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White House Reinterpreting Law on Environmental Reviews
The administration seeks to end red tape on federal lands, but critics see a policy 'assault.'
By Elizabeth Shogren
Times Staff Writer

November 3 2002

WASHINGTON -- In a series of efforts to limit the reach of the nation's bedrock environmental law, the Bush administration is working to prevent environmental impact statements from blocking or stalling energy production, logging and other controversial uses of federal lands and waters.

From oceans to deserts, the administration is making the case that the National Environmental Policy Act applies only to activities that could potentially cause major environmental damage.

The Bush administration argues that the 1969 law has become a bureaucratic obstacle to action because it has been interpreted as requiring environmental impact statements even when proposed actions would obviously have no major effect. It says its goal is to cut red tape, streamline decision making and get more done.

"What we're trying to do is return [the law] to its original vision as a tool that can help us make wise decisions," said Lynn Scarlett, an assistant Interior secretary.

But to Marty Hayden, legislative director of the environmental legal group Earthjustice, the administration is conducting "a systematic assault on our nation's premier environmental law."

One typical case involves plans for managing the nation's 192 million acres of national forests, grasslands and prairies. A draft proposal circulating within the administration would exempt all but major changes to national forest management plans from the thorough environmental reviews now required.

The document says the new process would "allow for new plans, amendments, or revisions to be categorically excluded from documentation" in environmental impact statements.

The management plans are important because they determine which lands are targeted for mineral development, grazing or timber harvests and which are preserved for wildlife, recreation or wilderness. Omitting environmental impact statements could swing some decisions in favor of commercial development.

If the Bush administration's draft proposal goes into effect, the U.S. Forest Service would still undertake lengthy environmental impact statements when proposed forest plans represented major changes from existing plans, according to Mark Rey, the Agriculture undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service.

But comprehensive environmental reviews would become the exception rather than the rule.

"The idea is to do the level of environmental review that is justified proportionate to the decision that is being made," Rey said. For instance, the administration argues that it would not be a good use of time and money to launch a full environmental impact statement when officials are updating the forest plan for a smaller eastern forest without any significant changes to guidelines or standards, Rey said.

Environmentalists have a different take. "The administration appears intent on taking away the public's long-standing ability to have a say in how their public lands are managed," said Linda Lance, a vice president of the Wilderness Society, a national environmental group.

On average, forest plans take four to five years to develop and cost $4 million to $5 million. The administration cannot say exactly how much time and money is for the environmental analysis, but Agriculture Department spokesman Dick Smith said it accounted for more than half.

The changes being introduced by the Bush administration directly affect only the way the government does business, not the policies it pursues. But the procedures can influence the policies, regardless of who the president happens to be.

The Clinton administration, for example, was tripped up over its Northwestern forest plan, which governs 19 national forests in Oregon, Washington and Northern California within the range of northern spotted owl. The Forest Service suggested relaxing the width of the unlogged strip of forest that it was required to leave on either side of intermittent streams to act as a buffer against erosion.

The rule had been 100 feet; the Forest Service proposed 50 feet. Environmental groups and government scientists expressed concern that the plan would make streams dirtier and their banks less hospitable to wildlife. The final plan, finished in 1994, called for full-sized forested buffers of at least 100 feet.

On other fronts, the Bureau of Land Management, seeking to expand domestic energy production, has repeatedly forgone environmental impact statements for new projects, even when other federal agencies urge such assessments.

And the administration has proposed exempting from environmental impact statements 10 large projects aimed at diminishing fire risk in federal lands. It is seeking to speed up thinning and proscribed burns on some of the most fire-prone federal lands, thus lessening the risk of severe forest fires.

Environmentalists charge that the administration's real goal is to undertake large timber harvests without scrutiny.

Even the Navy has joined the debate, arguing that the law does not apply beyond the 12 miles of territorial waters along the U.S. coastline. In particular, the Navy wants to be excused from preparing comprehensive analyses of the effect of its low-frequency sonar on whales and other sea mammals.

Environmentalists took the Navy to court, arguing that the law applies throughout the so-called exclusive economic zone, which extends to 200 miles offshore.

U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder in Los Angeles rejected the administration's arguments last month, concluding that the law applies not only in territorial waters but in the exclusive economic zone.

Environmentalists hope the defeat will deter the administration in other environmental issues as well.

"It was extremely important to rein in the Bush administration's attack on the most fundamental environmental law that we have," said Joel Reynolds, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which brought the case.

But so far, the administration does not seem deterred. Its quest to open public lands for oil, gas and coal production has been fertile ground for disputes.

