Weakening the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act won't better protect settings such as this one in Glacier National Park/Rebecca Latson file
First it was the National Environmental Policy Act. Is the Endangered Species Act next?
That's not a rhetorical question. Early this year we told you the Trump administration had its industry-besotted eyes on weakening both NEPA and the ESA, and on Wednesday the first of those predictions came to be as President Trump said his adminstration would take a "top to bottom overhaul" to NEPA, the law enacted on January 1, 1970, to protect the environment from wanton development.
In short, NEPA required industry and regulatory agencies to weigh the environmental consequences of their actions before they take them. But, as explained by NPR, "(T)he administration's new regulations are expected to reduce the types and number of projects that will be subject to review under the NEPA, shorten the timeline for reviews, and drop a requirement that agencies consider the cumulative environmental effects of projects, such as their contribution to climate change."
Doubt this is a bad move? Just look at some of the projects that have been OKed with NEPA in existence:
- A Dominion Energy subsidiary was allowed to build a seven-mile-long line of nearly 300-foot-tall transmission towers down the James River in Virginia, within sight of Historic Jamestowne and Colonial National Historical Park. Well, a year ago a unanimous appellate court chastized both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Dominion Energy's subsidiary for letting that happen without conducting the appropriate environmental review.
- Damage -- to the landscape, to archaeological sites, to hallowed tribal grounds -- has been done at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona courtesy of the administration's move to waive environmental regulations so the president's 30-foot-tall border wall could be built. The desire by Trump to try to impede border crossings has intensified work not normally seen in a park where the National Park Service is directed to preserve the natural resources, and which is an International Biosphere Reserve. Bulldozers have rumbled along the border, clearing way for the wall's construction, and explosives have been used to chew into the landscape for better anchoring of the wall of concrete-filled steel bollards.
- Two agencies failed to do a NEPA review before issuing more than $3 million in loan guarantees for the C&H Hog Farms operation that was built upstream of the Buffalo National River in Arkansas. A federal judge back in 2014 ruled that the entities issuing the loans should have taken a "hard look" at the potential environmental consequences of the operation. This turned out to be a happy story in the end, as the state of Arkansas bought out the hog operation last year.
Just imagine how many environmentally bad projects might go forward with little if any oversight.
Back in January, Nada Culver of the National Audubon Society, said on a Traveler podcast that, "(T)he purpose of NEPA has always been kind of two-fold, one is to look at environmental affects, and the other is to make sure that there is public scrutiny, and public input, with the concept being better information gets you to better decisions. And what we've seen in these recent (proposed) regulations is really an attack on both parts of what make NEPA work. These changes would be sweeping, they would affect pretty much every aspect of how NEPA has been working since its issuance (in 1970), and really try to curtail, for instance, what types of analysis would happen, really limiting it, providing a lot of discretion to just determine at the outset that NEPA doesn't apply, so you don't even pass 'go.' You don't even start to do an analysis, you don't even have to tell anyone what you're doing."
David Yarnold, president and CEO of National Audubon Society, on Wednesday put more bite into Culver's comments.
“Our new national motto seems to be ‘ready, fire…and don’t even bother aiming.’ That’s what the administration’s undoing of basic environmental protections adds up to,” said Yarnold. “Since President Nixon signed into law these basic protections 50 years ago, the United States economy has grown tremendously while this law has stood guard for the safety of people, places, and wildlife. So, why, exactly, would we be gutting this legislation?”
Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association, said Trump's actions are a direct threat to national parks.
“Across the country, national parks are melting, burning, and drying as our country’s dependence on fossil fuels pollutes our landscapes and harms our communities," she said. "And the administration’s anticipated overhaul of NEPA will only make matters worse, as it blatantly ignores science and lets the government and industry off the hook by not requiring the consideration of climate change impacts."
As for the Endangered Species Act, here's how the administration wants to water-down that law:
- Change how critical habitat for threatened and endangered species is calculated.
- Reduce the protections "threatened" species receive under the ESA.
- Open the door for economic interests to be considered when a species is proposed for listing.
