Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the Ok, so I haven't posted anything on AGU yet. The realclimate guys did a better job than I of anticipating how draining this meeting is and how it affects blogging, although considering that other conferences have stoked a avalanche of blogging from me (check the April archives), I expected more. The other reason is that I have in progress a very long and very complicated post that came out of multiple conversations yesterday (and today) with numerous climate scientists and it's going to be pretty controversial. I've worked and reworked it a bunch and it's just not finishing itself, but hopefully tonight I can get it done and post it.
In the meantime, something caught my eye out of the press officer of the Democrat side of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. I post this having told you its origins, so you know off the bat that it is partisan (and if you're a close reader you know that I am very political and yet [feel] very non-partisan), but it's worth reading:
Apparently eager to avoid Congressional and public scrutiny, the U.S. Forest Service has continued its holiday tradition of trying to bury bad news. Yesterday, just hours after Congress adjourned, the USFS issued a final rule that will eliminate environmental analyses and the public's right to participate in forest management planning under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).Under NEPA, public involvement and environmental analyses are required whenever the Forest Service wants to change the way it manages a forest - a process that occurs for each U.S. Forest every 15 years. However, under the rule announced yesterday, any update (or significant change) to those individual forest plans would be exempt from NEPA review.
Public participation is an absolute must for the health of a functioning democracy. For obvious reasons, many politicians and other non-elected policy makers would like to be able to avoid any and all public scrutiny because actually having to answer to the public decreases their power. We see this see-saw battle between openness and obfuscation constantly, and it represents one of the most important dynamics in our democracy. This issue is every much as important as the voting access issues we have been discussing for the past six years. Democracy does not start and end with the major every-two-year voting days, it starts and ends with the everyday interactions between we the citizens and our government. We forget that, or let ourselves overlook that, at our peril.
Comments
# 1 | Andrew Alden | December 15, 2006 12:18 AM
Kevin, nice to meet you yesterday, and once again kudos for your poster on bringing some sense to the way we set policy regarding disasters.
The Forest Service isn't the only one burying bad news; the USGS, of all people, has imposed new review rules for its scientists that has some of them squawking. But today Al Gore gave huge publicity to the reaction of Jim Estes, down at Santa Cruz, who felt the cold breath of Big Brother. Personally, I think he came off as whiny and overstated. For me it was just another lesson in being careful with your mouth in front of reporters. Relevant links on my home page.
# 2 | Matt | December 15, 2006 1:13 PM
Good post - public participation in and public scrutiny of policy decisions is essential. We're not talking about direct democracy (i.e. the public, often misinformed or uninformed, voting directly on particular propositions) but simply about the transparency of government. The Forest Service, for example, isn't putting each and every one of it's policies up for a direct public vote. But the public should be able to review these policies and have a way to make their views known to the elected officials and civil servants responsible for them.