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The staying power of environmental laws and policies in a conservative era is striking and at least for some, unexpected. This paper seeks to explain the roots of that persistence in three related, but heretofore unconnected policy developments, their intellectual origins and criticism of them -- post-war science policy, civil rights policies in the mid-sixties, and environmental policies in the early seventies. (1) Government support for science increased greatly during WWII and was sustained after the war, in part through creation of new programs and agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), but public funding of science, directed in large part by peer reviews by scientists was criticized by Don Price and others as largely closed to outsiders. (2) Civil rights advocates made a similar argument that American society and politics were largely closed to members of minority groups, particularly African-Americans. The influence of the civil rights movement at the time gave a parallel critique by Theodore Lowi and others considerable credibility when they contended that "iron triangles" and "policy subgovernments" excluded all but the participants in a very insular system. (3) Environmental policy was heavily influenced by Lowi's critique of the iron triangles, in part because of the strength of his case, but in part because members of Congress were seeking a means to insure that new environmental laws would not be circumvented by the Nixon administration. Many young congressional staffers had read Lowi while in college, often just before joining the growing congressional staff. Lowi's key recommendation, routinely included in early-seventies environmental laws, gave any citizen the right to sue to enforce those laws. Environmental groups have used the "citizen suit" provisions extensively and effectively in the thirty years since. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]