That Petition

I understand that so far I’ve under 100 signatures on my petition to President Obama about reforming environmental impact assessment. Not surprising, I suppose, since it’s a fairly esoteric topic and many of those interested in it are also self-interested in maintaining the status quo. I’ve given the effort till March 1, at which point I’ll decide whether to deliver it or forget it.

So please, if you’re inclined to sign it, do so, and please distribute it to others who may do so. Here again is the text of the petition and the URL where it can be signed.

"Please seek amendments to the National Environmental Policy Act, or issue an Executive Order, to require honest, objective impact assessment that respectfully involves and is responsive to the public, and that happens BEFORE decisions are made to promote projects."

Sign at: http://signon.org/sign/president-obama-reform?source=c.fwd&r_by=408029

One gratifying thing is that a number of Indian tribes and tribal members are signing it, even though it’s not explicitly worded to address tribal concerns. I think tribes recognize that rotten, self-serving EIA is causing unnecessary destruction of environments important to them, and short-circuiting the respectful consultation the President Obama and Secretary Salazar keep promising. I hope more tribes and tribal members will sign on, and I very much hope others will, too. Wasting time and money on EIA that just whitewashes proposed projects, fails to consider feasible alternatives, and shuts the public out of decision-making serves no one.  In the long run it doesn't help even those who do whitewash EIA, because it erodes the value of such work to the public, and thus undercuts support for even bothering to do it.

I’ve heard from a few in the EIA community who think I’m nuts for tilting at this windmill, and some who think I should instead be working quietly behind the scenes to help the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) improve things from the inside. I’m all for working quietly behind the scenes, and believe it or not have done so fairly effectively from time to time. But I’ve seen no evidence that CEQ or anyone else in this administration is interested in getting help, or for that matter that they even recognize the existence of the problem. Yet the problem seems so obvious; here’s a reminder:

1. Project proponents prevail upon the political system to support particular projects or programs with little or no consideration for their potential environmental impacts.

2. The proponents are then tasked with finding out what those impacts will be, and reporting them to agencies that often have been (or think they’ve been) given their marching orders to “streamline” review.

3. The proponents hire (and hence can fire) the EIA firms that do the studies.

4. The EIA firms give their clients good report cards (how could they do otherwise?), and carefully avoid considering alternatives to the projects they review.

5. The public, and such very interested parties as Indian tribes, are effectively shut out of the process; there may be public hearings and opportunities to review draft reports, but not to influence decision making through serious, good-faith negotiation. Even with tribes – with whom agencies are required by multiple laws to consult – “consultation” is often only a pro-forma matter that wastes time and patience, accomplishing nothing but to wear people down until they acquiesce in disgust.

What should be done? Well, the following is from a letter I sent on December 18 of last year to the president’s senior policy advisor on Native American Affairs and to the Chair of CEQ. Having outlined the problem, and illustrated it with a specific case, I suggested that action be taken to reform the administration’s approach to EIA and tribal consultation, saying:

“Such an approach might have the following elements:

1. Honestly establish what the environmental impacts of proposed actions – including but not limited to “green” projects – are likely to be before supporting and promoting them, and before telling the federal establishment to fast-track their implementation;

2. In the course of such impact assessment, honestly consider a reasonable range of alternative ways to achieve the public purposes of such actions;

3. Do not allow agencies to rely on data on and analyses of impacts and alternatives prepared by project proponents unless they have been thoroughly vetted to eliminate bias;

4. Actually consult with tribes, as well as with other stakeholders, about whether and how to proceed with projects, which alternatives to pursue, and how to mitigate adverse effects; and

5. Don’t lie.”

Yes, that seems pretty simple. Unsurprisingly, my letter has gone unanswered.

Playing the "Plus" in CRM Plus: Why Vote Democratic

I called this blog "CRM Plus" to give myself the space to write about things other than "cultural resource management," but haven't heretofore taken advantage of that flexibility. Now I will. I recently posted a note on Facebook asking anyone who was even thinking of voting Republican in the forthcoming election to give me the chance to talk them out of it. Only one person did so; I'll not reveal his or her identity; suffice to say that he or she is a law enforcement professional. Below, for whatever interest it may have for any of my faithful (or other) readers, is what I sent him or her.

Since I did my Facebook posting inviting anyone thinking of voting Republican to give me a chance to talk them out of it, and you (and only you) took me up on it, I guess the ball’s in my court and I’d better put up. Let’s see…..

