of concern before undertaking analysis of other effects on that resource, and (2) uses the No Action Alternative's trajectory of resource conditions (which incorporates the effects of other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future actions) as the baseline for assessing an action's incremental effects. The proposed six-step process integrates effects analysis by describing the overall effects of the No Action Alternative, altered by an action's direct and indirect (or incremental) effects, as the cumulative effect on a particular resource of concern.

Environmental Practice 10:107–115 (2008)

In the fall of 2005 and spring and summer of 2006, The Nature Conservancy, in cooperation with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Cascadia Research Collective, conducted a mammal inventory on McChord Air Force Base (MAFB). The military has a vested interest in maintaining habitat and species by congressional mandate and the corresponding burden of recovery. Six major habitat types were designated for trap-line transects; additional directed efforts were employed to target specific species. The resulting effort documented the presence of 36 species, eight of which were bats. Documented species of note include the western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus), a state “threatened” species, detected by hair-snag tubes; long-eared myotis (Myotis evotis); long-legged myotis (Myotis volans); and the Yuma myotis (Myotis yumanensis). Mammalian diversity on MAFB was influenced by three factors: water (either open water or wetland habitat); large, contiguous tracts of undeveloped acreage; and continuity with Fort Lewis, a large military base immediately adjacent to MAFB. Additionally, Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius), an invasive woody shrub, was found to support limited mammalian diversity, with the fewest species documented in this habitat type. Given the impending changes due to development, ownership, and climate, this survey will be useful to managers as a baseline for focused species efforts and future comparisons.

Environmental Practice 10:116–124 (2008)

Last May, the man who over 35 years ago signed the order banning DDT was asked to speak at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The occasion was an annual forum in honor of Rachel Carson, the woman responsible for the public awakening that led to that historic order. Now, in his seventies, William Ruckelshaus has been called upon to direct another landmark environmental effort, Washington State's Puget Sound Partnership (PSP). The PSP is a new state umbrella agency tasked with coordinating and supervising the restoration and protection of Puget Sound, whose watershed is home to over four million people, two-thirds of the state's population. In his remarks at the Rachel Carson Forum and in a follow-up interview, Ruckelshaus addressed the challenges of that herculean task and spoke of the importance to a democratic society of public involvement and public interest in environmental governance.