Harnessing the Power of Information to Protect Our Public Natural Resource Legacy

Abstract:     
Over the past century, Congress has enacted numerous laws that recognize the value of the vast store of natural resources under federal control. A remarkable number of these statutes explicitly embrace the goal of preserving public natural resources and the services and values they provide for future generations. Some also articulate a goal or mandate of sustainable use of public natural resources. All of these statutes reflect an awareness that those of us alive today will leave a legacy of public natural resources to the succeeding generation. They also implicitly embrace the idea that we should pay attention to what that legacy will look like – the quantity and quality of the public natural resources we leave them.

In practice, our laws have proven unequal to the lofty objectives of preserving a legacy of public natural resources for our children or achieving sustainable use of these resources. This paper considers whether the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), reinforced with a substantive standard of protection, would be the best tool for defining and protecting a public natural resource legacy. A review of the critiques of NEPA, and specifically those focused on how NEPA employs information, suggests that even with a substantive standard, NEPA would not necessarily provide the best vehicle for defining and protecting our resource legacy. In light of these critiques, this paper proposes an alternative model for a statute better tailored to defining and protecting our public natural resource legacy. The article briefly describes the contours of a statute that could be called a National Environmental Legacy Act and describes how such a statute could harness the power of information effectively to define and protect our public natural resource legacy.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 25

Keywords: National Environmental Policy Act, natural resources, information policy, natural resource legacy

Accepted Paper Series