***image1*** Enviros decry BLM proposal.
The term "categorical exclusion" is fairly innocuous. It's just another eight syllables' worth of flotsam in a sea of convoluted government terms and phrases. But those two words could significantly change how environmental protections are implemented in New Mexico.
That's because the Bureau of Land Management is in the process of amending its National Environmental Policy Act guidelines with "categorical exclusions" that, if approved, would expedite the approval process for activities like oil and gas exploration, livestock grazing and salvage logging.
In essence, activities covered under categorical exclusions have been deemed by the BLM to have no significant environmental impact-based on previous studies and analysis-and are not required to undergo environmental assessments or Environmental Impact Statements in order to be approved. Which means that projects like reissuing grazing permits and allowing oil, gas and geothermal resource exploration where no road construction is proposed could be subject to far less scrutiny than is currently required.
"They're basically saying that they're 99 percent certain that these types of activities do not need to generate any kind of NEPA process," says Nathan Newcomer, spokesman for the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. "That is very disingenuous because it's widely known that things like grazing and oil and gas exploration do have an impact on public lands."
According to Deb Rawhouser, the BLM group manager for Planning and Support Science, the proposed changes are intended to merely streamline the approval process and reduce paperwork, but environmentalists consider the move to be another salvo in the Bush administration's efforts to skirt environmental regulations.
"It's not OK to streamline just for the sake of streamlining," says Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Four Corners chapter of the Wilderness Society. "This is not supposed to be a paper-pushing exercise, this is supposed to be a hard look at the potential environmental damages of an activity."
The BLM announced on Jan. 25 its proposed changes to the Department of the Interior manual that guides the organization's implementation of NEPA regulations. The move opened up a required 30-day window for public comment (which ended on Feb. 24) after which the BLM considers comments before instituting the amendments with any revisions it deems necessary. The proposed amendments were posted in a document on the Federal Register, but Newcomer says the move fell short of the BLM's own requirements for public participation.
"The only way people would know about this is if they're reading the Federal Register every day," Newcomer says. "We're not arguing that BLM needs to do a whole Environmental Impact Statement in every situation but they at least need to go out there on the ground and give the public adequate notice."
According to Nicole Rosmarino, conservation director for the Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians environmental organization, that notice was never properly given.
"Regular citizens would have to be very attentive to be able to catch this kind of back-door undercutting of the law," Rosmarino says. "NEPA is not just about providing conservationists or businesses an opportunity to say something about what federal agencies are doing. It's about providing regular citizens that opportunity as well."
Included in the 11 categorical exclusions proposed by the BLM are provisions that would allow "geophysical exploration" for oil and gas interests, expedited processes for issuing grazing permits and expanded powers for salvage logging.
"It really strikes me as an abuse of the categorical exclusion provision," Rosmarino says. "It was intended for things like putting up outhouses in developed campgrounds or painting buildings. It wasn't intended for the kind of harm that things like geophysical exploration can cause."
NEPA has been at the center of pending lawsuits filed by the State of New Mexico and various conservation agencies against the BLM over proposed oil and gas drilling in the Otero Mesa region of southern New Mexico [Cover story, Feb. 1:
]. According to Newcomer, if the amendments are implemented, it could spell trouble for Otero Mesa and other areas in New Mexico, including the San Juan and Permian basins.
"If this gets passed, and it looks like there's a good chance it will," Newcomer says, "these areas are going to be opened up quicker and faster with less comment by the public and less insight by the agency."
Rawhouser asserts that there is, in fact, a system of checks and balances within the departmental manual in the form of 12 "extraordinary circumstances" that would override any categorical exclusion if a particular activity is determined to have an adverse environmental impact.
"If any of the cases regarding the extraordinary circumstances may take place then the categorical exclusion would not be used and we'd do an environmental assessment," Rawhouser says. "If you would think there would be-or analysis may show that there would be-an adverse impact on any species, for instance, we couldn't use a categorical exclusion."
But this also isn't the first time the geophysical exploration provision in particular has seen the light of day. According to Newcomer and Culver, the provision was excluded from the national energy bill that was passed last August by Congress only to be revived through the BLM.
"I don't think it looks particularly good for either the [oil and gas] industry or the agency," Culver says. "Right after this was removed from the energy bill, it mysteriously showed up in the next possible venue."
Not so mysterious to Newcomer, who says the proposed categorical exclusions are typical of the Bush administration's efforts to circumvent regulations in favor of special interests.
"This is just another bite out of the apple for the oil and gas industry," Newcomer says. "The BLM has a mandate from this administration to streamline the permitting process for oil and gas development and this is just one more tactic that they're using. These guys are really trying to break down the door on environmental regulations without giving the public, and really science, a fair opportunity to make recommendations on these policies."
Rawhouser says she is eager to sift through public comments before the BLM announces its final amendments to the NEPA guidelines in April or May. But if the proposed changes are implemented without significant changes, environmentalists fear "public participation" will be the next group added to the list of categorical exclusions.
