On paper, the National Environmental Policy Act sounds like a good idea. Passed in 1970, the same year Earth Day was created, NEPA requires all federal agencies to conduct an “Environmental Impact Statement” for every action taken that might affect the environment.
So if the Department of Transportation wants to build a highway, it has to study not just how the construction of the road will affect the surrounding community, but also the exhaust from the cars.
Or if the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility company, wants to build a dam, it has to study how the construction of that dam will affect wildlife in the river.
What makes NEPA so powerful is that it empowers anybody to go to federal court and stop an infrastructure project if they can show a federal agency failed to properly study how the project would affect the surrounding environment, which is exactly what happened to TVA’s Tellico Dam project after a University of Tennessee professor discovered it would harm the habitat of the 2-inch snail darter fish.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices sided with the snail darter. It ended up taking a special act of Congress exempting the Tellico Dam from NEPA to get the project completed.
Fast forward 40 years and the Forest Service Northern Region wanted to do some wildfire prevention management on the Helena National Forest in Montana. Specifically, the project included 900 acres of fuel reduction and 220 acres of underburning.
Environmental activists opposed the plan, of course, causing more than 15,000 pages of environmental review and years of litigation in federal court.
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Worse, while the case was still being litigated in court, a wildfire destroyed 45% of the forest. In other words, NEPA was used to delay fire prevention and preserve a supposedly pristine forest just so a wildfire could come along and destroy the entire forest.
Our nation’s federal environmental laws are not only making it impossible for us to build the infrastructure we need to survive, they are also destroying the very natural places they were meant to protect.