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doi:10.1130/2013.2501(07)Geological Society of America Special Papers 2013;501; 165-187 Michael E. Wysession and Linda R. Rowan Geoscience serving public policy Geological Society of America Special Papers

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165

The Geological Society of AmericaSpecial Paper 501

2013

Geoscience serving public policy

Michael E. Wysession*Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Campus Box 1169, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri 63130, USA

Linda R. Rowan*UNAVCO, 6350 Nautilus Drive, Boulder, Colorado 80301-5553, USA

ABSTRACT

Geoscience has a long history of providing guidance and support for public pol-icy that benefi ts government, society, and the health of the planet. An overview of government organizations and public laws that involve geoscience for the benefi t of humankind is provided here in celebration of the Geological Society of America’s 125th anniversary. With an expanding human population, increasing industrializa-tion, and evolving weaponry and hostilities, it is essential for public policy to consider geoscience guidance related to natural resource exploration and development, hazard monitoring and mitigation, national security, space exploration and development, and human impacts to Earth’s land, water, air, and life.

*[email protected]; [email protected]

Wysession, M.E., and Rowan, L.R., 2013, Geoscience serving public policy, in Bickford, M.E., ed., The Impact of the Geological Sciences on Society: Geological Society of America Special Paper 501, p. 165–187, doi:10.1130/2013.2501(07). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. © 2013 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

It is the inherent role of a government to take care of its citi-zens and national assets, especially the land and water within its borders. Geoscience serves public policy by advancing know-ledge of Earth systems and helping society effectively deal with the resources that Earth provides, the hazards that Earth poses, and the effects on Earth of the actions of humans. Policy serves geosci-ence by providing U.S. Government funds for basic and applied research, by using sound geoscience in policy decisions, and by ensuring that Federally supported research results (except for clas-sifi ed work) are publicly accessible. Geoscience and policy come together through government leadership, government organiza-tions, and public laws. As part of the celebration of the 125th anni-versary of the Geological Society of America (GSA), we present here an overview with examples of the leadership, organizations, and public laws where geoscience plays a pivotal role. For exam-ple, the GSA itself was created through the efforts of prominent

geoscientists and policymakers working to advance science and technology in the United States in the late 1800s. As such, the GSA is a prime example of an organization that supports the geosciences and geoscience-serving policy, making this chapter a relevant con-tribution to a celebratory perspective of the society.

Issues surrounding the three general areas of natural resources, hazards, and human impacts affect nations and a glob-ally connected society. While geoscience research may be the realm of geoscientists, geoscience literacy is a public necessity. Adding complexity to geopolicy issues is that these three cat-egories are not independent. For example, human actions impact resource availability as well as the associated risks resulting from any natural hazard. These topics are so important that they comprise the last three ideas of the nine “Big Ideas” of the Earth Science Literacy Principles (Wysession et al., 2012): “Humans depend on Earth for resources,” “Natural hazards pose risks to humans,” and “Humans signifi cantly alter the Earth.” While this chapter focuses on geoscience policy related to resources,

CELEBRATING ADVANCES IN GEOSCIENCE

1888 20138 02

166 Wysession and Rowan

hazards, and human impacts, it ends with a separate section on geoscience education and literacy. Ensuring Earth science lit-eracy within the public and a skilled geoscience workforce for basic and applied research is critical for any government to be able to take care of its citizens and national assets. The U.S. Gov-ernment has a long and signifi cant history of important legisla-tion that involves geoscience. These policies have played a major role in the economic success and stability of this country and of its ascendency to the role of a world leader.

Resources

Natural resources (such as minerals, energy resources, water, and biomass) form on Earth through a variety of complex and interconnected processes. Geoscience research and educa-tion help geoscientists to understand and exploit these resources, primarily for the benefi t of society. The discovery and develop-ment of petroleum and mineral resources as useful commodities have pushed the boundaries of knowledge of chemical and physi-cal processes. Only through the expansion of a steady research program, working with applied sciences and engineering, has society been able to take those raw resources and turn them into the extraordinary technological infrastructure that now provides the backbone of the economy. While applied research has often been driven by market forces, basic research in the United States, which remains a model for other countries, requires consistent and forward-looking government policies. Many Earth resources are limited, interlinked, and nonrenewable, and the successful long-term management of these resources requires a long-term vision that only a well-informed government can provide. History is littered with civilizations that have collapsed because of the mismanagement or lack of understanding of natural resources, such as the Mayans mismanaging their soil resources (Diamond, 2005). While past governments may be excused because they did not understand the intricacies of Earth systems affecting their resources, an ignorance of how the Earth works or an unwilling-ness to address this ignorance is not excusable for nations in the twenty-fi rst century.

Hazards

Signifi cant efforts have been made to avoid losses from nat-ural hazards and protect infrastructure, even if the infrastructure is built in hazardous areas. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has made huge efforts over more than 100 years to hold the Mississippi River in its course, providing safe means of river transport and protection to surrounding lands from fl oods. The Mississippi River system controls are the single larg-est and most expensive engineering project in human history. It is an effort that is carried out every day, with the dredging of chan-nels and repairing of levees. This was typifi ed during the drought of 2012–2013, when extensive blasting of rocks was required to keep river transport channels open when the Mississippi River levels became critically low.

The impact of natural hazards was exemplifi ed in 2012 by the impact of Hurricane Sandy along the Eastern U.S. seaboard, which caused many tens of billions of dollars in damage. Equally impressive, however, was the ability to monitor the storm with many kinds of land-based and satellite-derived data that allowed for suffi cient preparation so that there were only ~100 fatalities in the United States attributed to the storm. Preparing for the next hurricane or tornado will require the integration and analysis of continuous high-resolution monitoring of Earth’s conditions from the surface to the uppermost atmosphere, the most sophis-ticated super-computing-based models of fl uid dynamic systems, and a rapid response system. None of these would exist with-out government legislation, and certainly not without govern-ment coordination. Earthquakes pose a different kind of threat because they are insidious, unpredictable, and can lie in wait for decades or longer before occurring without warning. Repeat times between the most devastating earthquakes on a given fault can be much greater than a human lifetime, making preparation based on uncertain probabilities a diffi cult choice for any par-ticular administration. With great competition for limited govern-ment funds, preparing for an event that might not even happen in your lifetime can be unpopular.

Human Impacts

Human actions have signifi cant effects on Earth systems, local to global, and have done so for many thousands of years going back to the removal of forests and overhunting of large mammals. Humans are now the largest agent of geologic change on land surfaces, and Americans account for about a quarter of this even though they are only 4.5% of the total world population of 7 billion. Americans annually consume almost 4 billion tons of non-energy-related mineral resources, which is a full order of magnitude greater than the amount of rock carried by the entire Mississippi River system to the ocean each year. Beyond con-struction aggregate, much of this raw material comes from min-ing and extraction in other countries, which often have reduced environmental restrictions. Human impacts are not included in the costs of most goods and services and thus are ignored by market-driven forces, as evidenced by the great extent of pollu-tion of the land, air, and water. In the United States, key acts of legislated environmental protection in the early 1970s have alle-viated some of the pollution. For example, the Cuyahoga River has caught on fi re at least 13 times, dating back to the nineteenth century, but not once since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. It is not only medical and environmental health that are protected by geoscience legislation, but economic health as well. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency projects that over the span of 30 years the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments will save our nation $2 trillion in reduced health problems and loss of workdays. However, as helpful as this legislation has been, the country and the world face an even larger threat in the changing climate driven by fossil fuel consumption. The largest consum-ers of fossil fuel, the United States and China, did not ratify the

Geoscience serving public policy 167

United Nations Kyoto Treaty and have no signifi cant policies to deal with climate change in the near future.

GEOSCIENCE IN POLICY LEADERSHIP

Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophi-cal Society (APS) in 1743, and it played a prominent role in the early development of geoscience-related institutions within the U.S. Government, such as the Survey of the Coast. Institu-tions such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were later formed to promote national science. Many members and leaders of these societies were prominent geosci-entists and policymakers; APS members included the fi rst four American presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. APS, along with the other socie-ties, laid the groundwork for U.S. science and technology, often through direct interactions between scientists and policymakers. In the late 1800s, members of these science societies started to develop specifi c physical science societies such as the American Chemical Society (1876), GSA (1888), and the American Physi-cal Society (1899). GSA and its members continue to lead the American geoscience community from outside of the U.S. Gov-ernment, while offering support and guidance to government-led organizations. Within the U.S. Government, several organiza-tions have played a leading role in geoscience policy as part of the broader U.S. science and technology enterprise.

National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council

The fi rst scientifi c organization in the United States created to provide science advice to the government was the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS was chartered by Con-gress and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Its purpose was to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” The NAS is a private, nonprofi t society whose membership includes the nation’s most distinguished scientists, including over 200 Nobel Prize recipi-ents. The NAS’s policy and technical work is carried out by the National Research Council (NRC), which enlists top scientists and engineers to volunteer their time to provide independent scientifi c advice outside of the framework of the government. By the nature of its scientifi c stature, the NRC can provide authoritative support to scientifi c initiatives undertaken by gov-ernment organizations.

The NAS was originally organized by an elite group of scientists in the mid-1800s that included Louis Agassiz, noted paleontologist, glaciologist, and geologist, and Alexander Dallas Bache, who was a Superintendent of the Coast Survey, which is considered to be the fi rst Federal science agency. The initial goal of the NAS was to organize the sciences and to provide advice on weapons testing and a slew of suggested inventions made during

the Civil War, such as the underplating of ironclad boats. Neither of these goals was realized, and the NAS was not a major scien-tifi c organization in terms of its infl uence until the creation of the NRC in 1916 during World War I. The importance of the NRC as an independent source of advice on science and technology issues has since been formally reaffi rmed on several occasions by congressional legislation and White House executive orders. One prominent way that the NAS provides advice to the govern-ment is through NRC reports published by the National Acad-emies Press (NAP). Each year, the NAP publishes more than 200 reports based on NRC studies, and there are currently more than 3600 publications in digital format freely available online. The NRC has fi ve divisions: Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Earth and Life Sciences; Engineering and Physi-cal Sciences; Policy and Global Affairs; and the Transportation Research Board. Within Earth and Life Studies, there are many sections that are directly or indirectly related to the geosciences, such as Agriculture; Climate and Weather; Disaster Management and Homeland Security; Environmental Quality, Health, and Management; Earth Sciences; Ocean; Polar Science; Nuclear and Radiation Studies; Water; and Natural Resources and Ecology.

The NRC reports have been especially important for those issues that have been the target of anti-science movements, such as human evolution and global climate change. For example, the Climate and Weather division produces between 60 and 70 reports each year; in the year 2010 alone, there were eight dif-ferent NRC reports published on climate change, including titles such as “Advancing the Science of Climate Change,” “Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change,” “Limiting the Magnitude of Climate Change,” and “Informing an Effective Response to Cli-mate Change.” The NRC can make necessary recommendations that might be diffi cult for a government organization to put for-ward for political reasons, such as with the 2009 report, “Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use.”

