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 was gutted during the Trump administration. Alongside a nationwide coalition of groups, Earthjustice challenged this polluter power grab in court. The Biden administration now has the opportunity to restore the protections of this important law.
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.
What can the Biden administration do to fix NEPA?
- Address Conflicts of Interest: The Trump regulations allowed industries to prepare their own environmental reviews, introducing fatal bias to the review process. Reversing this will help restore the integrity of NEPA as the necessary legal recourse for communities to fight polluting projects and industries.
- Restore Explicit Requirements for Alternatives: The Trump regulations limited consideration of alternative proposals that would be less damaging to the environment and local communities. The new regulation must empower agencies to consider such alternatives once more.
- Account for Cumulative and Future Impacts: Future infrastructure projects must address the many issues impacting communities and ensure future decisions include the impacts of climate change.
- Strengthen Public Input: The Trump regulations effectively silenced the voices of communities that wanted a say in the projects built in their backyards. These harmful provisions must be restored to guarantee more robust public participation and ensure NEPA continues to be a legal recourse for environmental justice communities to fight for their right to clean air and clean water.
