At this point, if you’re like us, you’re probably inundated by requests to file public comments for important environmental issues. Non-profit organizations have been joined by big, environmentally-minded corporations in their campaigns to ask their followers and customers to submit public comments on everything from National Monument designations to dam removal, all across the United States. It usually goes something like this: you text a phone number at a cool/inspiring event/film showing/athlete lecture, you get a link back to your phone, click on the link, fill out a form, hit submit, and voila – you’ve participated in the democratic process! Right?
Well, sort of. When you submit a public comment to a federal agency, you’re participating in a process designed to allow the American public (scientists, non-profit agencies, lobbying groups, and regular Americans) to provide additional information to the agency with regard to a proposed action that the agency is considering. This is a part of what’s known as “rulemaking procedure,” which is governed by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946. The APA requires all federal agencies to read, and respond to, every substantive public comment submitted during an open public comment period.
So, those public comments that nonprofits and corporations write, and that you submit, certainly can and do contain substantive points that the federal agency is required to respond to. However, since these comments are all raising essentially the same points, they are lumped together and responded to once. That is, in the eyes of the federal agency, hundreds of thousands of public comments are reduced to one. To put this another way––if one person at Patagonia submitted one comment, it would have the same procedural effect as one million people submitting it.
This isn’t to say that these public comment campaigns aren’t valuable. At the very least, they expose a large part of the American public to the details of important environmental issues and provide a lever for action to the masses. The vast numbers of submitted comments can also serve as an informal poll for or against a given action, which can be used as leverage by lobbying groups and other stewardship organisations. But despite how good it feels to submit a public comment, it’s not voting. The public comment process is designed to gather scientific information and assess community impacts of a given action, not to assess public opinion of a rulemaking action.
In order to stop or change the course of a rulemaking action, we need a body which is able to represent the needs and opinions of the American people in government. Fortunately, we have one: congress. Want to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Call your representatives and tell them to support a new bill protecting the Refuge from drilling. By all means, keep submitting public comments so we can use the huge number of comments as leverage when our representatives go to bat for the issue, but it’s going to take an act of Congress to stop drilling in the Refuge. If you are commenting, do your best to write a substantive public comment using your scientific, legal, or local expertise. But again — call your representatives. Cite the Yale Climate Opinion study which estimated 65% of Americans oppose drilling in the Refuge. Don’t let a provision pinned onto a tax reform bill undermine the representative nature of our government.
To submit a comment — the BLM has a direct comment form link here: https://eplanning.blm.gov/epl-front-office/eplanning/comments/commentSubmission.do?commentPeriodId=74027. The deadline is tomorrow — March 13th. You can also submit a comment through your favorite environmental advocacy group’s mass-comment campaign, but know that unless you customize the comment with real criticisms of the EIS, it will be ignored by the BLM.
Don’t know who your representatives are or how to contact them? Start here: https://contactingcongress.org/.