Offi ce of Science and Technology Policy

There are several offi ces that advise the President on issues related to science and technology. Foremost among these is the Offi ce of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which was created as part of the Executive Offi ce through the National Sci-ence and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976 (Public Law 94-282). The OSTP advises the President on domestic and international affairs and is authorized to “lead inter-agency efforts to develop and implement sound science and tech-nology policies and budgets, and to work with the private sector, state and local governments, the science and higher education communities, and other nations toward this end.” The OSTP began in 1961 as the Offi ce of Science and Technology (OST) with the primary role of advising President John F. Kennedy about technical aspects of the rapidly accelerating space race with the Soviet Union. The role has since broadened to include all areas of science and technology as well as their impacts on


both internal relationships with states and external relationships with other nations. The OSTP is authorized to work with the sci-ence and technology communities as well as the private sector in choosing paths that will maximize national economic prosperity and national security while minimizing environmental impacts. As defi ned under President Barack Obama’s Administration, the OSTP’s work occurs in four separate divisions: Science; Tech-nology; Environment and Energy; and National Security and International Affairs. Each of these four divisions has an Associ-ate Director who works with the Director of the OSTP, who is usually referred to as the “President’s Science Advisor.”

National Science and Technology Council

The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is a cabinet-level council co-chaired by the President and the Presi-dent’s Science Advisor, established in 1993 by Executive Order 12881. The Council includes the Vice President, most cabinet secretaries, some agency heads, and other White House offi cials with signifi cant science and technology responsibilities. The NSTC establishes strategies to coordinate Federal science and technology policies across all Federal agencies and is responsible for setting goals for Federal science and technology investments. The NSTC work is organized into fi ve primary committees: Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability; Homeland and National Security; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education; Science; and Technology.

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

The President relies upon an outside council, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), for advice on cutting-edge advances and innovations in science, technology, and STEM education. PCAST is administered by the OSTP and is co-chaired by the President and the President’s Science Advisor. Each President traditionally establishes such a panel, which comprises distinguished scientists and engineers chosen by the President from industry, academia, research insti-tutions, and other nongovernmental organizations. This tradition began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Science Advisory Board. For example, the PCAST for President Barack Obama was chartered in 2010 by Executive Order 13539 and has 21 members in addition to the President’s Science Advisor. This Council prepares reports on a variety of topics, which sometimes are geoscience related, such as the 2010 report on energy tech-nologies, “Report to the President on Accelerating the Pace of Change in Energy Technologies through an Integrated Federal Energy Policy,” and the 2011 report on ecosystems, “Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy.”

GEOSCIENCE IN GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS

Throughout the history of the United States, geoscience has guided Federal policy. Some of the Federal agencies that

are involved in geoscience research that advances knowledge and informs policy include the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) within the U.S. Department of the Interior, multiple offi ces within the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the U.S. Depart-ment of Commerce, and three independent agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Admin-istration (NASA). The U.S. Department of Defense supports more basic research than all of these agencies combined and an entire chapter on defense spending related to geoscience research would only scratch the surface of either the associated classi-fi ed or unclassifi ed work. This section only reviews certain non-defense agencies and tackles the discussion of different agen-cies in a chronological order to provide some recognition of the nation’s evolving science and technology priorities.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was created through an executive order in 1970 by President Richard M. Nixon. The agency combined the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (originally the Survey of the Coast, formed in 1807), the Weather Bureau (formed in 1870), and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (formed in 1871). Given the long history of the Survey of the Coast, NOAA considers itself one of the oldest government agencies and the fi rst physical science agency.

The Survey of the Coast was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807. Ferdi-nand Hassler, who had led the Coast Survey in its early years, published a paper in the Transactions of the American Philo-sophical Society calling for the creation of several national sci-entifi c institutions including a survey of the coast, an offi ce of weights and measures (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST]), a national astronomical observatory (now the U.S. Naval Observatory), and a national topographic mapping program (now the National Mapping Division of the USGS). Hassler and many of his scientifi c colleagues, who were members of the American Philosophical Society along with President Jefferson, thus made early efforts to organize physical science, especially the geosciences, into agencies of the U.S. Government for the benefi t of its citizens. In 1917, the Survey of the Coast became the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, a commissioned service of the military, and the agency became responsible for developing geodetic techniques and surveying the nation’s interior as well as its coasts. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson reorganized the Coast and Geo-detic Survey and the Weather Bureau into the Environmental Science Services Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Commission on Marine Science, Engineer-ing, and Resources published a report, “Our Nation and the Sea: A Plan for National Action,” which aimed at dealing with ocean-related problems and presented a plan for appropriate


government responses. In 1970, President Nixon once again reorganized the Federal landscape based on this report, estab-lishing the independent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the basis for NOAA (a later reorganization plan and executive order established NOAA). The plan transferred to NOAA the responsibilities for fi sheries from the U.S. Depart-ment of the Interior, Sea Grant functions from the National Sci-ence Foundation, and surveying functions as well as oceano-graphic, atmospheric, and meteorologic observations from the military. NOAA does not have an organic act and thus its responsibilities are not described and codifi ed by U.S. law.

Today, NOAA’s capabilities include maintaining satellites for Earth observations through the National Environmental Satel-lite, Data, and Information Service with research concentrated in the Offi ce of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the Sea Grant university network, and the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Studies. NOAA is the largest agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, with a fi scal year 2011 budget of about $5 billion (Table 1). NOAA’s tagline is “Science, Service, and Steward-ship,” with these three themes having goals “to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts,” share this knowledge, and manage resources. While research is its pri-mary mission, NOAA has an explicit regulatory role in several areas including fi sheries (the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conser-vation and Management Act, Public Law 94-265) and oil spills (the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which requires NOAA to promul-gate regulations for assessing natural resource damage from oil spills). NOAA manages the sustainable use of marine resources, balancing human resource needs with environmental protections. It is the lead agency for monitoring weather, including severe weather events, and provides this weather information for ensur-ing safe transportation networks. NOAA is also the chief agency for monitoring and understanding climate change, on regional to global scales.

U.S. National Park Service

The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) oversees 398 parks and thousands of landmarks covering over 350,000 km2 with ~20,000 personnel and a fi scal year 2011 budget of about $2.6 billion. The NPS was created in 1916, but its origins go back much further. The original idea for national parks goes back to the artist George Catlin, who traveled across the Great Plains in 1832. The preservation of areas of spectacular geologic beauty had early origins in Federal legislation: in 1864 President Abra-ham Lincoln signed an act of Congress that granted Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California to “be held for public use, resort, and recreation.” What really paved the way for the creation of the NPS were geologic surveys of U.S. lands such as the1871 survey led by Ferdinand Hayden. The Hayden survey provided information to the public in support of creating Yellowstone National Park. Hayden and his colleagues wrote a lengthy report that included photographs, sketches, and the beautiful paintings of Thomas Moran and made the case for the preservation of this natural wonder (Fig. 1). Yellowstone had a champion in Representative Henry Dawes from Massachusetts, whose son had been part of the 1871 expedition. The public and policymakers, most of whom had never visited Yellowstone, were motivated by these reports to preserve the unique wonders of this volcanic hotspot as the nation’s fi rst national park. Con-gress established the Yellowstone National Park in the Wyoming territory in 1872 as “a benefi t and enjoyment” for people. In 1906 Congress passed An Act for the Preservation of American Antiq-uities, known as the Antiquities Act of 1906, which was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. This measure allowed the Presi-dent to create executive orders that restrict the use of a particular piece of Federally owned public land. Roosevelt fi rst used it in 1906 to declare Devils Tower in Wyoming a National Monument. It was not until 1916, under President Woodrow Wilson, that The

TABLE 1. FISCAL YEAR 2012 (ENACTED FY2011) FUNDING LEVELS FOR MAJOR GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS AND KEY SUBORGANIZATIONS RELATED TO GEOSCIENCE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

1102YF detcanE noitazinagrobuS noitazinagrO(millions of US$)

yevruS lacigoloeG .S.U 1,084

National Science Foundation 6,860 Geosciences Directorate 885

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 18,448 227,1 noisiviD ecneicS htraE

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 4,597 Oceanic and Atmospheric Research 445 National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service 1,396

ygrenE fo tnemtrapeD .S.U 27,007 409,4 ecneicS 159 ygrenE lissoF

U.S. National Park Service 2,611

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 8,682

U.S. Department of Defense 687,000 Research and Development 11,700


National Park Service Act of 1916 created a new agency within the Department of the Interior to protect the 35 existing parks and monuments. The National Park Service Act established the pur-pose of the NPS as conserving “the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein.” Geology motivated the creation of the parks, and the role of geology within the parks has ebbed and fl owed like the many stunning rivers and streams that traverse them. The number of geoscientists working for the NPS has decreased over the past few decades. In the 1980s, there were ~130 geologic positions within the NPS, with the number falling to 107 by 2011. The declining geoscience workforce has moti-vated the temporary employment of NPS geologists through the successful Geoscientists-in-the-Parks program. Several divisions within the NPS support geology research and monitoring, most signifi cantly the Geologic Resources Division (GRD). The GRD is responsible for NPS programs that include Abandoned Min-eral Lands, Coastal Geology, Energy and Minerals, Geohazards, Geologic Heritage Resources, Inventory and Monitoring, Land Restoration, Planning and Permits, Soils, and Geoscientist-in-the-Parks. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act that included the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act. The GRD is tasked with carrying out this Act to manage and protect fossils on public lands, and currently manages 237 “units” (in situ or in collections). Other major legislation that the NPS is responsible for within the parks includes the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Oil Pollution Act, and the Mining in the Parks Act.

U.S. Geological Survey

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is a science agency that provides information to the public on many critical topics related to U.S. land and land use, including ecosystems, the environment, natural hazards, natural resources, and the impacts of climate and land-use change. The program in fi scal year 2011 was funded at a

level of about $1 billion and is the only scientifi c agency within the Department of the Interior. The USGS employs ~8500 scientists, technicians, and staff who work in more than 400 different locations around the country (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2011). The USGS is involved in more than 2000 strategic partnerships with other organizations and is the nation’s primary agency involved with mapping and monitoring land use, resources, and hazards.

The USGS tagline is “Science for a Changing World,” and it describes itself as “a science organization that provides impartial information.…” The USGS does not develop policy nor provide regulatory oversight for any legislation. However, decision mak-ers and stakeholders often request geoscience advice from USGS scientists to provide policy guidelines or to comment on regula-tory frameworks.

