The US Environmental Protoection Agency (EPA) is excused from complying with Nat

Question

The US Environmental Protoection Agency (EPA) is excused from complying with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Why do you think the Nationa Park Service or the US Forest Service has not been granted the same NEPA exemption as EPA?

What do you think of the instituitional incentives of the NEPA process? Does it make sense, for example, for action regencies to write the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the very actions they are proposing? On Canada, by contrast, the EIS process is directed by an independent agency with no interest in whether the proposed action goes forward or not.

Explanation / Answer

United States Environmental Protection Agency: The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA or sometimes U.S. EPA) is an agency of the federal government of the United States which was created for the purpose of protecting human health and the environment by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress.

The mission of EPA is to ensure that:

EPA is required to comply with the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for it’s:

EPA is exempt from NEPA under the following statutes:

In addition, courts have consistently recognized that certain EPA procedures or environmental reviews under enabling legislation are functionally equivalent to the NEPA process and thus exempt from the procedural requirements of NEPA. The purpose of the functional equivalence exemption is avoidance of repetitious analysis in a decision making process that functions in an equivalent way to the NEPA process.

National Park Service or the US Forest Service: It is a multi-faceted agency that manages and protects 154 national forests and 20 grasslands in 43 states and Puerto Rico. The agency’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. Their plans and plan revisions can run into many hundreds of pages and are very complex. Plan amendments can be simple or complex. The Forest Service has to comply with NEPA in its planning for the national forests.

Critics have argued that NEPA analysis is important because forest plans make critically important choices about overall management direction and environmental safeguards, and that categorically excluding forest plans from NEPA will deprive citizens of their right to understand and comment knowledgeably on forest plan alternatives and their environmental consequences. Hence, it is not been granted the same NEPA exemption as EPA.

An environmental impact statement (EIS), under United States environmental law, is a document required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for certain actions "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment".

By requiring agencies to complete an EIS, the act encourages them to consider the environmental costs of a project and introduces new information into the decision-making process. The NEPA has increased the influence of environmental analysts and agencies in the federal government by increasing their involvement in the development process. This feature introduces scientific procedures into the political process. Hence, it make complete sense to write the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the very actions proposed by the agencies.

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