Most recently, the Bush administration opted not to undertake a comprehensive environmental assessment of a large new oil and gas exploration project in Utah's remote Book Cliffs region.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and several other environmental groups sued the Bureau of Land Management in September.

The oil and gas project, which would be the largest ever in Utah, would encompass seven areas that are also proposed wilderness areas.

Even the Environmental Protection Agency commented that the relatively brief environmental assessment conducted by the Bureau of Land Management "does not adequately characterize the direct and indirect effects to wildlife habitat and soils."

Book Cliffs is the third seismic project in Utah approved by the Bush administration without environmental impact statements. Another was the decision to send large seismic "thumper" trucks into the Dome Plateau area, home to several threatened and endangered species. Several federal agencies had unsuccessfully urged the Bureau of Land Management's Utah office to conduct a thorough environmental impact review.

On Wednesday, a federal judge, agreeing that the exploration could harm the fragile desert landscape, temporarily halted the project.

Environmental 'Magna Carta' law under fire
A law that subjects all federal projects to an environmental-impact study faces review.
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

ASHLAND, ORE. - What do whales off the Pacific Coast, fire-blackened forests in Colorado, and farmers in Oregon's Klamath Basin have in common? All are involved in lawsuits centered on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – the most sweeping of all US environmental laws.

This means they're also involved in a political confrontation over the future of a law that the Bush administration wants to rein in and environmentalists are fighting to preserve.

Signed into law 32 years ago by Richard Nixon, NEPA has been called "the Magna Carta of environmental laws." It's championed by activists who use it as a legal lever to expose – and in some cases halt – environmentally damaging development proposals. But developers see it as an unfair roadblock to legitimate projects. And it's a source of frustration for some government-agency officials. They complain that the law produces "analysis paralysis," preventing them from effectively managing hundreds of millions of acres of federal land.

Under NEPA, federal agencies have to study all the environmental impacts that every proposed federal project might have. That includes deciding whether the Navy can boom the depths of the sea with advanced sonar, figuring out how to repair the more than 6 million acres of federal land that burned this summer, and making Solomon-like allotments of scarce water to farmers and fish threatened with extinction.

Agencies must gather public comment and consider the alternatives before going ahead with any project. In essence, it's a kind of "sunshine law," opening the political process involving environmental decisions to all Americans. Anyone – from a single grass-roots conservationist to the powerful Sierra Club with its own lawyers – can delay (if not squelch) a development project by filing legal appeals.

Now, even as courts look likely to settle some of the political debates that have arisen as a result of the law, the Bush administration wants to streamline NEPA.

Earlier this year, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) set up a task force of federal agency officials whose goal, says CEQ chairman James Connaughton, is to "move federal environmental analysis and NEPA documentation into the 21st century." This process is expected to take several months, and it draws heavily on public comment from a wide range of interests that could be affected.

Not surprisingly, foresters, shareholder-owned utilities, homebuilders, highway officials, and other industry leaders whose work affects the environment have advocated reform of NEPA.

"The NEPA process can impose significant regulatory burdens on our industry," says J. Michael Luzier, senior vice president of the National Association of Home Builders. "We are keenly interested in ways the NEPA Task Force can help streamline the process [and] reduce regulatory burdens."

One noticeable change since passage of the law in 1969 is the dramatic advance in technology used by those who manage (or watchdog the management of) public lands.

"The personal computer, computer-aided design, geographic information-systems mapping, and the Internet have all emerged and come into the mainstream during this period," says John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. "Paradoxically, in the context of NEPA, new technological tools can actually end up creating new opportunities for delay, rather than expediting the process."

CEQ chairman Connaughton wants the task force to take these new technologies into account in examining environmental rules.

But what the White House touts as reforms in the name of regulatory efficiency, critics see as undermining a law that – more than any other – is the one legal tool grass-roots groups and individuals have to prevent special interests and their friends in office from doing damage to the land.

Given the president's environmental views, they're suspicious to start with. They note that, among other things, Bush has sought to undo environmental laws enacted by the Clinton administration. And on NEPA, says Sharon Buccino, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, "the administration has continually sought to circumvent it."

Some examples: In his "Healthy Forest Initiative," Bush would exempt certain areas from NEPA review in order to speed up rehabilitation (including logging) in forests damaged by fire. The administration says NEPA should not apply to offshore military activities out to the 200-mile limit of the US Exclusive Economic Zone. (A federal judge recently sided with environmentalists on this point.) In September, the president issued an executive order to speed up the environmental review process for high-priority transportation projects.

"So far the administration is going in the wrong direction," says Ms. Buccino

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1107/p02s02-usgn.htm