The USGS was created by an act of Congress on March 3, 1879, for the “classifi cation of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain” (Rabbitt, 1989). The country at that time had managed to survey only ~200 million out of its 1.2 billion acres, many of which had been added with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Mexican-American War of 1848. The formation of the USGS provided the opportunity to map out the nation’s lands and natural resources. The USGS was formed in response to a report by the National Academy of Sciences. The report sug-gested that the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey be moved to the Department of the Interior and given the lead role of mapping through the creation of a USGS whose role would be to clas-sify public lands and examine natural resources. Congress had initially gone to NAS because there were several different sur-veys of western U.S. lands being done by different geologists (such as Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, John Wesley Powell, and George Wheeler) with different techniques funded by dif-ferent agencies, and Congress wanted to fi nd the most effi cient and cost-effective way to map the lands and resources of the West. Based upon the high quality with which Clarence King

Figure 1. Grand Canyon of the Yellow-stone by Thomas Moran (1872). The paintings, photographs, and descrip-tions of Yellowstone by the expedition led by Ferdinand Hayden contributed to Yellowstone being declared the na-tion’s fi rst National Park. (Image of the Department of the Interior; http://www.nps.gov/yell/historyculture/ thomasmoransdiary.htm.)


had led the six-year Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Paral-lel (Fig. 2), which mapped out lands from eastern Wyoming to western Nevada, King was named the fi rst director of the USGS and served until 1881. Though he served for only three years, King had a profound infl uence on the organizational structure of the Survey, establishing a strong emphasis on mining geol-ogy, with basic science playing a secondary role. John Wes-ley Powell directed the USGS from 1881 to 1894, and greatly advanced the mapping activities of the USGS. Topographic map-ping became independent from the geologic mapping efforts, and soon became the largest function of the USGS. However, a year after taking the directorship, Powell obtained permission from Congress to create a geologic map of the entire nation, includ-ing lands east of the Mississippi, and studies of paleontologic and stratigraphic structures began across America. It was under the directorship of paleontologist Charles Wolcott (1894–1907), however, that the USGS became a powerful and infl uential scien-tifi c organization. Wolcott, who is best known for his discovery of the Burgess Shale in 1909, was also a gifted administrator. He returned the focus of the USGS toward industrial applications, as King had defi ned it, but extended the scope beyond mining to include other industries such as forestry and water resources. He strengthened the basic research programs to support these industrial applications, and it was USGS research that led to the large gold production of the late 1890s that allowed the United States to establish the gold standard as its monetary base. The USGS found a great advocate in President Theodore Roosevelt, and expanded its operations during his terms. By 1904, 25 years after its formation, the USGS had created topographic maps of over 900,000 square miles (more than one quarter of the United States, including Alaska), and had created geologic maps of over 170,000 square miles (Rabbitt, 1989).

Figure 2. Photograph of the eastern slopes of Mount Shasta in Cali-fornia, USA, taken during the six-year Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel led by Clarence King between 1867 and 1872. The re-sults of this exploration contributed to the creation of the U.S. Geologi-cal Survey (USGS) with Clarence King as its fi rst director. (Photo by C.E. Watkins. USGS Archives. Image fi le: /htmllib/btch133/btch133j/btch133z/btch133/kingp062.jpg.)

The USGS abandoned its traditional ways of developing its topographic maps in 2008, and it now provides access to a wide variety of digital maps and mapping options through its online National Map project and other avenues with content coming through the USGS National Geospatial Program. As of 2012, there were over three million Landsat images available, as well as more than 170 different digital land-surface data sets that include 20 million aerial photos and satellite images.

The USGS budget is distributed among six core programs: Ecosystems (which includes fi shery and wildlife resources); Climate and Land Use Change; Energy, Minerals, and Environ-mental Health; Natural Hazards (primarily earthquake, volcano, and coastal hazards); Water Resources; and Core Science Sys-tems (which includes the bulk of the mapping programs). The USGS supports national and international monitoring of hazards and maintains a massive database of long-term information about natural resources and environmental changes. There are currently ~2200 seismometers and 7600 stream gauges whose data are available to the public. The survey has primary responsibility for warnings about earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the United States, and is frequently the fi rst place that people from the public and private sectors go for related information. The USGS also develops online educational materials from kindergarten through undergraduate levels.

U.S. Bureau of Mines

The U.S. Bureau of Mines was formed by an act of Con-gress in 1910 primarily to deal with a spate of serious mining accidents. The bureau conducted research on the extraction, pro-cessing, use, and conservation of mineral resources by employ-ing geoscientists and supporting university-based research. The agency collected and analyzed data on the mining and process-ing of more than 100 mineral commodities from more than 185 countries. In addition, it monitored the production, conservation, sale, and distribution of helium for essential government activi-ties. The bureau was terminated in 1995 to help reduce govern-ment spending with a savings of about $100 million annually (~0.001% of the national gross domestic product at that time). Some functions of the U.S. Bureau of Mines were then trans-ferred to the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Geologi-cal Survey. Since the closure of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, the nation has lost research and development support in mineral resources and mining processes and knowledge and expertise on mining and mineral resources in the United States and around the world. Unfortunately, at the same time that the nation is los-ing valuable mining-related expertise and research and devel-opment, the United States is slowly regenerating its domestic mining industry, dealing with acid mine drainage and other envi-ronmental legacy issues, trying to deal with a new spate of min-ing accidents, and struggling with supply-and-demand problems for critical minerals. The 2008 NRC report “Minerals, Critical Minerals, and the U.S. Economy” focused attention on the need for greater mineral and mining expertise, highlighting some of


the concerns and recent problems such as the critical shortage of helium supplies.

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the premier fund-ing agency for basic science research in the United States. In fi scal year 2011, the NSF’s budget was about $6.9 billion, with $5.6 billion for research and related activities. While this is only 3.8% of all Federal research and development spending, it repre-sents ~20% of all Federal funding for basic research conducted at colleges and universities. The Geosciences Directorate (GEO) accounted for 13% of the 2011 NSF total budget, with funding allocated between the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sci-ences ($258 million), Division of Earth Sciences ($184 million), Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research ($92 mil-lion), and Division of Ocean Sciences ($352 million). Additional geoscience funding came from other NSF programs such as the Offi ce of Polar Programs, Offi ce of Cyberinfrastructure, Educa-tion and Human Resources, and Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (which funded the construction of Earth-Scope). In 2011, the NSF supported research at ~2000 universities and other institutions, and awarded more than 11,500 new grants each year. At the end of 2012, the Offi ce of Polar Programs was moved into GEO, and while some further reorganization may occur, it will likely remain a separate department within GEO, making GEO the single largest NSF directorate.

The NSF was created in 1950 by Public Law 81-507, signed by President Harry S. Truman. This was the culmination of a pro-cess that began with a letter in 1944 from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Director of the Offi ce of Scientifi c Research, Dr. Vannevar Bush, asking advice on four issues related to con-tinuation of science research in postwar times. Roosevelt wanted to make sure that (1) the scientifi c discoveries made during the war effort could be made public (without compromising national security); (2) research continued in the area of medicine and dis-eases; (3) the government fostered research at public and private institutions; and (4) an effective program was established for sci-ence education (Mazuzan, 1988).

Vannevar Bush commissioned four committees to examine these issues, and his response, a report in 1945 entitled “Science—The Endless Frontier,” contained the fi nal reports from these four committees. Bush’s recommendation called for the creation of a permanent Federal agency that he called the “National Research Foundation.” Several congressional bills were proposed to respond to this report and establish such an organization. In fact, the name “National Science Foundation” was fi rst used in a 1945 bill by Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia. Congress fi nally passed a bill establishing the NSF in 1947, but President Truman vetoed it because it did not give the President the ability to choose its director (Mazuzan, 1988).

The bill that Truman fi nally signed in 1950 did give the President the ability to nominate the NSF director (with Senate approval), as well as a newly established 24-member oversight

body called the National Science Board (NSB). The NSB, which comprises leading scientists and engineers in the public and private sectors, still plays a vital role in national science policy, providing high-level oversight to the NSF. The NSB identifi es the directions that are vital to the NSF’s future, and approves the NSF’s strategic plan as well as its annual budget, which is then submitted to the Offi ce of Management and Budget.

The original funding of the NSF in 1951 was a modest $225,000, under the oversight of its fi rst director, Alan T. Water-man, who had been the chief scientist at the Offi ce of Naval Research. By 1960, funding had increased to $153 million, for ~2000 grants plus facilities and infrastructure. The increase was primarily driven by the space race set off by the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. Many aspects of the NSF began in the early 1950s such as postdoctoral fellowships (1952), fund-ing for undergraduate science education (1952), and funding for high school science education (1953). The NSF supported U.S. participation in the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), which led to many important geoscience discoveries such as the Van Allen radiation belts and the mid-ocean submarine ridges and set the stage for the discovery of plate tectonics. Besides research, the NSF funded large science infrastructure that could not be supported by other entities. These large projects included the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank (West Virginia) and six scientifi c research stations in Antarctica. By the end of the 1950s, there were many research programs under way but inadequate means of disseminating their discoveries. In order to address this, President Dwight D. Eisenhower charged the NSF with the responsibility of making scientifi c information accessible and available to other scientists in more effi cient ways.

The 1960s saw the development by the NSF of many new areas of geoscience research that refl ected the changing priori-ties of the nation. The NSF, along with the University Corpora-tion for Atmospheric Research, started the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1960, which not only laid the founda-tion for research in weather and climate systems but provided a basis for monitoring global environmental changes. In 1965, the NSF created the Division of Environmental Sciences, with a focus on monitoring the impacts of pollutants, and in 1969, the Ecosystem Analysis Program was started in order to assess human impacts on ecosystems. Advances were made in marine sciences, and in 1961, Project Mohole, the fi rst deep-sea drill-ing project, was carried out off the coast of Mexico. While the project did not meet its goals, it laid the foundation for future ocean seafl oor drilling research. Over the past 40 years, the NSF has changed signifi cantly as a result of internal reorganizations and available funding. NSF funding was modest throughout the 1970s and did not begin to make substantial gains until the mid-1980s. Taking into account infl ation, NSF funding actually decreased over the nearly two-decade period of 1966–1983, but it has steadily increased since then. The NSF’s budget reached $2 billion in 1990 and about $6.9 billion in 2011. Strictly speak-ing, the NSF, whose tagline is “Where Discoveries Begin,” is entirely concerned with supporting basic research at academic


and other institutions and has no regulatory role. However, the NSF’s objectives have come under increasing pressure to provide measurable societal benefi ts and thus go beyond basic scientifi c research. The NSF is developing more interdisciplinary programs such as “Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability” and “Climate Change Education” that directly or indirectly infl u-ence policy and regulations. The NSF’s mission as now defi ned by Congress, “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…,” includes objectives that go far beyond what many might consider basic research.

