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The New Mexican | Editorial
Thursday 04 August 2005
As part of their ongoing assault on Ma Nature, congressional Republicans brought their road show to Rio Rancho this week. It featured weeping and wailing, to the tune of a thousand violins, over the grave injustices to the gas-and-oil industry committed in the name of NEPA - the National Environmental Policy Act.
That darn law, said the leader of a Capitol Hill task force, has led to lawsuits, stalled economic-development projects and (gasp) cost taxpayers money.
So, said Rep. Cathy McMorris of Washington, "The question before this task force is can we do better for our economy and for our environment?"
No, it isn't, said Southern Arizona's Rep. Raśl Grijalva; this effort is a pretext for a broader attack on NEPA and other environmental laws.
His fellow Democrat, Rep. Tom Udall of Northern New Mexico, was on hand to defend NEPA as a shield - against a unwieldy federal bureaucracies, forcing them to stop and listen to the advice of "on-the-ground, private Americans."
That's the kind of statesmanlike reasoning and bipartisan appeal his dad, former congressman and interior secretary Stewart Udall, and his uncle, the late Rep. Morris Udall, used to advance the cause of environmentalism back when boosterism flourished - and many environmentalists vented their frustration with eco-raids and the like. It's encouraging to hear those elder voices echoed by our community's congressman.
NEPA, he noted, "mandates only that federal agencies consider the possibility that they might be wrong or too narrowly focused before they charge ahead with plans that could have long-term, unintended consequences."
The Mountain West, he said, is the scene of all kinds of examples where NEPA has worked to the benefit of the people who live and work in this region.
He cited an Environmental Impact Statement, that bane of Republican existence, completed by Los Alamos in 1999 - a year before the Cerro Grande Fire destroyed some of our atomic city.
The Department of Energy, which runs the town, hadn't contemplated the danger of wildfire. But citizens who showed up at a NEPA-required hearing weren't quite so blithe. As a result, the final EIS included a scenario closely predicting what happened the following spring - and the severity of the fire's toll, bad as it was, was reduced.
All over the West, concerned citizens have spoken their minds about industry's environmental impacts on their communities and surrounding regions. Sometimes, they've been heard in time to avert disaster.
But before Republican Richard Nixon signed NEPA in 1970, community concerns went largely ignored. Udall cited the case of the radioactive tailings pile alongside the Colorado River near Moab, Utah - a leftover from the 1950s' uranium boom in that part of the Four Corners.
NEPA is riding to a belated rescue, proving influential in a Department of Energy plan to move the tailings away from that river, the main drinking supply for large parts of Arizona, Nevada, California, Baja California and Sonora.
NEPA's greatest value, perhaps, lies in demanding a long, last look before doing environmental damage that all too often can't be undone.
Frustrating as that might be for the drill-now, worry-later lobby champing at the bit to pump finite supplies of petroleum into America's SUVs and China's Buicks, it's a caution our country needs.
Sometimes it comes with bureaucratic silliness - but it beats pillaging for profit, and Republicans seeking to torpedo NEPA should realize that many of their fellow Republicans share with Democrats a concern for the environment.
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