By Chance Gowan
In April of this year, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land-management agencies proposed a sweeping change in how NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, would be implemented when developing new land-management actions or providing other uses for our public lands and natural resources.
Now, to most of us, this might seem like more governmental double-talk. But, in fact, this will have a huge effect on permitted actions like timber sales, grazing, mining, hunting, fishing and even camping, mostly in a good way.
In a nutshell, this new proposal would streamline NEPA. Agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be able to design and implement projects while significantly avoiding much of the stalling, objections and immense costs inflicted by wildly rich and powerful “nonprofit” environmental groups.
As it currently stands, the development of any project by a government agency must be preceded by a long, convoluted and incredibly expensive NEPA evaluation. Once the evaluation has been completed, the totality of the project is presented to the public and comments are solicited.
The “nonprofit” environmental groups quickly learned that they could tie up any project proposal by filing a litany of lawsuits. It didn’t matter if their objections had merit or were backed by any presentation of fact. The nonprofits brought the management of our public lands to a virtual halt and would allow projects to continue only after they were paid millions of taxpayer dollars.
NEPA was created in 1970 and, among other things, directed government agencies to notify the public and explain actions proposed on public lands. The public was then invited to express concerns or identify issues pertaining to the proposed project, which, on the surface, seemed like a good idea. And, in my opinion, it was a good idea.
But, as we know, a lot of good ideas sometimes don’t work out as planned. It didn’t take the environmental nonprofits, groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, long to realize that NEPA presented a bottomless opportunity to generate cash. Lots and lots of cash.
Now, stick with me here. The first part of this explanation will seem like a bunch of governmental double-talk, and you’ll be tempted to just turn the page. But, trust me, what follows will influence every person who has ever ventured onto public lands, including Forest Service, BLM, national parks, national wildlife refuges and more.
Like most good ideas, if the wrong people get involved, those ideas can easily be turned into a bottomless muddy swamp. Such is the case with NEPA.
One of the first problems developed in 1970, shortly after NEPA was signed into law. The U.S. Forest Service proposed a timber sale. The project’s primary objectives were to provide lumber to the American public and reduce the risk of wildfire to adjacent communities.
The Forest Service developed its NEPA proposal and presented it to the public, which was then invited to review the proposal and submit comments. Simple enough, right?
Well, in the beginning, everything worked out more or less as planned. People within the community responded, concerns and objections were considered, modifications were made and the project was implemented.
Unfortunately, loosely organized groups—AKA tree huggers, friends of Bambi or simply “environmentalists”—banded together, endeavoring to stop or curtail any and every use of our natural resources, and “environmental nonprofits” were born.
Now, bear in mind, with very few exceptions, these groups have little actual knowledge or documented expertise in biology, forestry, engineering or ecology.
They somehow just knew that developing any use of our public lands would be bad. In short order, the groups became organized, and every time any government agency proposed an action or use of our public lands, they would flood the agency with objections.
And it wasn’t just massive letters. Without a modicum of actual knowledge, they began throwing out any reason they could think of to stop the action, and that was accompanied by huge lawsuits, with millions of dollars winding up in the hands of greedy “nonprofits.”
In their minds, any use of our public lands should be prohibited. Even fighting forest fires became a profanity to them. Unless, of course, the fire was near their homes. Then they’d sue the agency for not preventing it in the first place.
Due to the “nonprofits’” bastardization of NEPA, management of our public lands has been nearly derailed. Even the most innocuous proposed use or management of public lands has been hopelessly tied up in the quagmire that has become NEPA.
But that isn’t the worst of it. Environmental nonprofits, with the Center for Biological Diversity leading the way, soon realized there was money to be made objecting to NEPA projects. I’m talking millions upon millions of your tax dollars by objecting to, well, virtually everything while at the same time convincing a naive public to donate even more money.
Kieran Suckling, who has become rich as the leader of the environmental nonprofit the Center for Biological Diversity, likes to boast that its lawsuits are based on science. Even CBD’s IRS Form 990 has stated that “scientific research” is a cornerstone of its program.
Noted columnist Hugh Holub, after reviewing the actions and staffing makeup of CBD, came to realize that few CBD employees had pertinent degrees and even fewer had viable, documented field experience in any sort of “hard science.” In fact, even though CBD has boasted on IRS Form 990 that “scientific research” is a keystone of its program, almost none of its employees had specific documented scientific research in, well, almost anything.
Recognizing this disparity, Holub arranged an interview with Suckling, asking if the veracity of CBD’s objections and litigation suffered from the absence of a science-based approach to its litigious demands. Suckling simply replied, “No, kids with science degrees are hindered by resource management values. I’m more interested in hiring philosophers, linguists and poets.”
What he was really saying is linguists and poets can spin ideas and generate a lot more money than lengthy, complicated and expensive research.
As an example of how philosophers and poets are utilized to litigate and generate money, Suckling and CBD once ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, stating that it had “long fought the National Rifle Association over the senseless killing of endangered condors, polar bears and bald eagles.”
Essentially, they were saying: Send us money and we’ll protect the condor from the mean old NRA. But, in reality, there was nothing to protect. Those animals were already fully and completely protected by the Endangered Species Act.
The fact is, the NRA has long promoted ethical and safe hunting practices and has never endorsed the killing of any endangered or threatened species. That didn’t stop CBD from hoodwinking its supporters into making huge donations to the “Stop the NRA Extremism Fund.” One has to wonder what rat hole all of those donations were flushed down.