The NSF’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities Con-struction program (MREFC) has funded one large Earth science project, EarthScope, which is a 15-year quarter-billion-dollar program that began operating in 2004 as a multidisciplinary lab-oratory for studying the geologic structure and composition of North America. The components of EarthScope include USArray (a network of permanent and transportable seismic and magneto-telluric instruments, through a cooperative agreement with the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology [IRIS]), the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO—a network of Global Posi-tioning System receivers, tiltmeters, strainmeters, and borehole seismometers for examining active deformation in the western United States through a cooperative agreement with UNAVCO, Inc.), and the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD—a sampling and monitoring borehole drilled into the San Andreas fault) (Fig. 3). EarthScope is operated by IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford University.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is responsible for the nation’s nonmilitary space pro-gram and for aeronautics and aerospace research. NASA was a product of America’s space race with the Soviet Union, which was the most visible component of the Cold War. The 1957–1958

International Geophysical Year (IGY) provided the fi nal step for launching NASA. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a U.S. effort to launch a satellite as part of IGY, and the Soviet Union did likewise. The famed launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 Octo-ber 1957 by the Soviet Union caused panic in the fl edging U.S. space program because the United States was not able to launch an orbiting satellite, Explorer 1, until 31 January 1958 (Fig. 4). Congress and the Eisenhower Administration chose to strengthen U.S. efforts in outer space by creating NASA through the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. The act listed nine objectives for the agency, with the fi rst being “the expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmo-sphere and space,” which secured the importance of the geosci-ences within the space program. NASA began with a budget of $100 million and a workforce of 8000 employees and took con-trol of multiple aeronautics and space science research centers, including the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and the Jet Pro-pulsion Laboratory. An important milestone for NASA was Pres-ident John F. Kennedy’s speech on 25 May 1961, declaring that the United States would land a man on the Moon and return him safely by the end of the decade, which led to a massive infl ux of resources and advances in space-related science and engineer-ing. A total of about $25.4 billion would be spent on the Apollo project over the 1960s and 1970s. One geologist, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, would be part of the program and would be the only scientist to walk on the Moon, exploring the lunar surface as part of the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. NASA remains a large and independent agency with a budget in fi scal year 2011 of about $18 billion. While the Human Exploration and Opera-tions Directorate is considering future plans after the Space Shut-tle program was terminated and while there is more pressure to commercialize human space exploration, the Science Directorate has decadal plans to support research and discovery. The Science Directorate, with a fi scal year 2011 budget of about $5 billion, consists of Earth Science, Planetary Science, Astrophysics, the

Figure 3. Map showing locations of the EarthScope stations, as of February 2013. EarthScope is the largest single geoscience project ever funded. This quarter-billion-dollar project is funded through the National Science Founda-tion’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction program. (Image from http://www.earthscope.org/.)


James Webb Space Telescope, and Heliophysics. While many citizens consider NASA a space and planetary agency, NASA conducts signifi cant amounts of Earth-observing science, provid-ing observations, modeling, and data to address climate change, natural hazards, water resources, and other societally important issues. Within Earth Science, the 2007 NRC report, “Earth Sci-ence and Applications from Space: National Imperative for the Next Decade and Beyond,” defi ned 15 missions that should be priorities for Earth observations.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was the result of an executive order (Reorganization Plan No. 3) that President Richard M. Nixon submitted to Congress on 9 July 1970, and was formed to carry out the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). The EPA provides oversight for U.S. environmental legislation and is given enforcement powers to maintain national environmental standards that include fi nes,

Figure 4. Photograph of a model of the Explorer 1 rocket being held up by William Pickering, James Van Allen, and Wehrner von Braun (1958). The space race with the Soviet Union served as the impetus for much science legislation in the United States including the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). (NASA archive photo. Image: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/explorer/explorer-hold_prt.htm.)

sanctions, and legal actions. Its roughly 17,000 employees are involved in a variety of assessments, research, and educational activities that are carried out in its D.C. Headquarters, 10 regional offi ces, and 27 laboratories. Though the EPA is not a Cabinet-level department, its Administrator, appointed by the President and approved by the Senate, is usually given a cabinet rank. The fi scal year 2011 budget for all operations of the EPA was about $8.7 billion. The EPA states that its goal is “to protect human health and environment” and to “use the best available scientifi c information.” Its mission is clearly regulatory, but sound science is demanded for its regulatory oversight.

When NEPA was enacted, environmental activities were being conducted by many different government agencies. Under Reorganization Plan No. 3, environment-related activities car-ried out within the Department of the Interior, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Food and Drug Adminis-tration, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Department of Agriculture were all absorbed into the EPA, which also absorbed the authority of NEPA’s Council on Environmental Quality. President Nixon, in his message to Congress, stated that the U.S. Government was “not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food” (General Services Administration, 1971). Nixon proposed “pulling together into one agency a variety of research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities now scattered through several depart-ments and agencies” (General Services Administration, 1971). It was at roughly the same time, 3 October 1970, that an additional executive order (Reorganization Plan No. 4) created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the U.S. Department of Commerce.

U.S. Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was formed in 1977 with a budget of $10.4 billion and ~20,000 employees (Fehner and Hall, 1994). The department brought together defense roles regarding the design, construction, and testing of nuclear weap-ons, a legacy of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb for World War II, and an assortment of energy-related programs. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the urging of Albert Einstein, had initiated a research program to study whether nuclear chain reactions could be controlled to create a powerful bomb, and dur-ing World War II the program morphed into the Manhattan Proj-ect. After the war, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to take over the Manhattan Project. Later, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allowed for commercial nuclear power with the AEC as the regulator. Except for nuclear energy, the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. Government had not focused on energy pol-icy, especially as energy needs had been fulfi lled by the private sector with limited government regulations. The birth of nuclear energy and the energy crisis of the 1970s changed all of that, and Congress became more involved in energy resource development


and management through policy. The DOE has cabinet-level authority highlighting its importance to the U.S. Government, even though it is a relatively new agency. President Jimmy Carter and all presidents since have focused more attention on energy policy and research as concerns about the supply, demand, and environmental impacts of energy resources have grown. In par-ticular, the DOE has responsibility for high-risk research and large-scale energy development projects. Geoscience research is concentrated in the Offi ce of Fossil Energy, the Offi ce of Science, and the Energy Effi ciency and Renewable Energy Offi ce. The oil crisis of the 1970s seems a distant memory, though minor oil crises have arisen several times since then, causing policymak-ers to look for oil alternatives. Beginning in the 1980s, research confi rmed that the use of fossil fuels for energy was contributing to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the environment that were associated with rising global atmospheric temperatures. The recognition of this and other signifi cant global environmental effects of fossil fuel use has forced U.S. policymakers to contend with the impacts of a growing demand for energy by a rapidly increasing population. During the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century some U.S. policymakers viewed nuclear energy as a primary solution to demands for electrical power, but the Fuku-shima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan that resulted from the 2011 Mw 9 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami has reduced support in the United States for the construction of new nuclear power plants. The DOE had a budget of about $27 billion in fi scal year 2011; at least half of this budget was focused on nuclear waste management and environmental cleanup of the nation’s defense and civilian nuclear legacy.

RESOURCES AND POLICY

The United States has abundant natural resources that include large quantities of fossil fuels, expansive agricultural lands, large lakes and rivers of fresh water, and signifi cant fresh-water aqui-fers. The nation’s natural assets are not unlimited, however, and what we take for granted could be damaged or lost forever if not carefully managed. Other natural resources are either not abun-dant within our national boundaries or for economic or environ-mental reasons we choose to import them from other countries. Federal policies regarding natural resources have been diffi cult to enact because different resources are abundant in different areas of the country, making national policies harder to gain agreement about. For example, water resources are considered to be state or local issues so the United States does not have a national policy regarding their use. Energy fuel resources and nuclear energy waste, however, are two resource issues that the nation has grap-pled with at the Federal level on many occasions.

Energy Policy

The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (Public Law 102-486) was signed by President George H.W. Bush. It addressed a wide array of energy issues that included energy effi ciency and con-

servation, natural gas imports and exports, alternative fuels and alternative fuel vehicles, electric motor vehicles, radioac-tive waste, clean coal, and renewable energy sources. This law was amended by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Public Law 109-58), which was signed by President George W. Bush. This legislation, which extended the Energy Policy Act in many dif-ferent directions, encouraged the continued development of coal, petroleum, and nuclear power through large subsidies and tax incentives to these industries ($4.3 billion for nuclear power, $2.8 billion for fossil fuel production, and $1.6 billion for “clean coal” facilities). At the same time, it offered $2.7 billion in tax credits for renewable electricity production, $1.3 billion for energy conservation and effi ciency (most notably for home insulation), and $1.3 billion for the encouragement of alternative motor vehicles and development of alternative fuels. One par-ticularly controversial provision of the Act was to exempt fl uids used in hydraulic fracturing from protections under the CAA, CWA, and Safe Drinking Water Act. This loophole exempts drilling companies from having to disclose the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing fl uids.

The most recent major energy policy legislation is the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA 2007; Public Law 110-140), which was signed into law on 19 December 2007 by President George W. Bush. The measure increases the corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ standards) over time to improve vehicle fuel effi ciency. It provides incentives for increased pro-duction of biofuels and requires that 36 billion gallons of bio-fuels (mostly non-cornstarch biofuels) be added to gasoline by 2022 (in 2007, ~4.7 billion gallons of biofuels were used in gaso-line). The measure requires more energy-effi cient light bulbs and appliances and supports research and development to improve energy effi ciency in buildings. Following a request by President Barack Obama in 2012, the National Highway Traffi c Safety Administration extended the regulations on future automobile fuel effi ciency for vehicles; the target was set for an average fuel effi ciency of 54.5 mpg for the U.S. fl eet of cars and light trucks by 2025. This was done through the provisions of EISA 2007 and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-163) (Federal Register, 2012). This change would double the fuel effi ciency of the 2025 U.S. auto fl eet compared to 2008, and would signifi cantly reduce U.S. petroleum consumption.

Nuclear Waste Policy

Perhaps the best examples of the complexity and diffi culty of geoscience policy are the attempts to fi nd a permanent loca-tion for the nation’s nuclear waste. The U.S. nuclear program, both military and civilian, had existed for 40 years before any legislation was passed to deal with the resulting nuclear waste. During this time, and since, nuclear waste from power plants and from military reactors related to the development of nuclear weapons has been stored in a large number of temporary facilities around the country. To address this issue, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) in 1982 (Public Law 97-425).


