Environmental policy came from the side of the angels

Lynton Caldwell, NEPA and the birth of Environmental Impact Assessment

By Peter Burnett

When did the age of modern environmental policy begin? Some claim it kicked off with the publication of Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report) in 1987. This landmark document defined the notion of ‘sustainable development’ and stressed the need for integrating economic, social and environmental approaches. Others suggest 1972 is more appropriate as it was the year of the Stockholm Conference and the establishment of Environment departments in many countries around the world.

But I’m going to suggest to you that 1969 and drafting of the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is really when environmental policy began, and it owes much to a visionary political scientist named Professor Lynton Caldwell. And it’s not just that Caldwell was astute enough to understand what effective environmental policy needed, he was also canny enough to know when to make his pitch.

NEPA is famous for introducing the world to the concept of environmental impact assessment (EIA), a mechanism now used in almost every country. But NEPA stands for so much more.

Interdisciplinarity

Its antecedents lie in Caldwell’s earlier work. In 1963 he published an article entitled ‘Environment: A New Focus for Public Policy?’ 1963! That’s only a year after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book often regarded as having launched the modern environment movement.

In his article, Caldwell argues for, and thus invents, ‘environmental policy’. He calls for, among other things, an interdisciplinary approach to this new creature. Caldwell was a Professor of Government at Indiana University and he practised what he preached. He embarked on a course of interdisciplinary training and started hanging around with ecologists. (In 1963, ecology was still a relatively small discipline.) These days, interdisciplinarity is a much lauded goal (if little practiced) but back then it was a very brave undertaking.

In 1964 Caldwell began to operationalise his ideas by presenting them to a workshop for economic planners. Brave again. Not surprisingly, most of them were, as Caldwell later reminisced, ‘baffled’ by his argument and most of them rejected it as irrelevant. That’s except for one now world famous economist, Abraham Maslow (of ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ fame). Maslow understood what Caldwell was advocating. He later offered Caldwell constructive suggestions, declaring Caldwell to be ‘on the side of the angels’.

The time was ripe

By the late 1960s a wave of environmental concern was sweeping the Western World, particularly in America. Some major environmental disasters contributed to this. In 1969 and in America alone, the Santa Barbara oil spill despoiled the California coastline while on the other side of the country the Cuyahoga River was so polluted it actually caught fire.

Various members of Congress responded by proposing environmental laws. Public opinion was galvanised.

Against this backdrop, one of the leading proponents of reform in Congress, Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, hired Caldwell to help with Jackson’s environmental Bill. Initially, Caldwell wrote a report for a Congressional committee on what a national environmental policy might be.

He later wrote that he anticipated the need for ‘action forcing provisions such as impact statements’ to support a national policy statement. But Caldwell held back as he suspected Senator Jackson ‘did not appear ready to endorse so novel and intrusive a proposition’.

Later, however, in appearing before the committee, Caldwell was able to make his arguments for his action forcing provisions and they were then included in the compromise bill. That bill became the NEPA. Caldwell had bided his time and ‘threw his pebble’ (to borrow a term from one of our earlier blogs) when he perceived it would have maximum impact.

A remarkable piece of legislation

NEPA itself is a remarkable piece of legislation. Its statement of environmental policy goals is visionary. It talks about the need for a global approach three years before the world first met to talk about a global approach, at the UN Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm in 1972.

The legislation talks about each generation being trustees of the environment for future generations and sharing life’s amenities – this was 18 years before the Brundtland Report proposed the concepts of sustainable development and intergenerational equity.

It refers to maintaining the diversity if life just 12 months after Dasmann first wrote of biological diversity and 20 years before Lovejoy coined the term ‘biodiversity’.

And NEPA required the preparation of state of the environment reports (as ‘environmental quality reports’), 10 years before the OECD produced one and called on its members to do likewise. NEPA sought to drive policy integration 10 years before the OECD began to promote the same concept.

Ahead of its time?

Unfortunately most of the enormous potential of NEPA was not realised. True, it brought environmental impact assessment, EIA, to the world. But Caldwell, Jackson and the others behind NEPA had a much bigger vision than EIA.

If NEPA had been applied as an ordinary reading of its words would suggest, all US government agencies would have brought their decisions in line with a long-term policy vision directed to avoiding environmental degradation, and these decisions would have been supported by comprehensive information and research facilitated by a new institution, the Council of Environmental Quality. These things did not happen because government agencies were antagonistic and the US Supreme Court read the law down to a set of procedural requirements.

Caldwell’s vision and achievements, which would have been much greater if others had not been working against them, are not widely known. And to top it off, he was a registered Republican voter, working for a Democrat: if only environment was the bipartisan issue today that it was then.

Image: Lynton Caldwell enjoying the great outdoors. Indiana University Archives