{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.011217948717948718, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.181518151815181, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Harnessing the Power of Information to Protect Our Public Natural Resource Legacy

Over the past century, Congress has enacted numerous laws that recognize the value of the vast store of natural resources under federal control. A remarkable number of these statutes explicitly embrace the goal of preserving public natural resources and the services and values they provide for future generations. Some also articulate a goal or mandate of sustainable use of public natural resources. All of these statutes reflect an awareness that those of us alive today will leave a legacy of public natural resources to the succeeding generation. They also implicitly embrace the idea that we should pay attention to what that legacy will look like – the quantity and quality of the public natural resources we leave them.In practice, our laws have proven unequal to the lofty objectives of preserving a legacy of public natural resources for our children or achieving sustainable use of these resources. This paper considers whether the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), reinforced with a substantive standard of protection, would be the best tool for defining and protecting a public natural resource legacy. A review of the critiques of NEPA, and specifically those focused on how NEPA employs information, suggests that even with a substantive standard, NEPA would not necessarily provide the best vehicle for defining and protecting our resource legacy. In light of these critiques, this paper proposes an alternative model for a statute better tailored to defining and protecting our public natural resource legacy. The article briefly describes the contours of a statute that could be called a National Environmental Legacy Act and describes how such a statute could harness the power of information effectively to define and protect our public natural resource legacy.