The NWPA called for a permanent repository for nuclear waste, as well as temporary facilities where waste could be stored for 50–100 years before relocation to a permanent facility. The measure required the DOE to provide up to 1900 metric tons of temporary storage for nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power plants. State governments were given the right to veto the selec-tion of a permanent facility within their borders, but Congress could override a state’s decision. The NWPA plan called for a total of ten geographic sites to be studied as possible national nuclear waste repositories, with recommendations made to the President. Potential geologic formations included basalt, volca-nic tuff, granite, and salt. In 1987, the NWPA was amended to identify Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the sole choice for the only permanent repository, and in 2002 Congress voted to support the choice (Fig. 5). Nevada immediately vetoed the decision, but Congress overrode its veto. However, in 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia supported a challenge by the state of Nevada on the grounds that the 10,000-year compli-ance period required by the EPA was not in line with recommen-dations made by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The EPA then revised the compliance time upward to 1 million years, but this was seen as a geologically untenable timescale as geoscience research cannot adequately address the state of the repository

over such a long period. All of these discussions are now on hold because in 2010 President Barack Obama terminated funding for a Yucca Mountain geologic repository. The NWPA is still Federal law and as such cannot be canceled by the actions of a President, but, as with any authorization, it can be unfunded.

The United States does have one deep geological repository for nuclear waste: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, which was authorized by Congress in 1979 and appropriated by Congress in 1992. The facility is built within a massive bedded NaCl (salt) deposit. The WIPP began receiving shipments of transuranic waste in 1999, and by the start of 2011 had accepted more than 9200 shipments from around the country, totaling more than 70,000 m3 of radioactive waste.

HAZARDS AND POLICY

As mentioned in the introduction, one important function of any government is the protection of its citizens from natural haz-ards. This goes back at least to the Eastern Han Dynasty in China, in 132 C.E., when Emperor Shun directed the royal astronomer Zhang Heng to develop a means of identifying the direction from where earthquake seismic waves came, leading to the invention of the fi rst seismoscope. In the United States, the leading natural

Figure 5. (A) Photograph of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, USA, which was se-lected in 1987 to be the national reposi-tory of nuclear waste. (B) Plan for the construction of the nuclear waste site. Plans were discontinued and the project unfunded in 2010. (Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/energy.html for A, and http://www.lanl.gov/1663/yucca_mountain_complies_with_epa_regulations_for_safety_and_risk for B.)


hazards are weather related (hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms and blizzards, droughts, and fl oods), gravity related (mass wast-ing), or tectonic related (earthquakes and volcanoes). Weather-related hazards are a primary concern of NOAA, while the USGS monitors tectonic hazards. NASA provides important monitor-ing capabilities through a bevy of Earth-observing satellites, and given the nation’s increasing reliance on geospace for communi-cations, navigation, security, and observations, there is growing concern about solar storms and space weather affecting not only satellites but ground-based electrical grids and other engineered systems. Successful national hazards policy must balance and integrate two aspects: (1) understanding the hazards involved, through monitoring and modeling, and (2) addressing the risks involved, which is the intersection of the natural hazards with the societal constructs of human development.

National Flood Insurance Program

An important example of national hazard policy is the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which was enacted in 1968 by the National Flood Insurance Act (Public Law 90-448) to make fl ood insurance available to homeowners. Widespread fl ooding along the Mississippi River in the early 1960s made insurance companies reluctant to sell fl ood insurance. This was exacerbated by large fi nancial losses along the coasts of Florida and Louisiana following the fl ood surge of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 (Fig. 6). The NFIP is managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which works closely with the insurance industry to provide fl ood insurance in high-risk areas. In addition, NFIP provides funding to improve general fl oodplain management, largely through the development of maps of fl ood hazard zones. For communities to participate in NFIP, they need to establish management regulations that will ensure a reduction in future fl ood damages. The goal is to have the NFIP insurance program reduce the amount of fi nancial disaster assistance that the U.S. Government would need to provide following a severe fl ooding event. In 2012, NFIP was reauthorized through the year 2017 by the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 (Public Law 112-141).

Disaster Relief Act

As Hurricane Sandy demonstrated once again in 2012, there is an important need for the U.S. Government to be able to pro-vide both immediate relief during a natural disaster and funds for repair following the disaster. Hurricane Sandy caused signifi cant damage simultaneously to the infrastructure of many states along the eastern seaboard, requiring a national response and rescue effort. In addition, the initial estimates of the damage from the hurricane exceeded $60 billion, which is far beyond what any individual state budget could handle. The fi rst major step toward a Federal policy on disaster relief was the Disaster Relief Act of 1970 (Public Law 91-606), signed by President Richard Nixon on 31 December 1970. The law established a permanent and

Figure 6. Flooding in the lower ninth ward of New Or-leans, Louisiana, USA, following the arrival of Hurri-cane Betsy in 1965. This hurricane helped motivate the passing of the 1968 Flood Insurance Act. (Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOLA9thFloodedBetsy.jpg, from http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lix/html/top10.htm.)

comprehensive program to extend emergency relief and neces-sary assistance to individuals, organizations, businesses, states, and local communities following a major disaster. It was also intended to strengthen the coordination of Federal and local disaster assistance efforts.

This law was amended by the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 (Public Law 93-288), signed by President Richard M. Nixon in March 1974, a month after a spate of tornadoes caused signifi cant damage in a number of states. By that point the Nixon Adminis-tration had sent relief to 42 states following 180 different natural disasters, and it was clear that the fi nancial burden of disaster relief was becoming too great. The 1974 amendments included a requirement that insurance coverage be provided to protect property against future disaster losses as a condition to receiving Federal assistance. The law also helped streamline the process of coordinating disaster relief, which at times had been handled by over 100 different government organizations. This coordination was enhanced by the creation of the Federal Emergency Manage-ment Agency (FEMA) by President Jimmy Carter through the Presidential Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1978 and Executive Orders 12127 and 12148 in 1979. The governor of a state or terri-tory needs to fi rst declare a state of emergency, which then allows for FEMA to coordinate an emergency response.


The Disaster Relief Acts have been amended several times since their inception. In 1988, Congress passed the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (Stafford Act; Public Law 100-707), which encouraged states and locali-ties to develop disaster preparedness plans and increase insur-ance coverage. National disaster relief was expanded again by the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 (Public Law 106-390) and the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2005 (Public Law 109-308).

National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program

Earthquakes pose a special concern in that the connection between earthquake hazards and earthquake risks is very compli-cated; the threat to humans is largely a function of how buildings and other structures respond to seismic waves. It has often been said that earthquakes do not kill people, buildings do. In order to more effi ciently address the unique problem of earthquake hazards, Congress passed Public Law 94-125 in 1977, creating the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). NEHRP is led by NIST, and includes participation by the USGS, NSF, and FEMA. Through the original 1977 legislation and the many later reauthorizations, NEHRP’s goals have been to develop and implement effective practices and policies for earth-quake loss reduction, improve techniques for reducing vulner-abilities of facilities and systems to earthquakes, improve earth-quake hazard identifi cation and risk assessment, and improve the understanding of earthquakes and their effects.

The origins of NEHRP date back to the aftermath of the “Good Friday” Alaska earthquake of 1964. With the realization of the potential for signifi cant structural damage to cities, sev-eral reports were published over many years calling for funds to study earthquakes and earthquake engineering (Fig. 7). These included one report in 1965 led by Frank Press for the Offi ce of Science and Technology (OST), one in 1968 led by USGS Director William Pecora for OST and the Federal Council for Science and Technology (FCST), one in 1969 by the NRC for NSF, and one in 1970 led by Karl Steinbrugge for OST. An obvi-ous problem was that there were competing interests as to which organization should take the lead on earthquake hazards, partic-ularly between the USGS, which had created a National Center for Earthquake Research at Menlo Park in 1965, and the prede-cessor to NOAA, which had created the Earthquake Mechanism Laboratory (Hamilton, 2003).

The 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake renewed inter-est in earthquake hazards, but programmatic confl icts remained. It was not until the Offi ce of Management and Budget (OMB) moved NOAA’s earthquake programs into a new Offi ce of Earth-quake Studies within the USGS that the path was cleared for a more unifi ed approach. However, the impetus for the actual draft-ing of the 1977 bill was the geodetic measurement of land uplift north of Los Angeles, which became known as the “Palmdale Bulge.” While the very existence of the Palmdale Bulge has since been called into question, publicity over this risk led to the for-

mation of NEHRP and of FEMA. NEHRP underwent a major evaluation and review in 2004 and was reauthorized with several new aspects under Public Law 108-360. The potential losses for a large earthquake in a major U.S. metropolitan area were assessed as potentially approaching $200 billion, so NEHRP was directed to develop, operate, and maintain the USGS’s Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) and the Network for Earthquake Engi-neering Simulation (NEES) funding by the National Science Foundation to help understand the risks. The ANSS network monitors earthquakes within the United States, with globally distributed earthquakes monitored by the Global Seismographic Network, which is managed by the Incorporated Research Insti-tutions for Seismology with joint USGS and NSF support.

Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was adopted by the United Nations on 10 September 1996. As of Feb-ruary 2012, 157 nations had ratifi ed the treaty and 25 had not. President William J. Clinton signed the treaty in 1996, and though the U.S. Senate has not yet ratifi ed it, the United States has fol-lowed the treaty’s provisions. The CTBT bans all nuclear explo-sions in all environments for military or civilian reasons. It has taken decades to get the CTBT to the point of ratifi cation by the Senate, but a primary point of concern involves seismologic veri-fi cation. The treaty requires global monitoring to be able to detect any nuclear explosions that are in violation of the treaty. The pri-mary real-time monitoring system consists of a global network of seismometers, and it has taken time to verify and convince nations that this seismic system could detect fi rst- generation nuclear tests of any size and in any environment (Fig. 8).

The basic structure of the monitoring for CTBT starts with an automated International Monitoring System (IMS) of ~170 seismic stations or arrays, 60 infrasound stations, 11 hydroacous-tic stations, and 80 radionuclide stations distributed around the world and organized by the International Data Center (IDC). Fifty of the seismic stations record continuously, and the data are transferred automatically in real time to the IDC, with an addi-tional 120 stations providing an auxiliary system from which data are requested when needed by the IDC. Once a potential nuclear explosion is detected, forensic analysis of the radionuclide fi n-gerprint in samples analyzed from the radionuclide stations can verify an above-ground detonation and potentially subsurface or submarine detonation that is not well contained. The National Technical Means (NTM) provides information from many dif-ferent sources, including satellites, and therefore establishes the basis for countries to request on-site inspections of any suspected explosions. Many private and public organizations have their own systems of monitoring and detecting explosions that aug-ment the work of the IMS. As of 2012, ~70% of the IMS was fully operational with a smaller percentage of the auxiliary sys-tem in place. The network has successfully detected, identifi ed, and located nuclear explosions conducted by France and China before they signed the treaty, and explosions by India, Pakistan,


and North Korea. The detection system can be compromised by submarine explosions, explosions detonated more than 1 km below the surface in hard rock, explosions hidden by mining operations, and other types of evasive maneuvers, but seismology continues to advance to deal with these evasive maneuvers. In the United States, the National Data Center at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for American monitoring and commu-nicates directly with the IDC. The DOE provides analysis, mod-

Figure 7. Photograph showing damage to the Government Hill El-ementary School in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, following the Mw 9.3 Good Friday earthquake on 27 March 1964. This earthquake began a process of deliberation that eventually led to the creation of the Nation-al Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program in 1977. (USGS archive. Image fi le: /htmllib/batch07/batch07j/batch07z/aEquation 00048.jpg.)