- Effectively ignore climate change by defining the "foreseeable future" as "only so far into the future as the (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service) can reasonably determine that the conditions potentially posing a danger of extinction in the foreseeable future are probable. The Services will describe the foreseeable future on a case-by-case basis, using the best available data and taking into account considerations such as the species' life-history characteristics, threat-projection timeframes, and environmental variability."
As we told you in January, these changes would affect all visitors to public lands, including hikers, campers, anglers, and hunters. If the administrations changes to NEPA, and its desired changes to the ESA, are implemented, they could affect wildlife at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, impact whether you can enjoy Cumberland Island National Seashore on the Georgia coast without rockets being launched overhead, affect how much land is deemed necessary to recover a species such as wolverines, and determine whether economics could trump the protection of a species.
America the Beautiful? These changes won't help in that regard.
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Comments
For crying out loud, if this article was about a ten cent increase in a park entry fee, a nickel extra each night to park an RV, a temporary policy on using masks in a visitor center, a requirement that motorcycles in parks have mufflers, a decision against spray painting a graffiti portrait of Trump on the Washington Monument, or maybe a proposed limit on the number of moose calves an individual hunter could take in Denali using a flamethrower in any single season; you can bet your bottom dollar that every cheapskate touron, every dimwitted delusional republican, every psychotic machine gun fanatic in America would be on here posting their two or three incoherent sentences of outrage in ALL CAPS by now. However, on this topic, there is, so far, not a word, perhaps because you need an IQ above 80 to be able to understand the topic.
All seriousness aside, this is an important subject. I first started studying and engaging in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes in the late 1970s. The NEPA process is one of the most powerful and useful planning tools in existence, not just for conservation or environmental protection purposes, but for recognizing and assessing any type of costs or benefits and for making intelligent decisions about any type of project.
The truth is that the NEPA doesn’t even force you to do the right thing. If it’s a small project, you’re unethical, want to do something inappropriate; and you have enough brains to get a headache; you can segment it into the categorical exclusions or connive your way through the assessment, into a finding of no significant impact, and dare your opposition to expend the effort to take you to court. The worst that can happen is that you’ll be forced to do a full impact statement and be honest about what you’re doing in the record of decision. And, that’s where you’d end up on large project anyway. In the end, all the NEPA forces you to do is be honest.
But, in fact, republicans have always been virulently opposed to the NEPA. Much of that opposition has been driven by the fact that using the NEPA as a framework to rack and stack the alternative approaches to a project forces you to fully disclose and document the anticipated impacts of those projects, who and what bears those impacts, who gets the benefits, and what the projects actually end up costing the taxpayers, all of the facts that republicans are so often trying to hide about projects and their approval processes. They want to hide those facts in order to get away with and not have to answer for their decisions.
I already had significant NEPA experience when the first really serious high level opposition to its use cropped up in the form of James Gaius Watt, a rightwing republican from Colorado who served as Ronald Raygun’s freakish first Secretary of the Interior. Watt didn’t like the NEPA, partly because he believed the Department of the Interior shouldn’t regulate extractive industries so much as guide them past the pesky public and through the onerous hurdles of public policy. All that full disclosure demanded by the NEPA certainly didn’t help there. Yes, Watt was a Trumper back when Trump was still just a spoiled playboy hanging around with Roy Cohn. For example, Watt once contemptuously described some of his own federal staff as “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple” along with some talent. Watt also chronically denigrated Native Americans, once asserting that, “If you want an example of the failure of socialism, don't go to Russia, come to America and go to the Indian reservations.” No, James Gaius Watt didn’t like the NEPA and resented its requirement for transparency about the projects under his control.
Opposition to the NEPA smoldered through the late 1980s and into the 1990s as it increasingly served as a framework for issues related to Endangered Species Act (ESA) and other public and environmental health debates. Outright opposition to the NEPA flared again during the first term of the George W. Bush or maybe Dick Cheney or maybe Donald Rumsfeld Administration. Who really knew who was in charge of that bedlam? Sometimes it was mean; sometimes it was stupid; and most of the time it was both. During that first term, James Gaius Watt’s protege at the infamously rightwing Mountain States Legal Foundation, Gale Norton, was appointed Secretary of the Interior and she, like Watt, was a rabid opponent of both the NEPA and the ESA.
