The People’s Environmental Law: The National Environmental Policy Act
The People’s Environmental Law: The National Environmental Policy Act
When the government wants to build a toxic waste incinerator in your neighborhood, run a dangerous pipeline past your child’s school, or put a massive, costly freeway on top of a wetland, a federal law gives you the right to find out and fight back.
That law is the National Environmental Policy Act. It ensures you have a voice in major projects built in your community.
But backroom negotiations involving Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia could gut NEPA on behalf of oil and gas companies that find community voice inconvenient. The "dirty permitting side-deal" would allow industry to fast-track fossil fuel projects while sidelining communities, producing more pollution, and ignoring the reality of the climate crisis.
As the U.S. embarks on the most active period of building infrastructure since the New Deal, the NEPA process is an essential bridge — nor a barrier — to building in a sustainable, just, and equitable way. When communities are engaged from the start, the result is more inclusive and resilient projects. When communities are silenced, we risk repeating the cycle of environmental injustice that leaves low-income neighborhoods and communities of color bearing the most pollution.
Learn how the National Environmental Policy Act protects you:
What Does the Law Say?
1. Transparency
2. Informed Decision-Making
- how the project will be built
- the consequences of the project (good or bad) for local communities
- alternative ways to develop the project that still meet the government’s needs but better protect people and the environment
- measures that can be taken to lessen any harmful impacts of the project
3. Giving the Public a Voice
What Has the National Environmental Policy Act Achieved?
- After an old steel mill closed in Atlanta, public input collected through the NEPA process helped turn 138 acres of contaminated land into a safe place to work and live.
- A federal judge in Alaska sent the U.S. Forest Service back to the drawing board with a plan to log centuries-old trees across 1.8 million acres of Tongass National Forest, ruling that local communities had not had a fair chance to weigh in on the proposal.
- NEPA helped the state of Michigan save $1.5 billion when an analysis revealed that improving an existing highway — rather than constructing a massive, four-lane freeway — would save money and prevent the single largest loss of wetlands in the state to date.
- Developers canceled plans to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline — which would have carried fracked gas across the Appalachian Trail and through 600 miles of forest and farmlands — underscoring the importance of NEPA.
On the northern coast of Puerto Rico, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the National Environmental Policy Act has for the past six years helped the town of Arecibo breathe a little easier. There, residents have used NEPA’s critical safeguards to halt a waste-to-energy incinerator that would operate in an area already contaminated with heavy metals.
The incinerator, which proponents hope will get federal financing, would reportedly burn more than 2,000 tons of trash a day less than two miles from the largest wetland in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico residents face 2.5 times the death rate from asthma as residents of the mainland United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so the incinerator’s toxic fumes would be dumped into the air in an already at-risk community.
As Puerto Rico rebuilds from the devastation of Hurricane Maria, the last thing it needs is another blow to its environmental health. For Arecibo — and many other communities around the country — NEPA offers life-saving protection.
Prime farmland, fisheries, beaches, forests and coral reefs — now at risk in the North Pacific — are also benefiting from the defensive power of National Environmental Policy Act. The U.S. government wants to conduct destructive war games on two islands, Tinian and Pågan, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. There, mostly indigenous and low-income U.S. citizens are using NEPA to compel the U.S. Navy to consider the devastating effects that artillery, rockets and bombardment could have on their tropical homeland and sacred sites. Training could make it impossible for formerly displaced families to return to Pågan and could also disrupt access to vital emergency medical care.
If it weren’t for NEPA, low-income families and community leaders in the Northern Marianas would have little chance to protect their lands and livelihoods.
Stand up for your community — protect NEPA
Earthjustice is urging its supporters to contact their members of Congress and ask them to reject the dirty permitting side-deal.
This backroom deal brokered by fossil fuel industry lobbyists would do untold damage to American communities by denying vulnerable communities a voice in the permitting process for polluting industries. NEPA is a critical tool for low-income communities and communities of color to fight back against corporations with enormous resources and no incentive to protect public health and the long-term stability of the environment.
Instead of damaging NEPA, Congress has an opportunity to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act. This bill ensures that meaningful community outreach and review happen at the outset of projects, which research indicates is key to avoiding delays on needed and beneficial renewable energy projects.
Congress has already taken a historic step forward by including $1 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for improving the government's capacity to conduct environmental reviews. Let's make sure Congress does not take two steps back.