Figure 8. Aerial photograph of a site in Nevada, USA, where underground nuclear tests were carried out. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, signed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, moved all nu-clear testing underground, leaving seismology as the primary means of monitoring nuclear tests. (Credit: U.S. Department of Energy.)

eling, and technology to help monitor data from the IDC. The USGS provides support through its global and national seismic networks as well as its geophysical and geochemical expertise. Geoscientists from these agencies are called upon to analyze the data, conduct on-site visits, and inform the U.S. Government and other national to international entities about any possible nuclear explosions. Other geoscientists from public or private sectors may be called upon to help with explosion verifi cation depending on their expertise and their work with other observing networks that may have made relevant detections. Working with the CTBT is one of the more sensitive and dangerous diplomatic and policy roles that geoscientists can engage in, given the international threats posed by nuclear weapons. A comprehensive and con-cise summary of the current state of U.S. policy and geoscience regarding CTBT was prepared by seismologist Jonathan Medalia of the Congressional Research Service (Medalia, 2013).

HUMAN IMPACTS AND POLICY

The protection of the land, air, and water of the United States has been a signifi cant part of U.S. public policy informed by the geosciences. The major acts of environmental protection date back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, though Federal involve-ment in managing pollution actually began in the nineteenth century. While the protection and conservation of U.S. lands receives overwhelming national support in concept (e.g., Gallup polls since 1985 and other polls funded by environmental non-profi t organizations), the direct confl ict that often exists between the development of environmental regulations and free-market competition in a wide range of industries has often made envi-ronmental policy the focal point of considerable political contro-versy. Nonetheless, the dramatic improvements in water and air quality in many parts of the country and the associated reductions in health impacts and pollution-related economic losses represent a signifi cant victory for geoscience in the service of public policy. U.S. laws have served as blueprints for environmental legislation in many other parts of the world.

The roots of environmentalism in America extend back even before the birth of the nation. Benjamin Franklin petitioned in 1739 to have tanneries and waste dumping removed from Phila-delphia’s commercial district on the basis of “public rights,” and led attempts to regulate waste disposal and water pollution from 1762 to 1769. The environmental effects of human impacts were documented by George Marsh in his infl uential book, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modifi ed by Human Action (Marsh, 1864). The year 1872 saw the creation of the world’s fi rst national park (Yellowstone) as well as the start of Arbor Day. However, the fi rst U.S. Government environmental law was not enacted until 1899. It had become clear to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) that the signifi cant amounts of refuse being dumped into rivers were becoming a hazard to inland water navigation. To attempt to halt this, the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899 included a provision that made it ille-gal to dump garbage of any kind into navigable waters or their


tributaries. This provision, later referred to as the Refuse Act, was the fi rst U.S. Government environmental law.

Today, there is a complex suite of public laws that protect the air, water, land, and endangered species. Many of them are amendments to previous laws. These laws are supervised by the Environmental Protection Agency. Signifi cant environmental policy includes the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Clean Air Act (1963 and later amendments), and the Oil Pollution Act (1990).

National Environmental Policy Act

In 1969, Congress passed the fi rst major piece of environ-mental legislation, the National Environmental Policy Act (Pub-lic Law 91-190). NEPA created and enforced a set of procedures to examine and minimize the environmental impacts of govern-ment activities. The regulations did not extend to the private sec-tor, but were the fi rst set of environmental regulations on Federal actions. The goals of NEPA were “to create and maintain condi-tions under which man and nature can exist in productive har-mony, and fulfi ll the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.”

NEPA was signed into law on 1 January 1970, and was nego-tiated by the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support (the House passed NEPA with a 372-to-15 vote). The ideas of the bill were not new, and were very similar to the failed Resources and Conservation Act of 1959, which had been introduced by Senator James Murray of Montana. However, during the 1960s there was a growing public awareness of environmental issues and the effects of pollution, infl uenced by an increasing environmental literature such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson, 1962). An important immediate impetus for the passing of NEPA was the Santa Barbara crude oil spill (the third largest in U.S. history, after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills), which leaked from a Union Oil platform from January to February of 1969 (Fig. 9).

NEPA contains three primary provisions. It lays out a set of national environmental policies and goals, it establishes a set of procedures to ensure that these policies and goals are met, and it created a Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) within the executive offi ce of the President to oversee the enforcement of these provisions. The main purpose of NEPA is to make sure that environmental priorities are weighted equally with other goals in all decision-making processes by all Federal agencies. This applies to global policies as well as to regional issues such as licensing a landfi ll or building a highway. The NEPA legislation describes the “continuing responsibility of the U.S. Government to use all practicable means, consistent with other essential con-siderations of national policy, to improve and coordinate Federal plans…[so] that the Nation may —

• Fulfi ll the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations;

• Assure for all Americans safe, healthful, productive, and aesthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings;

Figure 9. Photograph of the oil piled up on a sea wall in Santa Bar-bara, California, USA, that resulted from an oil spill from an offshore platform in 1969. This oil spill helped motivate public and government sentiment into passing the Clean Water Act and establishing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (USGS archive; http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2009/today09-03-30.html.)

• Attain the widest range of benefi cial uses of the environ-ment without degradation, risk to health or safety, or other undesirable and unintended consequences;

• Preserve important historic, cultural, and natural aspects of our national heritage, and maintain, wherever possible, an environment which supports diversity, and variety of individual choice;

• Achieve a balance between population and resource use which will permit high standards of living and a wide shar-ing of life’s amenities; and

• Enhance the quality of renewable resources and approach the maximum attainable recycling of depletable resources.”

The means for ensuring that these goals are met is through the development of environmental impact statements (EISs) for government actions to assess environmental implications before any actions are taken. Certain government activities can be granted a categorical exclusion if they have a history of not involving any environmental impacts. In most cases, a Federal action requires an environmental assessment (EA), which leads to either a FONSI (Finding of No Signifi cant Impact) or an EIS. The EIS includes an assessment of the impacts of a particular action or policy, reasonable alternatives to the action, and the resources that would be required to be expended if the proposed action was implemented.

The CEQ consists of three members who are appointed by and report to the President. The CEQ was modeled after the Council of Economic Advisors, which had been established in 1946. One of the activities of the CEQ is to assist and advise the President in the construction of an annual State of the Envi-ronment report that includes an assessment of the performance of the government in meeting the requirements of NEPA. One of the strengths of NEPA and its many amendments is that it


piggy-backs on a long list of public laws that protect environ-mental land resources, such as:

• 1947: Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (Public Law 80-104)

• 1964: Wilderness Act (Public Law 88-577)• 1965: Solid Waste Disposal Act (Public Law 89-272)• 1970: National Environmental Policy Act (Public

Law 91-190)• 1970: Wilderness Act (Public Law 91-504)• 1970: Resource Recovery Act (Public Law 91-512)• 1976: Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (Public

Law 94-580)• 1977: Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (Pub-

lic Law 95-87)• 1978: Wilderness Act (Public Law 98-625)• 1980: Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act

(Public Law 96-487)• 1980: Comprehensive Environmental Response,

Compensation, and Liability Act (“Superfund”) (Public Law 96-510)

• 1982: Nuclear Waste Repository Act (Public Law 97-425)• 1984: Hazardous and Solid Wastes Amendments Act

(Public Law 98-616)• 1986: Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act

(Public Law 99-499)• 1994: California Desert Protection Act (Public Law 103-433)• 1996: Food Quality Protection Act (Public Law 104-170)• 2002: Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfi elds Revi-

talization Act (“Brownfi elds Law”) (Public Law 107-118).As this list demonstrates, there is a signifi cant amount of

legislation in support of NEPA and its requirements. NEPA has been widely infl uential in the establishment of environmen-tal legislation by other governments around the world, and as such has been referred to as an “Environmental Magna Carta” (Eccleston, 2008).

Clean Air Act

The Clean Air Act (CAA) and its set of amendments, enforced by the EPA, protect the nation’s air quality and strato-spheric ozone layer. The acronym “CAA” often refers to the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970, which was signed by President Richard Nixon on 31 December 1970, with the aim of balancing the growth of a strong national economy and industry while pro-tecting and improving human health and the environment. This bill is sometimes referred to as the “Muskie Act” in honor of the work done by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine in creating the legislation. President Nixon, upon signing the bill, stated, “I think that 1970 will be known as the year of the beginning, in which we really began to move on the problems of clean air and clean water and open spaces for the future generations of America” (Peters and Woolley, 2013).

The fi rst Federal air pollution legislation was enacted 15 years earlier with the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955, which

funded research into the sources of air pollution. With the prolif-eration of post-war industry, coal-fi red power plants, and a boom in the automobile industry, air quality (and therefore stream and lake quality) was signifi cantly deteriorating. The human health hazards of smog were poorly known at that time, but it was becoming clear that they were dangerous, as shown by events such as the Donora, Pennsylvania, fi ve-day smog attack in 1948 (where 6000 people of the industrial town’s 14,000 residents became sick) or the deadly 1952 “Killer Fog” of London (which killed more than 3000 people).

The 1955 Act was followed in 1963 by the fi rst Clean Air Act, which funded research into ways of minimizing air pollu-tion and developed the fi rst national program to begin to address air pollution-related problems. The fi rst enforcement capabilities came with the 1967 Air Quality Act, for the interstate transport of pollutants, but it was not until the 1970 Clean Air Act Exten-sion that signifi cant powers of enforcement were granted to the newly formed EPA. The later amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1977 and 1990 signifi cantly strengthened the CAA. The history of U.S. air-related environmental legislation includes:

• 1955: Air Pollution Control Act (Public Law 84-159)• 1963: Clean Air Act (Public Law 88-206)• 1965: Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act (Public

Law 89-272)• 1966: Clean Air Act Amendments (Public Law 89-675)• 1967: Air Quality Act (Public Law 90-148)• 1969: National Environmental Policy Act (Public

Law 91-190)• 1970: Clean Air Act Extension (Public Law 91-604)• 1976: Toxic Substances Control Act (Public Law 94-469)• 1977: Clean Air Act Amendments (Public Law 95-95)• 1990: Clean Air Act Amendments (Public Law 101-549).An important focus of the CAA has been monitoring and

reducing the major “criteria” pollutants: particle pollution, ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and lead. These six pollutants are responsible for many of the documented damages to human health, property, and the environment. They are referred to as “criteria” pollutants because the EPA regulates them using research-based criteria. Particle pollution (such as the dust, soot, smoke, and aerosols that result from the burning of oil and coal) is a primary cause of respi-ratory-related diseases such as chronic bronchitis and asthma. These health risks are aggravated by the production of ground-level ozone from volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitro-gen oxides (NOx).

