We are pleased to present the 7th edition of our annual review of environmental trends and issues in the United States. The shape of environmental discourse has changed dramatically since the first edition of this report was published in 1994. Back then, there were few efforts at tracking environmental trends — the EPA hadn’t  published a report on general environmental trends since 1989 — and our researchers had to obtain data the old-fashioned way: by scouring slowly through dozens of thick dusty reports in the government documents section of the library. In the years since then, two important changes have occurred.

The most obvious, of course, has been the Internet revolution, which makes available copious amounts of data online. Now the difficulty is not scarcity but rather a surfeit of data. Not only is more national data available, but information on the state and local level is also becoming more widely available through the Internet. It has become overwhelming just to keep up with all the sources of data and analysis now available.

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