Pollution in a Promised Land "ss1.91"

ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING

Marinov joined the National Planning Council, which set the strategies for so much of the country's physical and economic development. Although technically he held only advisory status, he immediately set out to utilize the forum to promote environmental interests. Eventually he found funds to pay environmental advisers to counsel the six Regional Planning Committees. Although the EPS had talked a great deal about environmen-tal impact statements and even proposed a pilot framework, none had ac-tually ever been prepared.

When the “post-Reading” generation of power plants came up for dis-cussions, it was decided to locate the next one in the Hadera coastal region. Marinov had his test case. The EPS took a moderate position, which was to be the trademark of Marinov's environmental management strategy. Sensing that direct confrontation would produce few environmental victo-ries, for tactical reasons his EPS rarely opposed development outright.^[103] Marinov's tendency to accommodate industry and his willingness to compromise

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up front were the subject of criticism both throughout his public service career in the 1970s and 1980s and especially during the 1990s as a somewhat nondiscriminating consultant for the private sector. Defenders of this pragmatism cite the overwhelming absence of environmental con-sciousness or precedent in Israel at the time. With no real statutory au-thorities, the young environmentalists could rely only on moral suasion and Marinov's own powers of persuasion.^[104] Accordingly, the EPS did not object to the establishment of a coal-fired plant in Israel, arguing that it could be built with sound environmental controls.^[105] At the same time, Marinov demanded that an environmental impact statement (EIS) accom-pany the Israel Electric Company's proposal.

The decision to require an EIS in this case proved to be a crucial prece-dent. Marinov fought to bring the deliberations from the Regional Planning Committee to the National Council, where he had more allies and leverage. (The previous power station built in Ashdod had been ap-proved by a regional committee, on the basis of a decision that was only two pages long, containing only half a page of environmental provisions.) Predictably the Electric Company lobbied against the venue, arguing that the National Council was not a professional body, having members who represented youth and women's organizations.^[106] Yet Kuberski, who chaired the Council, backed the environmental demands, and the utility acquiesced. In May 1976 the impact statement was submitted to the EPS for approval. It was based on a questionnaire drafted by the EPS staff, and it showed that the site proposed by the Electric Company was actually less appropriate than the alternative site next to the Hadera Stream, which was favored by ecologists.^[107]

Six years later, the Minister of the Interior signed formal regulations into force that required environmental impact statements for a variety of large projects. The regulations also empowered planning committees or ministry representatives who sat on them to request an EIS for a proj-ect.^[108] In theory, if for any reason impact statements deviated from the guidelines set by the Ministry, the planning authorities were duty-bound to suspend discussions concerning project approval. By 1985 the EPS plan-ning department could boast forty separate impact statements that it was either reviewing or whose preparation it was overseeing.^[109] By 1997 the regulations had given rise to 236 such statements.^[110]

The Israeli environmental impact statement was by no means state-of-the-art. It did not require alternative analysis (including a no-action option), a crucial tool for evaluating the actual benefits of a project. It ignored indirect or social impacts. It left the responsibility for drafting

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the document in the developers' hands, occasioning an optimistic bias in Israeli environmental evaluations. Most of all, many problematic types of projects, such as superhighways, were not on the mandatory-EIS list. Indeed, only a small fraction of the seven thousand plans going through Israel's planning system each year are evaluated via impact statements.^[111] Yet the framework was a marked improvement, and in many important cases impact statements succeeded in getting planning agencies (and developers) to stop, think, and sometimes modify buil-ding plans.