Let’s start with something you and I discussed not long ago – immigration. You told me a story about stopping a vanload of obvious illegal immigrants en route to a distribution point, and being unable to do anything about it because dealing with them was reserved to the feds. That convinced me that there was justification in Arizona’s attempt to empower/require its police force to deal with illegals. Whether it’s constitutional for the state to do so is another matter, but I think we agree that something needs to be done, and that the federal government hasn’t yet done much. OK; I’ll also volunteer that I think one of the few smart things G.W. Bush proposed as president was an immigration policy including a guest worker program. But the Republicans never supported that, and now can’t propose anything but higher walls and more firepower along the border. That’s not going to do the job; the Romans and the Chinese and the French all learned that walls and troops along their borders don’t stop folks who really want to get in. We ought to profit from their education.

So what would work? I think it’s painfully obvious. Why are people risking and often losing their lives crossing the deserts to work here? Two related reasons. First, there are too many of them in their home countries – too many mouths to feed. Second, there aren’t enough jobs at home to make it feasible to feed everybody. How to fix this? Support population control and economic development in the countries from which illegal immigrants come. Do Democrats, on the whole, support such things? Yes. Do Republicans do so? Hell no; Republicans consistently want to cut foreign aid and prohibit our aid agencies from even talking to people about family planning.

Before you even say it, I know that promoting economic development and family planning in other countries isn’t going to solve the illegal immigration problem quickly; it’s a long-term strategy. In the meantime we need things like guest worker programs and probably amnesty for people already here, and some way for police forces not to have their hands tied in dealing with illegal immigrants. But those are all band-aids. We ought to be looking for long-term solutions as well as doing the best short-term fixes we can. At least some Democrats are willing to consider such things; Republicans have forbidden themselves even to contemplate them.

Let’s talk about drugs. Here again I think there are some obvious ways to bring drug abuse and drug-related crime under control. We ought to learn the lesson of Prohibition; decriminalize the use of at least the common “recreational” drugs, regulate their use the way we regulate the use of alcohol, and tax it. Undercut the cartels, stop stuffing the jails with relatively inoffensive “criminals,” bring in some revenue. Is this a perfect solution? Of course not, but it makes a whole lot more sense than the utterly mad arrangement we have now. Is it at least possible that Democrats would entertain such ideas? Yes. Republicans? Individual Republicans, sure, but as a body? Nope; the only thing the Republican Party can offer is to build more jails, contract with questionable private firms to run them, and lock lots more people up.

Then there’s the economy. It wasn’t really that long ago that the federal budget was showing a surplus, and the national debt was shrinking. That was an achievement of the Clinton administration, fighting back from years of tax cuts for the rich during the Reagan and Bush Senior years. Eight years of Bush Junior, more tax cuts, profligate spending, and blind deregulation of Wall Street, and the Obama administration comes in faced by a staggering debt, two wars to fight, and a meltdown of the stock market, housing market, and practically every other market around. They’ve had less than two years to fix all this and are making progress. Have they done everything right? Certainly not; whoever does? But they’ve tried, and they’ve had some success. What have the Republicans done? Sniped, whined, and tried – effectively, it sadly appears – to convince the electorate that our economic distress is Obama’s problem, that things would be better if we just cut upper-tier taxes some more.

How about health care? Is there some reason the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. health care system #37 in the world (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4)? Other than that they’re all internationalist commies? Maybe there’s a problem? Maybe we should try to fix it? Again, the bill passed last year may not be the best approach in the world (I don’t think it was; I’d like to see single-payer), but it was what could be done, an exercise of the art of the possible. What would the Republicans prefer? Maybe a nice comfortable slip to number 47, as long as the upper crust can afford privileged treatment.

I could go on and on, but let me wind up with a subject close to my heart – the environment, impact assessment, and regulation. I’m frankly mad as hell at the way the Obama administration has dealt with the environment. They’ve gotten railroaded into backing every cockamamie “green energy” scheme that’s come along, and as a result are bending the environmental impact assessment laws into pretzels to expedite putting up solar fields and wind farms – in the process screwing over some of the most pristine environments on the continent. And even when confronted with the Deepwater Horizon disaster they couldn’t be moved to pursue ways to fix the obvious flaws in the impact assessment and regulatory regime in anything like a systematic way. They’ve renamed agencies and set up study commissions instead. But we’ve hardly seen the Republicans doing better – remember the notion that we should all apologize to BP for being so mean to them?

OK, enough. I think it’s a no-brainer; the Democrats are far, far from perfect, but the Republicans, to be charitable, are nuts. If they’re not nuts, there’s nothing I can say about them that wouldn’t be libelous.