SHOW: NPR'S NEWS
HEADLINE: Environmentalists claim Bush administration is undermining the National Environmental Policy Act
BYLINE: Allison Aubrey
BODY:
JACKI LYDEN, host: If you've never tried to stop the construction of a federal highway or fought against a proposed oil drilling or timber project, you've probably never heard of a law called NEPA. But to environmentalists, the statute is sacred. It's given them the power to halt or amend hundreds of federal projects. Now, as NPR's Allison Aubrey reports, environmentalists say the Bush administration is undermining the National Environmental Policy Act.
ALLISON AUBREY reporting:
Last January the state director of the Bureau of Land Management in Utah sent out a bulletin to his field officers outlining a plan for speeding up oil and gas drilling permits. The director told them this was a top priority of the Bush administration, and it didn't take long for the BLM to begin expediting projects. Environmental lawyer Sharon Buccino of the Natural Resources Defense Council claims the bureau has accomplished its goal by illegally short-circuiting the National Environmental Policy Act, a sort of full-disclosure law that requires federal agencies to evaluate the environmental impacts of their projects and ensures the public has input into the decision-making process.
Ms. SHARON BUCCINO (Environmental Attorney): This administration's problem is that it really sees NEPA as an obstacle rather than a tool, and these rollbacks are consistent with this administration's basic approach to governing, which is to shut the public out.
AUBREY: She points to the Yellow Cat seismic exploration project which aims to open the public lands of Utah's red rock country to drilling. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance tried to halt the project before it started. The group's Steve Bloch projects the ruinous scene that drilling would bring.
Mr. STEVE BLOCH (Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance): It's standing at Dead Horse Point State Park that has a world-famous view across Canyonlands National Park and in the distance seeing the lights from oil and gas fields.
AUBREY: Bloch, along with other environmental groups, admitted an alternative plan to the Bureau of Land Management, one that wouldn't be, in their view, as damaging to the environment or the local tourism-based economy. But Bloch says the BLM, after a cursory look, simply ignored the NEPA process and gave the green light to the seismic exploration company.
Mr. BLOCH: Instead of doing their job, the BLM works essentially as an arm of the company.
AUBREY: But Chris Horner of the free-market think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute says the environmentalists' interpretation is way off base.
Mr. CHRIS HORNER (Competitive Enterprise Institute): The complaint here isn't that their voice wasn't heard; it's that they didn't get their way.
AUBREY: This was in sharp contrast to the eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, which favored protecting public lands. Then, federal projects had to clear layer after layer of hurdles, and Horner argues that the statute was too liberally applied.
Mr. HORNER: I think what the Bush administration is seeking to do is reverse the tide of expansionism in NEPA and bring it back to its original intent.
AUBREY: But environmentalists say that's a matter for interpretation. They argue the administration is gutting the law. They point to the president's forest plan that would waive the environmental review process from millions of acres of public lands. And in the transportation sector, the president issued an executive order in September creating an expedited review process for so-called high-priority projects. Jim Connaughton is chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He resents the environmentalists' charge and argues streamlining the process is not tantamount to wrecking it.
Mr. JIM CONNAUGHTON (Chairman, White House Council on Environmental
Quality): There have been no actions to circumvent NEPA; in fact, the record's to the contrary. We've been working to actually improve agency performance under NEPA.
AUBREY: Connaughton explains the administration currently has a task force assigned to this goal. But even some outside the environmental community who know NEPA well are skeptical of the administration's claims. Bill Cohen is a former Justice Department lawyer who oversaw hundreds of NEPA cases. He started the job the very year NEPA was passed back in 1970, and says never has the act been pushed aside so often.
Mr. BILL COHEN (Former Justice Department Attorney): I see a lot of proposals out trying to waive NEPA's requirements. To the extent they're waiving them, they're short-circuiting them.
AUBREY: In each of these cases, environmentalists plan to fight the administration in court. So in the end, it will be up to the nation's judges to decide if the National Environmental Policy Act is being violated.
