Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act

7. Early Challenges to NEPA: Trying for National Land-Use Policy

199 At the end of seven years of at first lonely but always persistent efforts to spread his ideas beyond his own academic field and maketheenvironmentafocusofinnovativepolicyandinterdisciplinary study, Caldwell at last felt vindicated. With the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act he could now say that all his hard work and the criticism he had endured had been worthwhile. The final version of theact,withmanyofitsconceptsadaptedfromhismajorarticlesandhis report A National Policy for the Environment, artfully reworked over time by William Van Ness and Dan Dreyfus and skillfully negotiated to passagebySenatorHenryJackson ,representedmanyofthethoughtshehad been building upon since that now long ago afternoon in Hong Kong. On January 1, 1970, the day that Richard Nixon signed NEPA into law, Caldwell flew with Helen and Elaine to Switzerland. Once home again he noted in his trip report that a grant from the Conservation Foundation had enabled him to devote much of his long sabbatical to “data collection, outlining and some initial writing [for] a book on international environmental protection, with particular reference to the [upcoming] United Nations’ Conference on the Human Environment. . . . [It] will be entitled In Defense of Earth. . . . In connection with this work I have been asked to chair a special study panel of the National Academy of Sciences to prepare recommendations for the U.S. Department of State preparatory to the 1972 Stockholm Conference.”1 Caldwell also soon caught up on the events that had resulted in the passageofNEPA,learningfromVanNessandDreyfusthatthesigningof whatwouldinthefuturebehailedbyenvironmentalgroupsas“historic” Early Challenges to NEPA: Trying for National Land-Use Policy seven 200 Lynton Keith Caldwell and “monumental” environmental legislation had in actual fact been something of a disappointment. Certainly, Nixon had announced to the reporters who had gathered at his San Clemente, California, home during the New Year’s holiday: “It is particularly fitting that my first official act of this new decade is to approve the National Environmental Policy Act. . . . I have become convinced that the nineteen-seventies absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment,” but Dreyfus later noted that the event had not been “one of those well-publicized Washington signings with lots of handshakes and a handing out of pens and so forth afterwards. The president signed the document and then made a televised speech in which he hardly mentioned Jackson’s name (probably to obscure the Democratic origins of NEPA) and somehow managed to take most of the credit.”2 Caldwellwasnotsurprisedbythisnews.NEPA hadpresentedNixon with a windfall opportunity to regain some popularity by portraying himself as an environmental champion at a time when intensifying public anger over the war in Vietnam had begun to overshadow concern about environmental degradation. As he wrote later, “The President’s unclear motives in [first] opposing the Jackson bill are consistent with the ambiguous and unpredictable course taken by his administration on environmental issues, but . . . following its passage in Congress, the PresidentwasabletoembracetheNationalEnvironmentalPolicyActas ifithadbeenhisown.”3Indeed,asJ.BrooksFlippenconfirms,“Although somewhatdisingenuousabouthismotives,Nixonwascorrectthat NEPA stood as a cornerstone for future environmental policy. Failing along with much of the public [and Congress also, as Caldwell would often point out later] to appreciate the true significance of the law–its impact statement provision–Nixon praised its forceful statement of environmental policy and its creation of [the] CEQ.”4 Despite the generally positive media reaction to the signing of what many reporters misleadingly referred to as new “antipollution” policy (even Newsweek referred to NEPA as “the first in what is expected to be a seriesofAdministrationmovesonpollution”),Caldwellwasquiteaware that federal agencies and business alike would have a far less friendly reaction to the statute.5 As Ronald Shelton notes, “At the same time Early Challenges to NEPA 201 that strategies were being developed for implementing NEPA, strategies also were being devised to counter [its] intent and requirements. NEPA had not signified a conversion in the attitudes of traditional resource ‘exploiters’ or of those committed to growth and progress in its various forms....Thesamebattleswouldhavetobefought;thesameadversaries would be present.”6 Now that NEPA had become law, Caldwell presumed that his involvement had come to an end. But on January 19, the first thing to catch his eye as he entered his office was a Christian Science Monitor article on which his secretary had written: “Welcome Home, Professor Caldwell! Mr. Nixon Wants YOU!” In this way, Caldwell learned that as “an authority on organizing government to cope with environmental problems” he was being considered...