However, Norton refined the old strategies for fighting these laws. Instead of confronting them directly, she finessed them, engaging them, but only enough to stall them out. For example, when public comments urged reform of excessive, out of control, snowmobiling in Yellowstone and forced the adoption of NEPA alternatives putting limits on those money-making activities, Norton simply stalled while her team found reasons to need to reword or rephrase something in the previous set of NEPA documents, thus providing an excuse to restart the process all over again. This strategy worked for quite a while, with each iteration consuming a year or two and the “no action” alternative effectively staying in place. Her team did something similar with the ESA, expanding the excuse that a listing might be “warranted” on the merits, but “precluded” due to staff or funding deficiencies within the department.
The last I heard, Norton was a Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a republican-leaning think tank and lobbying operation, based in Bozeman, and posing as a conservation group. “Improving Environmental Quality Through Property Rights and Markets” is the group’s current motto; but, the group has been around for years, formerly as the Political Economy Research Center. In the past, it was under scrutiny for hosting junkets to Yellowstone, allegedly designed to provide “orientation and training” for judges, but seemingly catering only to those with reputations for undermining environmental protections. PERC has worked hard to place their partisans in the conservation community. In fact, when the longtime Director of Board Relations at Yellowstone Forever (YF) left a couple of years ago, YF replaced him with the wife of PERC’s CEO. Now PERC has a representative right there on the staff and in a position to influence the Board of the “official nonprofit partner” for Yellowstone National Park. Yes, PERC has seduced a great many “would be conservationists” over the decades.
Now, in whatever you want to call these Trump times, we have a new assault on both the NEPA and the ESA. How do we counter it? Well, I believe we have to face a couple of things. First, it isn’t just Trump. These landmark pieces of legislation laws were under attack long before Trump came along. Trump probably doesn’t have the intellectual capability to even begin to understand these laws. No, republicans are the problem. If we get rid of Trump, but leave the Senate in republican hands, we won’t have accomplished anything close to what is needed. We need to hold the House and take both the executive branch and the Senate. Just sayin'.
As a 'new' American (last October) having come from Wales via Australia I can say we have a wonderful natural heritage to look after and protect.
Humphrey you have provided a perspective of some of the big issues we face and thankyou for your time to put your thoughts into print.
Australia has similar issues to deal with and I am encouraged through the discourses I read in National Parks Traveller that there is energy and engagement from a whole range of people.
NEPA can be a game changer and if we don't respond as a nation to the biggest threat we have (beyond COVID) then the future is bleak.
I will be voting this November!
We got our challenge to overcome then, eh?
Thanks, Colin P, and welcome aboard America's currently wobbly train. From what I've read, wildlife concerns in Wales seem to be holding close to steady; however, Australia is hurting badly, with great risks to unique lines of wildlife that date from relatively close to the very beginnings of the age of mammals. Any further loss in those kinds of ancient gene pools would be tragic.
And, you're right about the NEPA. The NEPA process is central to and critical in ensuring that we assess and examine what our proposed actions can and will do to wildlife populations and their habitat here in America. The NEPA does its job for America and has for many decades, which is exactly why the current adminstration and the party that backs it are hellbent on undermining the law and tainting the process. They want neither witnesses to nor documentation of what logging in the Tongass and that despicable Pebble Mine will do to Bristol Bay and what so many of their other pet projects will do to other priceless American treasures, treasures cherished not just by Americans, but by the world.
So, remember, when you vote this November, that our problem isn't just Trump; it's an entire corrupt political party, from Greg Gianforte and Steve Daines in the north, to Cory Gardner and Ken Buck in the middle, to Lindsey Graham and Ron DeSantis in the south. They're all hellbent, not only on despoiling America, but also on spreading their poison internationally.