Society is impossible without government. Even wolf packs have a rudimentary form of government. Government without science and facts as the basis for decision making is indeed tyranny. Yet it seems that the Trump administration believes that their conservative ideology is so pure and correct that it should be accepted without scrutiny or discussion. The Trump folks have decided that government agencies don’t need to study how their actions will damage the environment or society under the National Environmental Policy Act. And with no studies or records, court action becomes nearly impossible.
Even conservatives and religious people live by the facts of science. They use medicine and eat food and use transportation; all the products of decades of scientific research put into practical use. Yet conservatives in Washington today suppress science and deny facts that create conflicts with their ideologically chosen path. They squash science that blocks the industries they favor for various reasons. They have an almost religious determination to turn back environmental science and regulation to the 1960s when most of it didn’t exist.
The Trump administration is populated with people who not only disregard science but attack the institutions and laws, built up over 50 years, that require public agencies to use solid science and account to the public for that science when they manage our public lands.
When people call the National Environmental Policy Act (42 U.S.C 4321 et seq.) a “bedrock” environmental law, they are not speaking in hyperbole. This law requires the federal government to use science to evaluate anything they do that will affect the environment. They must write down what affects the action will have on the earth and its life, consider the local economy and look at a range of alternatives. The law requires the public to be able to review their decisions and appeal within the agencies and the courts if they want to. This accounting allows the public, the courts, and other scientists to check their work. The facts, laid out before us, allow us to choose a course of action together.
Of course, the law is not perfect, and it has been poorly implemented over time and taken to extremes by both the public and agencies. It can slow down minor projects that should move along, and it can cost too much time and money for bigger projects. People who care about the public and the environment could reform the law when a different administration is in power. But the results of NEPA reviews are critical to democratic decision making.
Not only does the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) force the use of science, or at least the appearance that science was employed, it creates the basis for public decision making. It calls for public review and comment of decision documents. The law sometimes requires public meetings. NEPA opens the road for courts to oversee agencies and the public they govern. NEPA was passed in 1969 with broad bipartisan support.
All of this is highly offensive to those who have a set path they want to follow, one that may be highly destructive to the environment. And for the people managing the public lands in the Donald Trump administration, the idea that the public should own public lands or should have a say in what industry does there, is obviously an offensive and foreign concept, one not familiar to these folks drawn from large corporate lobbying firms and the oil industry. After all, in a corporate setting, decisions are made in private with even shareholders blocked from decision making. Why would the Trump Interior or Agriculture department want to follow a law that violates this basis of commercial privacy?
But the Trump crew and the libertarian right believe that the law is “burdensome” and must be “streamlined” for those who exploit public lands for private profit. With a president who often distorts or outright lies, it is impossible to know from Donald Trump’s public statements what the reality of any of the proposed NEPA reforms are, who asked for them or what they will mean.
Even so Trump called for “reforms” after many Trump supported oil and gas projects have been blocked by the courts, even under conservative judges. Oil pipelines that transport the filthy tar-sands oil from Canada to Koch Industries refineries have been blocked when federal agencies streamlined their NEPA documents and left out key facts. The Keystone XL pipeline, for example, has been a hot topic since it was forced across Native properties and farms and has already leaked crude oil into streams and farmlands. Environmental impact statements for the project would have assessed the risk of spills.
Trump was angered when the courts blocked various oil and coal projects he favors, especially if they considered climate change impacts. Donald Trump doesn’t believe climate change is real and he has ordered his government at all levels to ignore the issue. Trump’s solution is to block climate change considerations in NEPA and to exclude as many projects as possible from NEPA.
Logging and Trump
The Trump crew sees their chance to block environmental protections on national forest lands in what may be the last months of the administration. The right was angered in the 1980s when litigation to protect the northern spotted owl stopped the timber industry from cutting down the last stands of large trees in the northwest. Using Trump’s direction to ignore NEPA, the US Forest Service is now “categorically excluding” huge logging projects across the West.
Categorical exclusions are exemptions from NEPA review. Courts have permitted some small projects to be excluded from NEPA if they are similar to other projects that were shown to have minimal or no significant environmental impacts. In the 1980s, logging projects that were categorically excluded were limited to 10 acres. But under Trump, the categorical exclusion is being applied to logging projects of hundreds of thousands of acres. In Region 4, the Forest Service has a 900,000-acre logging project that will have no NEPA review.
Excluding science and public comment on huge projects like this is unprecedented. If the Forest Service don’t account for impacts, they don’t have to follow a range of environmental protection laws that regulate the killing of wildlife, the destruction of streams, and the desecration of sites important to native people.
Wildearth Guardians, a public interest group, found that the Forest Service has proposed 175 projects affecting 4 million acres to be categorically excluded from NEPA review. “The acres are just staggering. We’re seeing millions of acres excluded from sufficient analysis,” WildEarth Guardians Missoula spokesman Adam Rissien told the Missoula Current.
Yet NEPA allows agencies to do three levels of environmental review. They can write a large Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), a shorter Environmental Assessment (EA) or they can, within legal limits, categorically exclude projects from review. The Forest Service has been reviewing logging projects for decades and they have past reviews on which to base new ones. Biologists and other specialists will still need to visit places where the trees will be stripped, but these documents need not take years and the agencies usually ignore most public comments anyway, unless they know they have a strong legal tie.
The Trump crowd sees a multitude of problems with NEPA. First it gives opponents of industrial use of public lands information for lawsuits, which often succeed and slow or block projects. The law exposes damages to the land, water and wildlife that industry will cause. The Trump crowd would rather not know about these damages and they apparently just don’t care. The law also empowers and employs scientists and economic specialists who expose inconvenient truths about projects, ones that often contradict the hype industry perpetuates about economic benefits and unreal environmental benefits.
Congress passed NEPA after a series of environmental disasters that threatened human health happened in the 1960s. Rivers caught fire because of oil pollution, millions of birds and insects were killed by pesticides, pesticides sickened farm workers and children eating contaminated produce. Mostly the public was angry at a government that allowed industry to act without restraint and without accounting to the American people.
The Trump crowd longs for the days before environmental laws were passed and when the vast fields of science related to the environment were professionalized and advanced around the world. They see federal land agencies as enablers for industry, not public servants. Federal land is for private profit according to Trump. The public has been given a place at the table because of NEPA but Trump wants to close the door and leave us out of agency decisions and out of the courts.
