ABSTRACT
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has had a major effect on the normal routines of government bureaucracies, however it may have affected the human environment. The standard agency procedures are all, of course, within parameters established by NEPA statute and then within the narrower parameters imposed by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the political process structured by the CEQ. NEPA's sponsors recognized that lofty statutory declarations of policy would have little effect on agency decisionmakers. In a series of 1971-1973 decisions, federal courts held agencies to strict compliance with NEPA's procedural mandate. By the 1980s, the US Supreme Court had set a pattern of interpreting NEPA narrowly. The chapter discusses the effort to integrate NEPA compliance with other planning mandates began shortly after passage of the act, but it took longer to integrate these efforts than to accomplish some other organizational procedures.
