The National Environmental Policy Act, or "NEPA" as it is commonly referred to is the bedrock of our environmental laws. It requires that the government research impacts to some development decisions, such as building dams, building roads through roadless forests, or drilling. It also requires public involvement in the planning and decision making. The House, along with the White House are looking to completely undo this much needed law in the following weeks. This law not only upholds environmental quality all across the board, but also upholds our standard of living by keeping water quality at high levels, as well as our best public lands(national forests, parks, etc). NEPA has been responsible for a resurgence in much of our rare wildlife, in improvements to formerly polluted areas, and in keeping intact our last rare wildlands.
Wilderness-Sportsman.com
A quote from the LA Times article son what may happen.
LA Times
To get a sense of the Bush administration's antipathy for the act, one need only look at how the U.S. Forest Service -- overseen by Bush's undersecretary of Agriculture, Mark Rey -- has implemented it. In June 2003, for example, the agency decided that logging done in the name of hazardous fuels reduction on up to 1,000 acres of land, as well as logging in burned areas up to 4,200 acres, was as benign environmentally as clearing brush. It claimed, shockingly, that logging of such magnitude would have no significant impact and therefore needed no environmental review or public comment.
This week, the Forest Service is expected to apply such "streamlining" yet again. A proposed rule change would exempt its entire forest-management planning process from environmental review. That means that the agency can put together a plan for logging, mining, off-road vehicle use and more on public lands without having to consider environmental effects or deal with citizen input. That process, instead, would kick in as each piece of the plan is implemented. But as more and more kinds of actions are made exempt, fewer and fewer reviews will actually take place.
Just more of the same anti-democratic actions taken by a White House and congress completely controlled by corporations. This type of thing should be illegal. Meet this thing head on and write your congressmen , telling them not to support any weaking of NEPA at any cost.
The Bush admin recently tried to sneak in a mini-attack on NEPA, requiring no public involement or study on logging projects smaler than 1000 acres in Bush's "healthy forests" rule. Fortunately, a recent court order reversed that aspect, calling it illegal and breaking a 1992 law requiring public process on federal lands.
If the House manages to destroy NEPA, hopefully we have the judges to reverse it. It seems judges aren't fond of government agencies trying to cut out the public from public land decisions.