Caught in the Courts

Behind closed doors the members of the House Public Works Committee were furious. "Pestiferous little lawsuits," said Congressman James Wright of Texas. The judges are "a bunch of ignoramuses," said Alabama's Robert Jones. "Ridiculous and silly," said Roger Zion of Indiana.

What incensed the committeemen was a relatively obscure section of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). It requires every federal agency to publish detailed statements on the "environmental impact" of every bridge or canal or other project under its jurisdiction--plus "reasonable" alternatives to those projects.

Such planning inevitably takes time, which means expense and delay. Because of NEPA, the $3 billion trans-Alaska pipeline remains just an idea; not a foot of pipe has been laid. The Cross-Florida Barge Canal is a half-built, abandoned ditch. Plans to link the Tennessee and Tombigbee rivers gather dust on engineers' shelves. Ironically, even the federal program to curb water pollution is stalled because of the paper work required by NEPA (some 20,000 separate permits might be required).

Goad. The basic conflict is between opposing interpretations of the public interest. To conservationists, NEPA is a goad to force the entire federal establishment to pay more attention to environmental problems. Turning to the courts, they have challenged the ecological wisdom of project after project--and thus halted them. "If agencies were making a real effort to implement NEPA, there wouldn't be so much litigation," argues Lawyer Gus Speth of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's a tough law and the agencies didn't realize it." But they are learning the lesson. To date, the courts have ruled for the environmentalists in the great majority of decisions.

On the other hand, the federal agencies find that the labor of preparing impact statements brings up myriad problems. In considering the effects of the 770-mile-long trans-Alaska pipeline, for example, planners had to investigate obscure questions like the effect of the pipe on caribou migration and spawning salmon. Its "statement" eventually filled nine large volumes. As a result of such toil, industry must often wait and wait for final approval of the agencies' statements before it can get on with its own work. Electric utilities with plans to build nuclear reactors have been particularly hard hit. NEPA is partly responsible for the fact that the Atomic Energy Commission has not issued a single license to start construction or operation of a nuclear plant since last summer, and the utilities fear that the delay may exacerbate power shortages for years.

Despite the courts' support of NEPA, the numerous critics of the law seem to be gaining. No less than ten new bills have been introduced to overcome various delays and difficulties deriving from NEPA. Though few of the bills di rectly change NEPA itself, all of them promote specific exemptions--for nuclear plants, water pollution control and public works projects like highways and dams--to avoid the troublesome impact statements. "You get enough of these exceptions on the books," says an aide to NEPA's coauthor, Michigan Representative John Dingell, "and you'll just wall NEPA off from reality."

Practical men like Dingell feel that some minor surgery on the law may be necessary now to avoid wholesale butchery later on. The major conservation groups disagree, warning that such expedient changes would set a dangerous precedent. Urging moderation, William D. Ruckelshaus, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, argues that "the impact statement is a powerful but costly instrument in the fight against pollution. We must not, by [its] indiscriminate application, generate cost and delays leading to a public counterreaction."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.