Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article, written on NEPA's 20th anniversay, maintains that the statute's constitution-like language conveyed the hope of a nation that the federal government could be transformed from an environmental degrader to an environmental preserver and restorer. In retrospect, its optimism seems quite unrealistic. Nevertheless, its call for productive harmony between man and nature, elimination of damage to the biosphere, and non-degradation of environmental quality sounds themes that remain relevant. By its 20th birthday, the Supreme Court had made clear that NEPA was essentially procedural, reducing it to a public disclosure statute without substantative content. This produced fewer NEPA injunctions against agency action, fewer court suits, and more agency authority to pursue environmentally objectional projects. NEPA in effect had become one part information disclosure, one part public participation, and eight parts administrative discretion. This paper overviewed a symposium on NEPA, discussing the results of some fourteen articles on NEPA, including the statute's judicial history, a call for substantive review, a defense of judicial deference, the task of enforcing agency promises, the myth of mitigation, and war stories from public land mining, the national forests, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the state of Washington, and Canada. The paper also suggested a number of NEPA possible reforms within federal agencies, through changes to the Council on Environmental Quality's regulations, and statutory amendments. Lead agency reforms included producing improved biological science in environmental impact statements (EISs), monitoring agency predictions, and greater decision-making authority for those writing NEPA documents. Proposed revisons to the CEQ regulations included use of briefing-style EISs, post-decisional monitoring in the form of compliace reports, a revised definition of mitigation, more detail on Environmental Assessments, and greater CEQ oversight of agency NEPA compliance. Finally, suggested statutory changes included a 1989 amendment that passed the House of Representative which would have required agencies to consider the effects of their actions on areas outside the U.S. (particularly in terms of global climate change), require mitigation measures in EISs, and direct CEQ to evaluate the accuracy of agency predictions in EISs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.019 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".