NEPA works by forcing government disclosure that citizens could never fund themselves

Evidence

There are many reasons for NEPA’s effectiveness. One underestimated reason is that adverse environmental impacts, once publicly disclosed, prove difficult to ignore. Environmentalists are unlikely to have the resources necessary to produce that information on their own. Yet, once armed with NEPA’s statutory requirement of information disclosure, environmentalists proved quite capable of forcing the federal government to produce that information for them and, upon its subsequent public disclosure, to use the information as an effective organizing tool. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 394

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State SEPAs extended NEPA’s reach to private activity and added substantive mandates — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 398; NEPA’s procedural disclosure mandate produced real environmental protection despite its critics — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 393; Environmental law thrives in democracies because they enable information disclosure — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 1104