White House Reinterpreting Law on Environmental Reviews

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.