Oil drilling in coastal waters from California to Florida. Underwater explosives
testing near the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. Ocean dumping off
the Eastern Seaboard. And trawlers scouring increasingly depleted fishing grounds
from Alaska to Maine. For more than 30 years, these activities and countless others
like them have been illegal unless there was full public disclosure and a thorough
review of their environmental impacts.
Now that could change. Under a proposal being considered by the Bush administration,
the federal law that has been the cornerstone of the protection of our environment--including
our oceans--is under attack.
Considered the "Magna Carta of environmental regulation" in the United States
since it was signed into law by President Nixon in 1969, the National Environmental
Policy Act imposes this common-sense requirement: If a federal agency is thinking
of taking an action or starting a program that could significantly affect the
environment, it must consider those effects first. Under the act, a federal agency
is required to identify the environmental impacts of a proposed action, consider
reasonable alternatives and identify ways to reduce the harm. This information
must then be made available for public comment.
Earlier this month, under pressure from the Navy and the Department of Justice,
five federal agencies convened behind closed doors to consider a Navy proposal
that the National Environmental Policy Act no longer be applied to any activity
or program--no matter its environmental risks--in waters beyond three nautical
miles from our shores. Activities within this part of the so-called "exclusive
economic zone," or EEZ, of the United States, not to mention activities on the
high seas--would no longer receive public environmental review.
The EEZ, which extends 200 nautical miles from our shores, covers more than
3 million square miles of rich ocean habitat and is home to a wealth of fish,
whales, dolphins, sea turtles and other marine life. Under the Navy's proposal,
these resources would no longer be subject to the "inconvenience" of public disclosure
and environmental review.
According to a Navy "point paper" leaked to the media, both the Council on
Environmental Quality, the federal agency charged with issuing regulations under
the act, and the Justice Department during the Clinton administration "pressed
to apply [the act] worldwide." As recently as this summer, that was still
the position of the council and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
the agency responsible for protecting our oceans. And that is how the act has
been applied for years by the federal courts.
Unfortunately, according to sources at the meeting, the five federal agencies
agreed with the Navy that it was time to loosen protections afforded under the
environmental policy act. Most important to the Navy--and the immediate reason
for its demand that the federal government's policy be so drastically restricted--this
would mean that an environmental review might not be required before testing or
deployment of powerful new active sonar devices around the world, devices that
could expose hundreds of thousands of square miles to potentially harmful sound
levels.
One of these sonars has been identified by the Navy as the cause of mass strandings
involving four species of whales in the Bahamas. Yet in federal court in Los Angeles,
in a case brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others, the Navy
is now arguing that its program for testing and developing this sonar, and many
others like it, is not subject to environmental scrutiny under the environmental
policy act.
If the law is weakened, however, this change would affect far more than the
Navy. It would affect coastal communities, commercial and recreational fishing,
beachgoers, scuba divers and anyone else who depends on the health of our ocean
resources for their livelihood, recreation or quality of life.
All of us depend on clean ocean waters full of species diversity and free from
oil spills, dangerous chemicals, harmful sounds and other pollution. That has
been an essential part of what Congress sought to accomplish when it enacted the
1969 law.
Never has protection of the oceans been more critical. With depleted fish populations,
endangered whales and sea turtles, growing ocean "dead zones," toxic algal blooms
and high-intensity sonar systems that can bombard ocean basins with sound, we
cannot afford to dispense with the protections of the National Environmental Policy
Act and the public accountability that it guarantees.
President Bush must reject the Navy's ill-conceived and unlawful invitation
to weaken the protection of our oceans.
Jean-Michel Cousteau is founder and president of Ocean
Futures Society in Santa Barbara. Joel R. Reynolds is a senior attorney with
the Natural Resources Defense Council
in Los Angeles.
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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