In researching CBD’s 2024 IRS Form 990, the latest available to the public, I was astonished to learn of the fortune CBD has amassed and how generous its salaries and acquisitions have become.
I wonder what its contributors—those willing to donate millions of dollars to “Save the Green-Eyed Mud Slug” would think if they knew the truth about CBD’s opulent salaries and wild expenditures.
What’s happened since the formation of their original altruistic grassroots mantras has been carefully crafted into a wealth-generating machine, often based on exaggerated or unfounded claims of imminent species and/or habitat demise. Their enviro-babble is largely funded by their “sue and settle” approach to generating wealth, which is at the heart of this article.
What I discovered while researching their IRS declarations was shocking. In a quote from their IRS Form 990, “CBD works to secure a future for all species great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law, and creative media.”
What they fail to accurately disclose is that much of their “creative media” often depicts exaggerations of circumstance and fact. They are essentially salesmen, and the product they’re selling is fear.
On their 2024 IRS Form 990, they disclosed nearly $60 million in net assets. In 2024 alone, they brought in nearly $38 million. But, as you’ll see, they have a lot of expensive overhead.
In their most recent IRS disclosure, it was revealed that their top nine employees were paid a total of $2,748,599—not counting bonuses and benefits. Kieran Suckling, the leader of the pack, knocked down $372,259, and their staff officer, who “works” 17 hours a week, is paid $150,000 annually. Even their secretary was paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars annually. I imagine not many secretaries in this country knock down $250,000 unless they work for an opulent “nonprofit.”
Now, remember, this is a “nonprofit,” and those words impart an image, to the average citizen or supporter, of a group of people who are working out of the goodness of their hearts. What they don’t realize is that “goodness” comes at a significant price. The general public, those who contribute to 501(c)(3) nonprofits, doesn’t realize that “nonprofit” is spelled with big dollar signs.
Over time, CBD realized it need not focus on species it had asserted were in imminent peril. They discovered that nearly every single proposal for any sort of use on lands owned or managed by state or federal government agencies had a pot of gold just waiting to be exploited.
With this knowledge, they developed their patented “sue and settle” form of litigation. What that means, in a nutshell, is they deluge government agencies with whatever form of litigation they can dream up, demanding huge sums of money that will somehow be used to mitigate the inferred mismanagement.
Then they get the agency to agree to some of their demands and settle for a lesser amount of compensation. What rat hole the remaining dollars go down is anybody’s guess.
CBD once deluged its benefactors, utilizing its “creative media” to trick people around the world into believing there was an imminent, impending risk to the survival of polar bears. A picture was once distributed on the internet showing a lone polar bear, adrift and apparently doomed while standing on a small piece of polar ice.
It was later discovered that the famous photo had been Photoshopped and completely contrived. It isn’t known if CBD had anything to do with the contrived phony photo or if they simply found it useful. Regardless, people around the world were tricked into believing and started writing checks.
However, according to renowned polar bear research scientist Dr. Susan Crockford, “Polar bears are a conservation success story. Their numbers have rebounded remarkably.” When asked about CBD’s claims, Crockford said, “CBD is fearmongering for cash, spreading misinformation to you and your children for the sake of increasing revenues.”
But when Suckling was profiled in The New Yorker, the discussion went well beyond protecting animals or habitat. The magazine described his philosophy as a “decentering and disempowering of the human” and said that, for a deconstructionist turned radical environmentalist, the goal required deconstructing “legal arrangements, social and economic forms, and even physical structures.” Suckling himself admitted he was “using one side of industrial society against itself” and imagined a future in which plants and animals would be “part of the polity.”
In other words, Suckling’s goal for CBD is seeking to create anarchy.
The first step is to prohibit the citizens of America from wisely benefiting from our natural resources; the next is to deprive us of our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as our economic forums are “deconstructed” and our physical structures are destroyed.
Those are pretty incongruous objectives for an organization that seems to place power and compensation, fueled by fearmongering, above all else it purports to care about.
Government agencies are currently pushing hard to streamline NEPA. In its current form, it’s costing the American public billions of dollars a year, and a large part of those costs are due to greed-driven environmental nonprofits.
If you’re concerned about the future of our country—worried about our ability to attain and regain energy independence, or simply concerned about the management of our natural resources being hijacked by people and groups on the far left—you should be.
Extremely wealthy “nonprofits” are scared to death that the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, will be rewritten and streamlined. In the process, the ability of nonprofits to stall and hamstring literally every proposed use of our natural resources, while generating huge income, will be greatly reduced.
If the government is allowed to rewrite and streamline NEPA, projects will be introduced and reviewed. Timber sales or mineral explorations will be carefully proposed, and they will be allowed to proceed, unimpeded by unending challenges, delays and litigation by money- and power-hungry “nonprofits.”
America needs to stop the madness that has been imparted by rogue “nonprofits.” Let’s get back to the wise use of our natural resources. Let’s stop paying off “nonprofits”—those who secretly wish to disempower humans—and take the next step to Make America Great Again.
Call or write to your representatives. Ask them to support the restructuring of NEPA and allow our public lands and agencies to provide goods, services and recreation to our populace. Those dollars should go to the betterment of our country, not into the pockets of greedy environmental nonprofits, those who wish to undo the dominion of man over animals and plants and deconstruct our country and society.
Photo Credit: Chris Talbot
