The erosion of environmental policy - GOP "modernize"/guts NEPA

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rosenberg5oct05,0,3148223.story?track=tottext

The erosion of environmental policy
By Erica Rosenberg

October 5, 2005

THE BUSH administration and Congress have been chipping away at the National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, to do environmental impact reviews of their actions and programs. Now the House is about to consider how to "modernize" the act, but based on what the White House and Congress have already done, it's clear that the agenda isn't so much updating the law as gutting it.

Like other recent campaigns that have hidden environmental assaults under euphemisms — such as the Clear Skies Initiative, which aimed to roll back air pollution controls — the attack on NEPA is being sold as something it isn't: cooperative conservation.

The act, a Nixon-era law and one emulated around the world, outlines a process for considering environmental factors in federal decision-making about such things as dam building, grazing, offshore drilling, roadless-area protection and highway expansion. It requires the government to analyze and disclose environmental impacts of proposed actions and to examine alternatives, and it allows the public — local governments, Indian tribes, individual citizens — to participate in the decision.

The act is set up so that the greater the environmental impact of a project or policy, the more analysis and public input it requires. It calls for a full-scale environmental review, in the form of an environmental impact statement, for major actions, and a shorter assessment for actions with less significant impacts. When a project is routine and has no significant environmental impact, such as painting a fence or removing brush, the act also allows for exemptions from analysis.

The act cannot by itself stop harmful projects, but it can substantially improve the environmental outcome. In Utah, for example, it resulted in moving a radioactive waste site away from the Colorado River. In North Carolina, a proposal for an erosion-control project was withdrawn because it meant rerouting a fishing stream. In these cases and many others, the act has served as an instrument of democracy. In short, it is already the statutory embodiment of cooperative conservation. <snip>

[tex-wyo-dem]

1. Kicked and nominated!

[papau]

2. Thanks :-)

:-)