Course Description
Environmental Policy and Law surveys the history and current condition of environmental policy development and decision-making in the United States, with emphasis on how policy is actually made — the conceptual structure of environmental regulation, its practical implementation, and the rationale underlying it. The course also provides an overview of general environmental and land use law: permitting, enforcement, toxic substances, and environmental litigation. Students read cases and study the federal, state, and local agencies that write and enforce environmental rules.
Within the SCNS taxonomy, EVR is the Environmental Studies prefix. EVR2861 sits alongside the introductory environmental science courses — Daytona State pairs it with EVR2001 as a corequisite — and functions as the social-science counterpart to them. It appears at approximately four Florida institutions, including state colleges and universities.
The pairing with a science course is the point. Environmental science establishes what is happening; this course examines why the response looks the way it does, which is rarely explicable from the science alone. Students who expect a policy course to be a continuation of the science course are usually surprised: the operative questions here are institutional, legal, and political.
⚠ Title drift
Florida course inventories carry this number as "Introduction to Environmental Policy." Daytona State's catalog title is "Environmental Policy and Law," and the published description gives substantial weight to the law half — permitting, enforcement, toxic substances, and litigation — which a policy-only title does not signal. Students expecting a policy survey will encounter statutory and case material. Read the catalog description.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Describe the historical development of United States environmental policy and the events that produced its major statutes.
- Explain the policy process: agenda setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation.
- Describe the structure and authority of the federal, state, and local agencies that make and enforce environmental policy.
- Explain the relationship between statute, regulation, and case law, and describe how a statute becomes an enforceable rule.
- Describe the major federal environmental statutes — NEPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, RCRA, CERCLA, the Endangered Species Act, and TSCA — and what each actually regulates.
- Explain environmental permitting: who needs a permit, what a permit contains, and how compliance is demonstrated.
- Describe enforcement mechanisms, penalties, and the role of citizen suits.
- Analyze land use regulation, zoning, and the relationship between property rights and environmental regulation.
- Explain the regulation of toxic substances and hazardous waste, including liability for contaminated sites.
- Read and brief an environmental law case: facts, issue, holding, and reasoning.
- Apply cost-benefit analysis and other policy evaluation tools, and identify their limits.
- Compare regulatory instruments — command and control, market-based, and voluntary — and evaluate their tradeoffs.
- Analyze the role of science, uncertainty, and the precautionary principle in environmental decision-making.
- Describe environmental justice and the distributional effects of environmental policy.
- Analyze a current Florida environmental policy question using the frameworks of the course.
Optional Outcomes
- Describe international environmental agreements and transboundary governance.
- Describe climate policy instruments and adaptation planning.
- Describe the role of NGOs, industry, and the public in environmental decision-making.
- Prepare a public comment on a proposed rule.
- Analyze an environmental impact statement.
- Describe careers in environmental compliance, policy, and law.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- History of American environmental policy and the modern regulatory era
- The policy process and the politics of environmental decision-making
- Federalism: federal, state, and local roles and preemption
- Statutes, regulations, rulemaking, and judicial review
- NEPA and environmental impact assessment
- Air quality regulation and the Clean Air Act
- Water quality, wetlands, and the Clean Water Act
- Solid and hazardous waste: RCRA
- Contaminated sites and liability: CERCLA / Superfund
- Toxic substances and chemical regulation
- Endangered species and habitat protection
- Permitting, compliance, and enforcement
- Land use law, zoning, growth management, and takings
- Environmental litigation, standing, and citizen suits
- Policy instruments: command and control, market-based, voluntary
- Risk, uncertainty, and the use of science in policy
- Environmental justice
- Florida environmental policy and agencies
Optional Topics
- International environmental law and agreements
- Climate policy, mitigation, and adaptation
- Energy policy and its environmental dimensions
- Agricultural and water allocation policy
- Coastal and marine policy
- Public participation and the rulemaking comment process
Resources & Tools
- Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century (Vig, Kraft) — the standard policy reader.
- Environmental Law and Policy (Salzman, Thompson) — a concise, readable law text well suited to a non-law-school audience.
- EPA (epa.gov) — statutes, regulations, enforcement data, and the ECHO compliance database, all free.
- Regulations.gov — proposed rules and the public comment docket; the most direct way to see rulemaking as it happens.
- Florida Department of Environmental Protection (floridadep.gov) — Florida permitting, enforcement, and program information.
- Florida's five water management districts — SFWMD, SJRWMD, SWFWMD, Suwannee River, and Northwest Florida — a governance structure unique enough to be worth studying on its own.
- Online Sunshine (leg.state.fl.us) — Chapter 373 (water resources), Chapter 403 (environmental control), and Chapter 163 (growth management), free and authoritative.
