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Yukon Pacific’s Environmental Review Committee a first for Alaska ERC wouldn’t work for all projects, say participants: requires project without ideological issues, developer open to working with environmental community Kristen Nelson Editor-in-Chief
For the past 11 years, while Yukon Pacific Corp. has worked on permits for its trans-Alaska gas system to take North Slope gas to Asia as liquefied natural gas, it has also been working with environmental groups on an experiment in cooperation.
That experiment is the TAGS Environmental Review Committee, formed in 1989 when Yukon Pacific approached the environmental community and said it would pay for access to the environmental community's expertise on environmental issues along the 800-mile route of the proposed gas pipeline.
Yukon Pacific was asking to pay environmental groups for the value of their knowledge — to include them in the process and work openly with them, said Mike Macy, who has been the coordinator for the TAGS Environmental Review Committee since 1994.
Macy has written a short history of the TAGS ERC, and he talked to PNA about the committee in December as he was packing up the operation.
Yukon Pacific's parent company, CSX, decided to mothball the ERC, Macy said, because the project isn't currently facing a lot of environmental issues.
However, he said, if Yukon Pacific gets access to ANS gas, CSX has said it would revive the committee.
Committee a new concept for Alaska The TAGS ERC is a different approach for nongovernmental organization environmentalist activists, Macy said. Environmental activists assemble lists of impacts and concerns about a proposed project and then raise public concern — with a goal of generating enough public concern to either stop it or reduce the environmental impacts.
One reason environmental groups agreed to the TAGS ERC was because the Yukon Pacific project would have been harder to oppose than some developments, Macy said. It already had a number of permits, it was in an existing pipeline corridor and was a natural gas project — all of which would have made it hard to raise substantial public opposition, especially in an energy state like Alaska.
But the ERC was a new concept to Alaska when the TAGS ERC was established in 1989, Macy said: “The first thing that had to be done was to come up with a framework or a understanding of what the ground rules were.”
Macy said the environmental community feared being co-opted and set down some requirements: Yukon Pacific could not use the existence of the TAGS ERC in promotions and could not claim exemption from environmental requirements because of the existence of the committee. Yukon Pacific could never say “we don't have to follow this rule or that rule or do this requirement because we have this group. It was not a free get out of jail card or anything like that,” Macy said.
Japanese reassured by TAGS ERC Macy said Yukon Pacific was very careful not to use the committee in promotions, but did discuss the Environmental Review Committee in trade visits to Japan. The Japanese were concerned about an American project because “compared to other parts of the world, we have this environmental, regulatory nightmare,” he said.
The Japanese perceived the environmental community in American to be very strong.
Yukon Pacific talked to the Japanese about the ERC, Macy said, and “the Japanese eventually became convinced that the only way you could do a gas pipeline project in Alaska was by involving Yukon Pacific because they cracked this particular nut and solved this problem.”
Macy said that while Yukon Pacific was careful not to use the ERC, the boundaries did get blurred: “I became a real booster of the project. … Ideally the coordinator would just be the monkey in the middle.”
The ERC coordinator was a half-time position, and several coordinators came and went, Macy said. The half-time position didn't work for some and others weren't interested in working to improve a project. Both sides of the equation worked for Macy, who has been involved in environmental issues since 1979, and is also a body therapist and wanted time for a half-time therapy practice.
Issues had to be clarified Macy became the ERC coordinator in 1994, just as the committee and Yukon Pacific came to an impasse over two documents a consultant had prepared identifying wetlands. Macy has a master's degree in English, and, he said, “being a writer and an editor and also figuring my job as coordinator was to try to figure out what was going on, I just read the documents, both the documents, and said well, something's wrong here.”
The documents were not well written.
“I said I think there's a possibility that what we're dealing with here isn't just Yukon Pacific tying to get away with murder. … there could be something else going on here, so let's see what's really going on here. And then when we figure that out we can figure out whether we have a problem with it.”
Macy got Yukon Pacific to agree that he would rewrite the documents, “so we could understand what was being proposed.” It turned out that Yukon Pacific was talking about a short-hand method for deciding in the office what areas should receive more attention as wetlands in the field.
“Oh, if that's all you're going to use it for, we can live with that,” was the result once the Environmental Review Committee could see what was actually being proposed.
In a typical developer versus environmentalists disagreement, he said, “everyone would just agree to disagree… And we got through that.”
ERC changes in mid-'90s The Environmental Review Committee originally included some large national environmental groups: the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace. After Macy became coordinator and the ERC was able to work through the wetlands documents problem, some groups pulled out of the ERC.
Macy said when he showed up he started generating reports and information that people had to respond to: ”Most of these people are really busy. So if it's either outside their bailiwick or something they're not they've not really bought into or not a high priority,” they dropped out of the ERC.
In recent years the ERC has included Stevens Village-Yukon River Tours-Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association, the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, the Alaska Forum for Environmental Responsibility, the Copper Country Alliance, the Prince William Sound Audubon and Cook Inlet Keeper.
Macy said it also may have clinched it for some people when he “became sort of a partisan of Yukon Pacific.”
That, he said, is “something maybe I would do differently in a perfect world, but I don't think it really mattered. Because it didn't really drive away the people that were going to roll up their sleeves and actually work on things and it hasn't prevented them from speaking out …”
Would this work for other projects? The Environmental Review Committee concept wouldn't work, Macy said, “where the environmental community has a big ideological problem with a project.
“So if it's like the (Arctic National Wildlife) Refuge… If it has to do with wilderness, or pipeline across the wilderness like the northern route or up the Dempster Lateral or something…“ an ERC wouldn't work.
The other thing that made the ERC work, Macy said, is the corporate climate at Yukon Pacific. When he came onboard, Yukon Pacific had shrunk in size and Macy was given open access to staff at Yukon Pacific — and all but two confidential documents — and basically became one of the family, he said.
So the willingness of Yukon Pacific to share information — the openness of the company — also contributed to the success of the Environmental Review Committee experiment.
Macy said that at a December luncheon attended by people involved with the ERC and Yukon Pacific there was discussion about the ERC process. One of the things people concluded, Macy said, is that the process wouldn't work for all projects — in fact you wouldn't want to use it for every project or “it would become like everything else, sort of meaningless.”
The ERC has also been “very labor and time intensive and somewhat capital intensive,” he said. “And in terms of what we proved, I think we proved that it can work. It won't always work.”
To work, an ERC requires “the right project and circumstances and the right people… But they really have to be problem solvers,” he said, both from the project developer and the environmental community.
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