The California Environmental Quality Act: A Regulatory Decree That Combats Environmental Degradation

The California Environmental Quality Act: A Regulatory Decree that Combats Environmental Degradation

Abstract

This essay will discuss in detail the visionary decree that affect the planning, development, and environmental fields throughout California. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is an elaborate and influential manuscript that dictates development, conservation, restoration and any project that involves physical changing of land. Thus, it is deemed one of the most controversial regulations in the development sphere; consequently, its validity is continuously questioned. Nonetheless, CEQA serves to reduce and effectively eliminate significant environmental impacts caused by human land use practices. This attempt to reduce man's ecological footprint and sustain our environment for future generations are the key outcomes that CEQA serves to produce.

Since CEQA is a detailed topic and is constantly adapting with new development practices and environmental threats, this essay highlights the broad, key focuses of the law. Namely, CEQA's application and importance to the planning process, local and state government roles, the pitfalls of the law, and finally CEQA's function in the 21st century and its approach toward Global Climate Change.

The Era of Environmentalism

"Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm." These are the influential works of the famous environmentalist Aldo Leopold expressed in his literary innovation, A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold's timeless contribution to the fields of ecology and wilderness along with other visionaries such as John Muir, Rachel Carson, Henry David Theroux, and President Theodore Roosevelt, all provided the foundation to the theories and practice of conservation, sustainability, and environmental health.

Throughout American history the powers of industry and big business have dominated economically and politically, which result in the ideas of environmentalism continuously being pushed to the wayside. In spite of this trend, the social and environmental revolutionaries of the 1960s and ‘70s were attempting to regain the existence and quality of life that the great idealists spoke of only several decades prior. Eventually their utterances of the injustices of environmental degradation fell upon the sympathetic ear of then California Governor Ronald Regan.

1970 was the decade of environmental transformation. For instance, the first nationally declared Earth Day was born on April 22, 1970. However, true change needed to surpass Earth Day; the Governor's office felt that the great Golden State needed an extensive, ecologically virtuous, policy driven element of reform in this ear of eco-idealism. With this in mind, policymakers systematically changed California environmental and land use law by enacting the California Environmental Quality Act.

Conversely, one year before in 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was enacted by Congress which may not make CEQA seem as fundamentally ideal and original, yet it is said that CEQA is a catalyst for NEPA although it was enacted first (Fulton and Shigley). Nonetheless, California was radical in being the only state at the time to adopt such a powerful document that decelerates much of the development and planning process which never had such mandates before. Currently, fourteen states including the District of Columbia have followed this eco-law trend, yet none can parallel with two purely California restrictions: (1) Both public and private development must adhere to CEQA review; and (2) a detail environmental review period that involves full disclosure of the project and its potential impacts.

Notwithstanding the obvious differences of CEQA and NEPA, both theoretically serve to limit and/ or cease harmful environmental impacts that can significantly impact the natural and human environments. According to Fulton and Shigley, "CEQA is a single-issue law concerned