Currently, almost half of all VOCs, more than half of NOx emissions, and 75% of carbon monoxide emissions come from motor vehicles, so important targets of CAA regulations have been car manufacturing and fuel composition. There are over a quarter-billion registered cars and trucks in the United States, with a long-term trend toward increased personal use of trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs), which burn more fuel and thus have greater emissions too. Emissions from cars today are more than 90% cleaner than emissions from cars in 1970 (EPA, 2007).


It was not until 2004, however, that CAA regulations began to apply to SUVs and minivans. Fuels have gotten substantially cleaner. Lead, which has many adverse health effects, started to be phased out in gasoline in the mid-1970s and was banned in 1996. Sulfur levels in fuel were regulated starting in 2006, and highway diesel fuel sulfur levels are now only 3% of pre-2006 fuels (EPA, 2007, 2011).

The lead from gasoline, along with mercury, polychlori-nated biphenyls, and dioxins, are examples of toxic air pollut-ants, known as “toxics,” that accumulate in the environment and pose serious health threats that include cancer, birth defects, and reproduction problems. The 1970 CAA began to regulate tox-ics, one at a time, but only addressed seven of them. The 1990 CAA established broader regulations on the industrial release of 187 different toxics, reducing their emissions by ~70%. The EPA does not prescribe any particular technologies for reducing the emissions of toxics but rather sets allowable levels that cannot be exceeded.

The release of nitrous and sulfur oxides from industry, power plants, and motor vehicles led to critically high acidity lev-els in national streams and lakes, so the 1990 CAA amendments introduced a market-based cap and trade approach to reducing these emissions. For example, power plants are issued “allow-ances” for sulfur dioxide (SO

2) emissions, with each allowance

equal to one ton of SO2 emissions. The fi nancial penalties for

exceeding a plant’s allowances are steep, but plants can buy or sell these allowances to other plants, creating a market for their trade. Plants that install clean coal technologies, use renewable energy sources, or encourage conservation are awarded bonus allowances. The result has been a decrease in air levels of SO

2 by

83% from 1980 to 2010 (EPA, 2011).The 1990 CAA enforced the phase-out of the release of

chemicals that destroy stratospheric ozone. For example, the U.S. production of chlorofl uorocarbons, halons, and methyl chloro-form ended in 1996. However, some ozone-destroying chemicals such as the pesticide methyl bromide are still allowed because economically feasible replacements have not been found. The CAA supports research in the development of “ozone-friendly” substitutes for these chemicals.

After a long battle regarding whether greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, could be considered pollutants by the EPA and thus be regulated as part of the CAA, the Supreme Court settled the issue in 2007 by upholding EPA’s role to determine that carbon dioxide is a toxic pollutant and thus falls within the regulatory capacity of CAA. In 2011, the EPA began to regulate specifi c greenhouse gases as pollutants under the provisions of the CAA. This applies to mobile and stationary sources. This was largely supported by a 2009 report by the EPA that showed that six greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofl uorocarbons, perfl uorocarbons, and sulfur hexafl uoride) posed a signifi cant threat to public health and welfare and could be regulated under the provisions of the CAA.

A 2011 study estimated that direct fi nancial benefi ts from the 1990 CAA amendments between 1990 and 2020 will amount

to a $2 trillion savings (compared to the $65 billion in the costs of implementation) (EPA, 2011). These savings are a result of reductions in health problems and loss of workdays. The esti-mates are that in 2010 the enforcement of the CAA prevented more than 230,000 early deaths and 13,000,000 lost workdays.

Clean Water Act

The Clean Water Act (CWA), formally titled the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments of 1972 (Public Law 92-500), is the primary U.S. law that governs and regulates water pollution. The CWA set standards for the release of toxic substances into U.S. waters, set goals for reducing water pollu-tion, and determined legal penalties for water pollution offend-ers. The original 1972 legislation was aimed at the “waters of the United States,” but this general description was limited in a 2006 Supreme Court case (Rapanos versus United States) to refer only to those relatively permanent streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes that form permanent geographic features, excluding wet-lands and temporary features such as playas (Copeland, 2010). The CWA did not apply to groundwater contamination, which was later addressed by the Safe Water Drinking Act (1974), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), and the Super-fund Act (1986). Nonetheless, the CWA remains the foundation of the protection of the hydrosphere within the United States.

The CWA, like the CAA, was introduced to Congress by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. Though President Nixon was generally supportive of the Clean Water Act (he had already signed the Clean Water Act of 1970), he objected to the $18 bil-lion cost of the program and vetoed the bill, but his veto was overturned by Congress. The CWA is technically a set of amend-ments to previous public laws, including legislation to mitigate water pollution as far back as the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act. A list of some of the key water pollution–related measures include:

• 1899: Rivers and Harbors Act (Refuse Act) (30 Stat-ute 1221)

• 1912: Public Health Service Act• 1924: Oil Pollution Act• 1948: Federal Water Pollution Control Act (Public

Law 80-845)• 1965: Water Quality Act (Public Law 89-234)• 1966: Clean Waters Restoration Act (Public Law 89-753)• 1968: Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (Public Law 90-542)• 1969: National Environmental Policy Act (Public

Law 91-190)• 1970: Water Quality Improvement Act (Public Law 91-224)• 1972: Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments of

1972 (“Clean Water Act”) (Public Law 92-500)• 1974: Safe Drinking Water Act (Public Law 93-523)• 1976: Toxic Substances Control Act (Public Law 94-469)• 1977: Clean Water Act (Public Law 95-217)• 1987: Water Quality Act (Public Law 100-4)• 1996: Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1996

(Public Law 104-182).


In 1910, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) tried to use the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act to regulate urban sew-age in New York City, but courts ruled that this infringed on states’ rights. However, two years later the Public Health Ser-vice Act began to formally monitor sewage and water pollution as risks to public health. The Oil Pollution Act of 1924 gave the USACE the power to arrest polluters for the intentional release of fuel oil into public waters. Following World War II, the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control Act increased the authority of the Public Health Service to monitor water quality, and began to provide funding to state and local governments for the construc-tion of treatment plants for sewage and other wastes. Major amendments to this Act were made in 1961, 1966, 1970, 1972, 1977, and 1987, with the broad 1972 amendments collectively known as the CWA. These regulations have played a dramatic role in improving the water quality of rivers in the United States (Fig. 10).

On 22 June 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fi re for at least the 13th time (dating back to 1868). Sparks from a rail-road car caused the oil-rich debris fl oating on top of the river to catch fi re and partially burned a railroad bridge. Although this fi re was not nearly as large or destructive as the 1952 fi re, which did more than $1 million in damage to boats and river-front property, it caught the attention of the nation primarily through a feature in Time magazine (1 August 1969: “The Price of Optimism”). The public attention from this news story pro-vided some of the impetus for the drafting and passage of new water pollution legislation.

The 1977 amendments of the CWA contained many sepa-rate provisions such as the National Pollutant Discharge Elimi-nation System (NPDES), which allows the EPA to issue permits for discharges into waters within the United States and in off-shore areas. If these discharges are determined to be detrimental to the quality of water supplies, to wildlife, or to recreational uses, the EPA can prohibit them. If violations are made, the EPA can level fi nes that can reach up to $1 million. Any discharge of dredged or fi ll materials likewise requires authorization by permit from the USACE. This provision of the CWA provided the fi rst major protection for wetlands, which up until then had been fi lled for land development without consideration of their value for environmental or other purposes. This provision also added restrictions regarding the dumping of mountaintop- mining waste in streams or wetlands.

The 1977 CWA established modern research-based standards for contaminant discharges from point sources, and these standards formed the basis for the issuance of permits. These standards also covered thermal pollution from power plants. In addition, the CWA created an $18 billion public works fi nancing program for the treat-ment of municipal sewage that initially would pay for up to 75% of the construction of municipal treatment plants (this amount was subsequently reduced in later amendments). One limitation of the CWA is that it only applied to point-source pollution and did not cover non–point-source pollution such as urban storm water or runoff from agricultural activities. The 1987 Water Quality Act addressed these other pollution sources by creating and funding a Nonpoint Source Management Program.

Figure 10. Photographs taken in 1973 of the Androscoggin River, which fl ows through New Hampshire and Maine and was one of the ten most polluted rivers at the start of the Clean Water Act of 1972. (A) Chimneys of the Brown Paper Company Mill, in Berlin, New Hampshire, USA. (B) Outfall from the Brown Paper Company into the Androscoggin River. (C) The Oxford Paper Company Mill viewed from the bridge across the Androscoggin River that connects the town of Rumford and Mexico, in Maine, USA. Because of the Clean Water Acts, the Androscoggin River today is clean of pollution and is an excellent river for boating, swimming, and fi shing. (All photos are from the Environmental Protection Agency and National Archives. Photographer: Charles Steinhacker. U.S. National Archives’ local identifi ers: 412-DA-8191; 412-DA-8199; 412-DA-8225; http://www.fl ickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/72157620729903309/.)


Oil Pollution Act

The BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 brought the almost forgotten Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990 back to the attention of the pub-lic and policymakers. OPA was passed in response to the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska in 1989 and was meant to improve the government’s response to oil spills, help to develop meth-ods and technologies to prevent oil spills, ensure that responsible parties paid for any damages, and support research and develop-ment to improve response and environmental cleanup. OPA rec-ognized the need for supporting geoscientifi c research to not only improve exploration and extraction techniques, but to enhance our understanding of the environmental impacts of resource exploitation and accidents. NOAA has primary responsibilities for handling environmental impacts of an oil spill in the ocean and along coasts while the Environmental Protection Agency deals with issues related to the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the environmental impact of the use of chemicals and other techniques to clean up a spill.

NOAA provides the scientifi c basis for response, cleanup, and development of improved methods for monitoring the cleanup. Between 2004 and 2008, NOAA supported oil spill research at about $2 to $3 million per year through its Offi ce of Response and Restoration and through a cooperative agree-ment with the University of New Hampshire’s Coastal Response Research Institute. The EPA spent about $3 million on oil spill research in 1993, but this amount has slowly decreased since then (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011). Two other prominent agencies involved in oil spill research supported through OPA were the U.S. Coast Guard and the former Minerals Management Service (MMS). The MMS in the Interior Department was given responsi-bilities for oversight of offshore petroleum industry activities and for supporting research and development of improved offshore technologies for drilling, pipelines, transport, and environmental impacts. Between 1993 and 2010, MMS consistently spent about $5 million on oil spill research each year. After the BP Deepwa-ter Horizon oil spill, MMS was divided into two separate agen-cies, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), with BSEE focused on better prevention and response to oil spills. It is unclear what the BSEE funding for oil spill research will be in the future. The U.S. Coast Guard supported an oil spill research program at a level of about $4 million per year from 1993 to 2004, but funding had decreased to less than $1 million by 2010 (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011). Coast Guard spending decreased as NOAA spending increased, but just before the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, both agencies were able to provide very lim-ited funds for oil spill research.

