Environmental Impact Statements

Origins

Following a very gradual awakening of public interest and concern for the environment, an enlightenment encouraged by such U.S. figures as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold, the EIS became a significant instrument in the U.S. environmental movement in 1970. Most observers agree that the breakthrough was precipitated by yet another U.S. writer, Rachel Carson, and her book Silent Spring, published in 1962. The EIS was devised as a legally binding way to pause the developmental process and to enrich it with insights from the biological and social sciences and numerous other disciplines, combined with broad public input.

An EIS might be required by any level of government. A municipality, for example, might call for an EIS before proceeding with a new parking garage. A county might demand an EIS before issuing permits for a new coal-fired electric plant. The state might develop an EIS prior to introducing new timber harvest rules for forests on state lands. At the national level in the United States, the EIS is the centerpiece of the federal National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Signed into law by Richard Nixon on January 1, 1970, it helped mark the beginning in this country of a new era of environmental awareness and responsibility.

Considered by scholars to be a remarkably straightforward, efficiently worded piece of environmental legislation, the introductory paragraphs of NEPA begin to articulate environmental policy for the nation and are eloquent in stating the purpose and urgency of the groundbreaking law that declares the encouragement of “productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment” to be the official national policy of the United States (see the NEPA Web site for full text of the statute and other useful information). These sentiments indicated that the U.S. government and, more importantly, the public were learning a fundamental lesson from ecology that says, metaphorically, that everything is related to everything else. The environmental impact statement was to become the required exercise to identify and address these many things.

The Florida Barge Canal Statement

The first EIS ever drafted in the United States was prepared not as a result of a federal mandate, but as an innovation by a private conservation group, the Florida Defenders of the Environment (FDE). The novel document was titled Environmental Impact of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal: With Special Emphasis on the Oklawaha Regional Ecosystem and was published in 1970, the same year that NEPA was signed into law.

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