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

14. The Grand Old Man of Environmental Policy

377 On April 9, 1993, Inside EPA announced that on April 2 the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee had passed S. 171, To Establish a Department of Environmental Protection, and that it would now go to the full floor.1 Despite the arguments Caldwell and others had made on behalf of the CEQ during the April 1 hearing, language to transfer responsibilities from the CEQ to the EPA remained in the bill, and plans moved ahead to replace the CEQ with a staff-level Office of Environmental Policy. On May 5 the bill easily passed the Senate. It now rested with the House to pass its own version of the legislation. In the meantime, however , environmental groups had increasingly backed away from their initial support of the Clinton/Gore proposals. Moreover, as significant differences began to emerge between the House and Senate over the elevation of the EPA to cabinet status and the redistribution of CEQ functions, any expectations the White House may have entertained of achieving quick approval of its proposals now began to fade.2 “Atlastwearegettingsomewherewithourcampaigntosave NEPA!” Patti Pride and Bob Smythe of the Center for Marine Conservation, who now headed what had become a widespread campaign on behalf of retaining the CEQ , wrote on June 7 in a memo to all Friends of NEPA, including Caldwell and William Van Ness, now at a law practice based in Washington, D.C.3 On June 9 Van Ness and Grenville Garside wrote to Representative John Dingell to remind him of their involvement, twenty-three years earlier, in realizing the passage of NEPA and to ask The Grand Old Man of Environmental Policy fourteen 378 Lynton Keith Caldwell himtoexerthisinfluenceinCongresstowardretainingthestatuteintact and unchanged. NEPA and CEQ have shown the strength and resiliency to survive both public controversy and Presidential neglect. Today, however, NEPA faces the first real threat to its continued viability. . . . Of the four major sponsors of NEPA . . . three no longer serve in Congress: Senator Jackson is deceased. Senator Muskie and Congressman Udall are retired. . . . You alone provide the link, the sole institutional memory, for making informed judgments about the purpose of Congress in the late 1960s in enacting NEPA. . . . Mr. Chairman, it is not too late to avert action which we believe will undermine our nation’s most important environmental statute.4 A few days later, Dingell replied: “I appreciate and welcome your timely letter....WhileIcanreluctantlysupportterminationoftheCEQ andthe ending of CEQ’s annual report, I cannot support a transfer of the CEQ’s statutory functions to an agency to which NEPA applies, directly or indirectly , regardless of whether that agency is a cabinet-level department. . . . I believe that most environmental groups [now] share the views you express. . . . It is my hope that we can convince the Administration that . . . CEQ not be abolished.”5 As Inside EPA reported on June 25, Dingell had forwarded the letter by Van Ness and Garside to Al Gore with a letter of his own in which he expressed his concerns about transferring NEPA functions to the EPA andreplacingtheCEQ withanOfficeofEnvironmentalPolicythatcould easily be abolished in the future since it lacked a congressional mandate. “Three influential House committee chairmen are working to keep the endangered Council on Environmental Quality alive for another year,” Greenwire then noted on June 30. “[Meanwhile,] Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce committee and one of the original authors of NEPA, wrote VP Al Gore on 6/17 to express ‘concern and frustration.’”6 Three months later, the Associated Press reported on September 17: “UnderpressurefromCongress,theClintonadministrationisreconsideringitsplantoabolishaWhiteHouseOfficethatmonitorsfederalagen cies ’compliancewithenvironmentallaw.”“Thegoodnews,”BobSmythe wrote to Friends of NEPA the same day, “is that the White House, in the person of Gore’s chief of staff, Jack Quinn, appears ready to concede that NEPA oversight should be retained (and with a statutory basis) by the The Grand Old Man of Environmental Policy 379 Executive Office of the President . . . [but] they maintain that only three permanent positions can be provided.”7 “To the dismay of some environmentalists,” the New York Times reported on September 26, the first agency to wither away as the Clinton Administration reorganizes the Federal government may be their staunch ally, the White House Council on Environmental Quality. . . . Administration officials said the move was part of Vice President Al Gore’s effort to streamline the Federal government. This leaves Mr. Gore in an awkward position since he has also positioned himself as the Administration’s leading environmentalist. . . . But the White...