Coming to Grips with Project-Level NEPA as a Barrier to Sustainability, and Ideas for the Future

摘要

Despite the broadly-based effort for expanding sustainable outcomes on the transportation and infrastructure front, long established regulations and "ways" often run contrary to the desired outcome. One of the biggest offenders in this category is, surprisingly, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, or NEPA: not as it was written in law, but how it has come to be promulgated, administered and practiced, especially at the project level. On projects large and small, well-intended "environmental clearance processes" so firmly in place and having their root in NEPA are often significant hindrances to moving the sustainability success meter, and can skip right past untapped empowering opportunities that would provide significant net sustainability benefit. It is curious how closely related NEPA and sustainability are related philosophically and how far apart they often exist in practice This paper speaks to how NEPA and all its subcategories (all the way down to the "permit" level), intended to protect and enhance the environment, often are applied unknowingly to the contrary, and makes suggestions about what might be done to make the NEPA a better performer on the sustainability front.