ABSTRACT
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), like other pieces of major legislation, created opportunities for political leverage and catalyzed change that the initial authors never envisioned. Numerous circumstances also greatly influenced the development of the initial, rather vague NEPA seeds. These circumstances included the explosion of the environmental movement in the early 1970s and presidential endorsement of a strong role for the newly established Council on Environmental Quality vis a vis NEPA implementation. The initial image of Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) as a means to add environmental quality concerns to the list of existing planning and development criteria resulted in a perceived conflict with the institutionalized notions of economic efficiency, political expediency, and engineering effectiveness. Many analysts have attempted to interpret the evolution of NEPA over the last ten years; all agree that, for better or worse, the EIS has been the key variable in the law's application.
