Law Commons^™

Adaptive Management And Nepa: How To Reconcile Predictive Assessment In The Face Of Uncertainty With Natural Resource Management Flexibility And Success, Robert L. Glicksman, Jarryd Page

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

For years, public lands scholars lamented the limited success that federal agencies had in applying adaptive management decisionmaking processes in pursuit of their natural resource management responsibilities. Agency duties to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) have played a role in creating a disconnect between the theory and application of adaptive management. NEPA was designed to force agencies to predict (and consider ways to avoid) the adverse environmental impacts of actions before committing to them. Adaptive management is built on the premise that, at least in conditions of uncertainty such as those that often characterize natural resource management, …

Throwing Precaution To The Wind: Nepa And The Deepwater Horizon Blowoutthrowing Precaution To The Wind: Nepa And The Deepwater Horizon Blowout, Robert L. Glicksman, Sandra Zellmer, Joel Mintz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil platform blew up. Eleven workers were killed in the explosion. When the platform sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico two days later, oil erupted out of the riser - a 5,000-foot pipe connecting the platform to the well on the ocean floor. After a number of failed attempts to stop the leak, BP eventually capped the well in July, three months after the explosion. Nearly 5,000,000 barrels of oil were released into the Gulf, making the Deepwater Horizon the largest offshore oil spill in world history. In this paper, …

Regulatory Blowout: How Regulatory Failures Made The Bp Disaster Possible, And How The System Can Be Fixed To Avoid A Recurrence, Robert L. Glicksman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is destined to take its place as one of the greatest environmental disasters in the history of the United States, or for that matter, of the entire planet. Like so many other disasters on that list, it was entirely preventable.

BP must shoulder its share of the blame, of course. Similarly, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) – since reorganized and rebranded – has come under much deserved criticism for its failure to rein in BP’s avaricious approach to drilling even where it was unable to respond to a worst-case scenario in …