On his book The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975
Cover Interview of February 13, 2019
A close-up
I think the most interesting and surprising chapter in the
book is the one on the role of public disclosure in environmental legislation.
What is detailed, especially on pp. 205-219, indicates that the key sponsors of
the key law, the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, were interested
exclusively in improving environmental protection, not in transparency of any
sort. The key provision of the law was the requirement that any federal agency
proposing actions that might have adverse effects on the environment must
produce a report assessing the environmental impact that the proposed action
might have, how likely the bad effects could be, and what measures, if any,
could mitigate the harm.
Most important, these environmental impact statements had to
be issued before agencies began to execute their proposed plans. They had to be
made public in a timely matter. Private citizens and interest groups could then
make their voices heard in the halls of executive agencies.
Part of what is so fascinating to me about this is that the
provision in the law that environmental impact assessments be made public –
rather than just shared among government agencies as the bill’s sponsors
originally proposed – seems to have been an afterthought. And, indeed, not
until early judicial interpretations of the law began to appear, a year after
the law took effect, did Congress realize that the publicness of the whole
procedure would give rise to lawsuits – lots of them! – against the government
on behalf of the environment. Transparency profoundly transformed the
battlefield over environmental protection, and at a moment when general public
interest in environmental issues was just beginning to develop.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I think the most interesting and surprising chapter in the book is the one on the role of public disclosure in environmental legislation. What is detailed, especially on pp. 205-219, indicates that the key sponsors of the key law, the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, were interested exclusively in improving environmental protection, not in transparency of any sort. The key provision of the law was the requirement that any federal agency proposing actions that might have adverse effects on the environment must produce a report assessing the environmental impact that the proposed action might have, how likely the bad effects could be, and what measures, if any, could mitigate the harm.
Most important, these environmental impact statements had to be issued before agencies began to execute their proposed plans. They had to be made public in a timely matter. Private citizens and interest groups could then make their voices heard in the halls of executive agencies.
Part of what is so fascinating to me about this is that the provision in the law that environmental impact assessments be made public – rather than just shared among government agencies as the bill’s sponsors originally proposed – seems to have been an afterthought. And, indeed, not until early judicial interpretations of the law began to appear, a year after the law took effect, did Congress realize that the publicness of the whole procedure would give rise to lawsuits – lots of them! – against the government on behalf of the environment. Transparency profoundly transformed the battlefield over environmental protection, and at a moment when general public interest in environmental issues was just beginning to develop.