🚀 go-pugleaf

Gil Hardwick writes

>I am not at all certain anyone ever looked to the US for "leadership"

When the US passed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National
Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) in 1972, we were acting as
a world leader in environmental issues. These two acts -- the second of
which created the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) -- were imitated
around the globe. 

We can act as leaders again by enacting, in the next few years, equally 
pathmaking legislation for the protection of whole ecosystems, of biological
diversity at all levels, for significant limitations of human impacts
which degrade the environment in a multiplicity of ways, and (perhaps)
by taking some first steps towards a national population policy.

Not only must ESA be reauthorized in a significantly strengthened form,
but a new national institute for the mapping and study of biological
diversity should be founded and should play a significant role in new 
authority, created by legislation, for protection of biodiversity and whole
ecosystems. Positive steps, not merely for protection but for *restoration* 
of diversity should also receive legislative support. With the EPA elevated
(as Clinton has promised) to a cabinet-level Department of Environment, a 
modernized NEPA should incorporate biodiversity as a central concern of the 
new department, not as a mere footnote to a main mission of toxic dump cleanup. 
In particular, every EIS should include an assessment of impacts on 
biodiversity, and the expected impacts should be consistent with regional
and national conservation plans for diversity.

The US should also begin to take leadership in the carbon and CFC emissions
area by enacting meaningful carbon taxes (compensated, if necessary, for
regressivity by changes in other parts of the tax code) and by greatly
strengthening regulation of CFCs. Similar strengthening of regulation for
other pollutants is needed. 

A process akin to drug authorization for pharmaceutical companies should
be initiated for all new industrial substances which are potentially
released into the environment. Each such substance should be "guilty until
proven innocent" by standards akin to those employed for drugs. Monitoring 
regimes should be put in place for all substances with potential environmental
impact. The Department of Environment should have regulatory authority over 
all such substances, and should be able to halt or limit the manufacture of 
any substance having excessive impact. [Some of this is theoretically the 
case already, but we have to move from theory to real practice.]

The question of where the regulatory authority for the protection of 
biodiversity should be centered is a difficult one. The possibilities are
locating it in Interior, as an extension of the current ESA, in Agriculture,
or in EPA/Dept of Environment. Arguments can be made on all sides; my initial
prejudice is towards *not* putting it in the special-interest-ridden, resource-
extraction dominated culture of the Interior's services or in Forestry Service,
despite the fact that the biological expertise is currently there, but in EPA 
where it can grow up in a newer culturre deeply enmeshed with the concept of 
environmental impact assessmen -- I.e. in a agency whose central mission is
*regulation* rather than *extraction*. But I'd be very interested in hearing
arguments to the contrary.

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Alan McGowen