On March 9, the Warren County-based Friends of Allegheny Wilderness submitted comments to the federal Council on Environmental Quality on proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy Act project environmental review procedures it considers harmful.

The FAW letter was developed with the help of the University of Pittsburgh's Environmental Law Clinic.

NEPA has stood as a vital tool in our democracy, and bulwark against environmental threats for more than 50 years. It has been rightly lauded as “the Ten Commandments of environmental policy.”

To date, more than 100 nations around the world have enacted national environmental project review policies modeled after NEPA.

FAW strongly opposes any regulatory changes that would weaken its implementation, or make it easier to subvert. The CEQ’s proposed changes would introduce major barriers to public participation, circumvent rigorous scientific analysis, and purposefully deemphasize the role of NEPA as a means to protect America’s natural resources, as well as public health.

Specifically, FAW’s opposition includes, but is not limited to:

-- Loopholes that could allow logging, drilling, road-building and other proposals on federal public lands in order to avoid complying with NEPA altogether.

-- Provisions that would hand over control to extractive and other industries, and in essence ensure that no matter what everything always leads to approval of industry proposals.

-- Provisions that encourage the bare minimum level of review or no review at all.

-- Loopholes that would allow agencies to shirk their obligations to consider indirect or cumulative environmental impacts.

-- Needless barriers to public participation and judicial review.

“We could not have hoped to have recently stopped a very bad mountain biking proposal for Pennsylvania's largest inventoried roadless area-- the proposed Tracy Ridge Wilderness Area in the Allegheny National Forest-- without the NEPA process being intact and in place. And that's only one example,” said FAW executive director Kirk Johnson.

“On behalf of our wilderness advocacy organization, our board of directors, and our enormous and rapidly growing support network all over the four-county Allegheny National Forest region, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, throughout West Virginia, Ohio, New York, and beyond, we strongly urge the CEQ to fundamentally reevaluate their proposed radical change in direction for NEPA, outlined in detail in our comment letter,” concluded Johnson.

Click Here for a copy of the letter.

For more background on this issue, visit The Wilderness Society NEPA Rollback webpage.

Visit the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness website to learn more about programs, initiatives, upcoming events and how to get involved.

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[Posted: March 11, 2020]

3/16/2020