- Florida Administrative Code — the operative Florida rules, and CourtListener or Google Scholar for case text.
Career Pathways
- Environmental compliance specialist — in industry, utilities, and consulting; the largest employment category coming out of this material.
- Permitting specialist — with FDEP, a water management district, a county, or a consulting firm preparing applications.
- Environmental planner — local government comprehensive planning and development review.
- Regulatory and policy analyst — state agencies, legislative staff, and advocacy organizations.
- Environmental consultant — site assessment, impact analysis, and compliance auditing.
- Sustainability coordinator — increasingly common in Florida local government, universities, and large employers.
- Environmental law — for students who continue to law school; this course is an unusually good preview of that work.
- Florida employers: FDEP, the water management districts, county and municipal environmental departments, the Army Corps of Engineers Jacksonville District, utilities, and a large environmental consulting sector. SOC codes 19-2041 Environmental Scientists and Specialists and 19-4042 Environmental Science and Protection Technicians.
Special Information
⚠ Florida's environmental governance is genuinely unusual — learn the state structure, not just the federal one
A student who learns only the federal statutes will be unprepared to work in Florida, because a great deal of the operative authority here is state and regional.
- Five water management districts govern water supply, flood control, and wetlands permitting on hydrologic rather than political boundaries, with taxing authority and governing boards. This structure, established under Chapter 373, F.S., has few parallels nationally and is where much of Florida's real environmental decision-making happens.
- FDEP holds delegated federal authority for major programs, so Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act permitting in Florida is frequently a state process applying federally approved standards — the reason a practitioner must know both layers.
- Growth management under Chapter 163, F.S. ties land use planning to environmental outcomes through comprehensive plans and concurrency. Florida's growth management framework has been substantially restructured over the past fifteen years, with state oversight considerably reduced — a textbook describing Florida's system as strongly state-supervised is describing a superseded regime. Rule 11 applies.
- Everglades restoration (CERP) is the largest ecosystem restoration program in the world and a live case study in federal-state cost sharing, litigation, and agricultural water quality regulation.
⚠ Florida's constitutional and statutory tools are stronger than most states'
Two Florida provisions give this course unusual practical traction, and students should know them because they are usable rather than theoretical.
Article I, § 24 of the Florida Constitution constitutionalizes access to public records and open meetings. Florida's Sunshine Law is among the broadest in the country: a requester need not state a reason or identify themselves, oral requests are permitted, and open-meeting requirements reach small groups of a board. For environmental work this is a genuine investigative tool — permit files, inspection reports, enforcement correspondence, and agency communications are largely public. Students should file a real public records request during the course; it is the single most useful practical exercise available in this subject.
Chapter 403, F.S. also provides for citizen enforcement participation, and federal statutes carry citizen suit provisions that allow private parties to enforce environmental law where agencies do not. The doctrinal gateway is standing, and it is worth understanding properly — the requirement to show concrete, particularized injury is what determines whether a case is heard at all, and it has been the decisive issue in a large share of environmental litigation.
⚠ This subject moves, and it moves in both directions
Environmental law is among the least stable areas a student can study, and material more than a few years old will misstate current law in specific ways. Two developments deserve naming.
First, the scope of federal jurisdiction over wetlands and waters under the Clean Water Act has been repeatedly redefined by rulemaking and by the Supreme Court, most significantly by Sackett v. EPA (2023), which substantially narrowed the definition of "waters of the United States." That has outsized consequence in Florida specifically, given the extent of the state's wetlands, and it shifted a great deal of practical authority to state permitting.
Second, judicial deference to agency interpretation changed fundamentally when the Supreme Court overruled the Chevron doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024). Environmental regulation was the field Chevron arose in and the field most shaped by it; any text explaining that courts defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes is describing the pre-2024 rule.
Verify current law against primary sources. That habit is not merely academic caution here — it is the professional skill the course exists to build, and it is what distinguishes a competent compliance specialist from one who repeats what they were taught.
Course format and transfer
EVR2861 is a lecture course, 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, consistent with this repository's EVR2001. Daytona State offers it in fall with EVR2001 as a corequisite. Expect reading-heavy work: statutes, agency documents, and edited cases, assessed through case briefs, policy analysis papers, and often a research project on a current Florida issue.
How Florida course levels affect transfer
The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.
Two specific notes. EVR2861 is a social science course in an environmental prefix, and whether it satisfies a general education social science requirement varies by institution — confirm rather than assume. And because it is 2000-level, it will not substitute for an upper-division environmental policy or law course in a bachelor's program, though it is excellent preparation for one.