September 30, 2002
Opinion: Undermining Environmental Law
NYT
The Bush administration has been seeking to ignore or limit the reach of the
National Environmental Policy Act, regarded as the Magna Carta of
environmental protection.
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/opinion/30MON1.html?tntemail1
Undermining Environmental Law
On issues large and small, the Bush administration has spent the better part
of two years rolling back Bill Clinton's environmental legacy. It has
abandoned the Kyoto accord on global warming, weakened protections for
wetlands and eased mining laws. Now it appears to be aiming at even bigger
game - the National Environmental Policy Act, regarded as the Magna Carta of
environmental protection and perhaps the most important of all the
environmental statutes signed into law by Richard Nixon three decades ago.
The act, NEPA for short, is no stranger to controversy. Bureaucrats blame it
for gridlock, commercial interests for blocking progress. Environmentalists,
of course, love it, as well they should.
The act is essentially a sunshine law. It requires all federal agencies to
make a detailed assessment of the consequences of any project likely to have
a significant impact on the environment, and make that assessment available
for comment from the public and other federal agencies. The law does not
mandate particular outcomes. Its purpose is to keep federal agencies from
doing destructive things - clear-cutting forests, straightening rivers,
destroying wildlife in the name of development - under cover of darkness.
And over the years it has done a world of good.
The Bush administration has been seeking to ignore or limit the reach of
this statute in three main areas. The clearest example is forest policy. Mr.
Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative, now the subject of intense debate in
Congress, would ease NEPA requirements for timber projects that the federal
government deems necessary to prevent fires. Conservationists believe that
many such projects are in fact camouflage for commercial logging. They are
worried, and rightly so, that suspending NEPA could lead to widespread
environmental degradation for no other purpose than to enrich the timber
companies.
Energy policy has been equally troublesome. Though President Bush has never
hidden his desire to open up vast expanses of the public lands to oil and
gas drilling, the White House has always insisted that it had no intention
of end-running NEPA. But in fact it has. In recent months, at least two
projects - a 77,000-well methane project in Wyoming and Montana, and a
seismic testing project near Arches National Park in Utah - have been
challenged (and may ultimately be significantly revised) because the
administration failed to do the necessary environmental reviews.
The administration has also tried to limit the law's reach offshore. In a
recent court case, involving a Navy plan to test sonar devices off the
Pacific Coast, the Justice Department argued that the Navy was under no
obligation to assess potential harm to marine life. The Natural Resources
Defense Council sued, arguing that not only did the law apply but that
suspending it in this case would open the door to a range of unregulated and
potentially destructive activities, including ocean dumping and the
overfishing of depleted species.
The judge sided with the environmentalists, who, though pleased with the
ruling, regard it as only a temporary respite in the NEPA wars. Even now, a
White House task force is working on ways to "enhance" the act by
streamlining it. That sounds innocent enough, but based on the
administration's behavior so far, some fear that the real intent is not to
streamline the process but to circumvent it, perhaps by executive order.
Congress, which wrote this law 33 years ago, must be alert to any effort to
undermine it.
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