It was the intent of Congress to provide funding for oil spill research from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund through the enactment of OPA, but a quirk in later legislation regarding

agency budgets forced a cap on total spending that reduced the funding for oil spill research even though the funding was not coming from the U.S. Treasury (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011). Con-gress has not enacted any new legislation that would overcome these limiting caps and allow agencies to spend the $28 million authorized by OPA.

The USGS played a prominent role in the scientifi c assess-ment of and response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but is not specifi cally called out as a responsible agency in OPA. Con-gress may remedy this by amending OPA, but even if no new leg-islation is enacted, the government will likely consult and use the geoscience expertise of the USGS for future oil spill responses. University researchers and the National Science Foundation played a signifi cant role in the scientifi c assessment and response to the BP Deepwater Horizon accident. The NSF provided rapid response grants to allow geoscientists to make measurements in the Gulf of Mexico to determine the environmental impact and propose ways to respond. The USGS and university researchers helped to determine the fl ow rate (McNutt et al., 2012) of the leaking oil from the damaged drill site and their advice helped in capping the multiple leaks without further delays and problems.

GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION AND POLICY

There are certain aspects of governance that have tradition-ally been left to the states and have had minimal Federal partici-pation. Education, including science education, is one of those areas. While the U.S. Government has, on occasion, passed legislation to attempt to infl uence or incentivize state activities in this area, the actual educational policies have always been left to the states. Emblematic of this is the fact that there are no national science standards for K–12 education—each state gets to determine its own science standards and even how many years of science a student should take. While the current K–12 Next Generation Science Standards effort is aimed toward a national audience, adoption is still voluntary on a state-by-state basis (Wysession, 2012).

This situation is unfortunately disadvantageous to the fi elds of earth and space science, dating back to recommendations made in 1893 by the Committee of Ten, a committee chaired by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, which was con-vened at the request of the National Education Association to attempt to standardize national science education. The fi eld of geology was very much still in its infancy at that time, and as a result the committee recommended that “physical geography” be taught before three years of high school biology, physics, and chemistry (NEA, 1893). Unfortunately, this tradition was still in effect 120 years later, with the outcome that geoscience has usu-ally been taught in middle school but has played a minor role in most high schools in the country (Blank et al., 2007).

There have been many acts of legislation that have tried to address the needs of science education, though they have an unfortunate history of being underfunded and ineffective. These


measures have often been spurred by attempts to stay competi-tive with other countries in the areas of science and technology. For example, the 1958 National Defense Education Act (Public Law 85-864), which encouraged training in applied mathematics and provided college loans to many thousands of students, was motivated by the space race with the Soviet Union and even had a McCarthyist clause requiring benefi ciaries to promise not to overthrow the U.S. Government. Some acts, such as the 1990 National Environmental Education Act (Public Law 101-116), have provided modest funding for geoscience-related educa-tional programs.

One of the most infl uential Federal education acts was the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Public Law 89-10), which was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The Act provided funds for primary and secondary education through professional development, instructional mate-rials, support programs, and parental involvement. Most signifi -cantly, its Title 1 program provided special fi nancial assistance to schools with signifi cant numbers of low-income children. Cur-rently, Title 1 funding is received by more than half of all U.S. public schools. However, the Act explicitly forbade the creation of a national curriculum. This legislation has been reauthorized many times. The current reauthorization, proposed in 2001 by President George W. Bush, is known as “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) (Public Law 107-110). NCLB is a standards-based edu-cational act that applies fi nancial penalties on schools that do not perform well in the standardized testing of its students. This con-troversial Act, which has been largely responsible for pushing education toward a more “teaching to the test” approach, only addresses education in the areas of English and mathematics. The result has been that while progress in mathematics and English has been observed by many testing mechanisms, test scores in other areas including science have dropped due to decreased time and emphasis.

Another concern with NCLB has been that without a national curriculum, each state was allowed to determine its own standards, leading to signifi cant inequality between state evalu-ations. This disparity was the target of the development of the “Common Core” standards in K–12 mathematics and English language arts (ELA), written by the organization Achieve, Inc., and the concurrent awarding of “Race to the Top” (R2T) funds by the U.S. Department of Education. R2T funding, in the amount of $4.35 billion, came from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and was awarded to the 12 states that had the highest scores in a rubric that included many criteria involved with improving education. One criterion was that the state commit to adopting the Common Core standards, which, as with NCLB, were only in the areas of math and ELA. Though the Common Core standards were tied to R2T, they were state-sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Offi cers (CCSSO), who had founded the organization Achieve, Inc., in 1996.

While there are not and will not be any science standards as part of the Common Core, there is a set of published nationally

aimed science standards, including Earth and Space Science, called the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Like the Common Core, their writing has been supervised by Achieve, Inc., though with increased participation by NGA and CCSSO. The NGSS are the implementation of the recommendations of the NRC report, “A Framework for K–12 Science Education” (NRC, 2011). Both the Framework and the NGSS were funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and adoption by states is entirely voluntary. The NGSS represent a signifi cant advance-ment beyond the seminal National Science Education Standards (NSES), published by the NRC in 1996 (NRC, 1996), in that the standards fully integrate science content with scientifi c practices. The NSES were very infl uential for the development of standards by many states, but were never adopted nationally. It remains unclear how many states will adopt the NGSS, though many states beyond the 26 that were directly involved with the writing of the standards have expressed interest in adopting them. This has very positive implications for geoscience because NGSS, unlike the 1893 report by the Committee of Ten, recommends a year of Earth and Space Science in high school as well as in mid-dle school, and the topics covered (including climate change and human sustainability) are of a level of complexity that requires that most be taught following biology, chemistry, and physics (Wysession, 2012).

It is not clear if there will be any Federal legislation that will address NGSS, similar to R2T. As mentioned earlier, there are many U.S. Government organizations that are concerned with advanc-ing national science and technology through STEM education. The major legislation that currently addresses this is the America COMPETES Act, which was initially passed in 2007 as the Amer-ica Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-69), and reauthorized in 2011 as the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-358). The measures put forward here are designed to stimulate technological innova-tion and scientifi c advancements through investments in STEM education. These STEM programs are to be administered by the NSF, NASA, NOAA, NIST, and the DOE. Funding targets include increasing the number and quality of national science teachers, increasing the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, mentoring postdoctoral researchers, developing advanced STEM curricula and educational materials, increasing the research experiences for undergraduates, increasing the number of merit-based scholar-ships, and increasing training opportunities for developing innova-tion and advancing manufacturing. There are many opportunities for the geosciences within these provisions.

CONCLUSION

The United States has a long history of Federal legislation concerning geosciences-related topics. When the United States was founded, with a population of around 2.5 million, its fron-tiers and the resources contained within them seemed limitless,


and the environmental impacts of its citizens were minimal, at least compared to today. As the U.S. population expanded by more than a hundred-fold and most of its land was developed for agriculture, livestock grazing, mineral and energy resource production, and the construction of towns and cities, confl icts and challenges involving the use of the land, air, and water increas-ingly required government intervention. Along with this legisla-tion have evolved a large number of government and nongov-ernmental organizations that are responsible for carrying out the necessary geoscience research that make that legislation possible.

The creation and support of geoscience-informed policy are very challenging. There are many political, economic, and social factors that sometimes oppose each other. This occurs for all three of the major areas of geoscience-related legislation: resource development, hazards mitigation, and human impacts. Appropriate actions are sometimes very costly. Environmental protection often requires signifi cant shifts in industrial practices and can be very expensive. Developing urban infrastructures that can withstand natural hazards that might not even occur during their structural lifetimes can be unpopular. There is a continual tension between balancing preparations for the future against the needs of the present. The conservation of resources for the benefi t of future generations is often directly at odds with the economic pressures of today. For example, in the current period of high unemployment and stagnant fi nancial growth, can the United States afford to raise energy costs by requiring that coal-fueled power plants remove particulates and carbon dioxide from waste exhaust? For the sake of future economies and the long-term health of the nation (both medical and economic), can the United States afford not to? Political power in Washington, as well as public opinion, changes over time. Controversial legislation enacted by one Congress or administration may be challenged or even reversed by a later one, such as with the proposed storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

This situation is made all the more challenging within the construct of a political system where elected offi cials are acutely aware that raising taxes for government programs, no matter how necessary, is likely to raise the wrath of voters and lower the likelihood of reelection. However, wise legislative decisions depend upon accurate and up-to-date advice, and this requires the fi nancial support of a healthy infrastructure for basic and applied research funding. The targets of geoscience legislation— managing resources, reducing risks to hazards, and minimizing human impacts—are not simple problems with easy solutions, and neither are the areas of Earth systems research needed to address them. Sustained programs in geoscience research and development are an absolute necessity. It is evident, however, that continued support for geoscience research will not be possible unless the basic Earth science literacy of the American populace signifi cantly increases. Improving geoscience education is there-fore a fundamental requirement for providing the foundation for a sustainable and resilient society.

Given an increasing population, greater urbanization, growing and competing demands for resources, continued and

changing environmental degradation, and risks from natural and human-driven hazards, the needs for sound geoscience in national policymaking have greatly increased over time. The near future poses some very signifi cant challenges that may require some severe decisions. Humans now use over 40% of the land surface to raise or grow their foods, with much of the remaining land too arid to be arable. Under this stress, soil quality is decreasing. The wastes from 7 billion people who are living in increasingly industrialized communities put stresses on water and air quality. Humans use energy at a planetary scale—at a rate of 18 terawatts, which is about half the rate that the entire planet cools off into space. Our economically viable mineral and fossil fuel resources now have lifetimes that are measured in only decades or centu-ries. The nine gigatons of carbon released by humans into the atmosphere each year is causing a historically unprecedented rise in global temperatures, with a long cascade of ramifi cations that include sea-level rise, glacier thinning, decreased groundwa-ter recharge, increased drought frequency, and increased ocean storm intensity.

And yet, the human population, which doubled over the past 40 years, continues to soar. Scientists who study the topic of human sustainability debate how many planets it would take to provide a long-term supply of the resources humans now use, but in any case it is far more than one, and becomes greater every year as the population continues to increase. Historically, human populations have existed and expanded at the full capacity of the land, which has meant that unfavorable climate changes have led to signifi cant losses of life. For example, European popula-tions expanded greatly during the mild and pleasant climates of the Medieval Warm Period that accompanied a slight increase in solar output. However, 70% of all Western Europeans died dur-ing the ensuing fourteenth century from the famine and disease that accompanied the less favorable agricultural conditions. With future climate fl uctuations, perhaps driven by anthropogenic forces, such population losses today are not acceptable, nor are they necessary. However, these and other enormous Earth-related challenges will not be solved by self-regulation, on the part of individuals or industries. It is only through intelligent, educated, research-based national (and likely global) legislation that some measure of human sustainability will be attained.

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