ABSTRACT
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) decade was accompanied by a diffuse shift from public approbation for "pork barrel" projects that promised local economic benefits to public suspicion about the environmental, social, and fiscal costs of such projects. NEPA, however, certainly gave those political pressures a legitimate channel into the bureaucratic world of project decision-making. The NEPA process, as elaborated by the prescriptive literature based on many cues in the act's language, nonetheless holds out rational-comprehensive decision-making as an ideal. One could argue that NEPA was directed more at impacts on the biological components of natural environments than at physiographic impacts. The empirical record and real-world limitations of the NEPA process present a grim prognosis for the rational, comprehensive, optimizing, scientific model of the prescriptive literature on environmental impact statements (EISs). The chapter examines whether EISs contain the kind of quantified, precise forecasts that are the hallmark of state-of-the-art environmental assessment, according to the prescriptive literature.
