NEPA has followed a similar course. In the 1970s, it helped to bring about far-reaching changes in the planning and management practices of many federal agencies. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the usefulness of NEPA stalled. The courts became less supportive, and federal agencies adopted defensive tactics to neutralize the impact of the law on their operations. Today, the requirements of NEPA—in particular, to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for major federal actions—have become mainly a bureaucratic obstacle to be overcome, generating large volumes of paperwork but having a modest impact on the actions of federal agencies.

In their history of NEPA, Matthew Lindstrom and Zachary Smith greatly lament this fate. They argue that NEPA had the potential for a revolutionary improvement in the quality of federal decision making. The prime culprit in their minds is the Supreme Court. The courts initially gave strong backing to NEPA, but then an increasingly conservative Supreme Court undercut the law.

The greatest blow was the Court's limiting of NEPA to procedural considerations. According to this cramped interpretation—as Lindstrom and Smith see it—NEPA is now unable to prevent even the most environmentally destructive of federal actions, as long as the negative environmental impacts are fully disclosed in advance.

Lindstrom and Smith argue that, to the contrary, NEPA contains strong substantive requirements. As they state, “NEPA legislates values …. NEPA is unconventional in its purpose and design, which seek to reorganize the federal government's values and actions not through budgetary diversions or strict standards but by providing a set of goals and values for all agencies” (p. 8). NEPA, as they contend, represented “a political device to guide Americans toward sustainable ecological paradigms,” guided by “the act's holistic purpose and vision” (p. 10).

Unfortunately, the authors fail to address seriously the powerful arguments that can be made against their views. If NEPA were given the wide substantive role that they envision, it would seem that the courts would be in a position of constant second-guessing of federal agencies. It would not only overwhelm the administrative capacity of the courts but also collapse the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

As it is, NEPA did represent a large court challenge to executive authority. By declaring an EIS to be procedurally “inadequate,” federal courts have delayed a long list of federal projects. In a number of cases, this delay has resulted in the cancellation of the project. Even the more aggressive federal judges recognized, however, that judicial power has its limits and that they should couch any court's substantive views in language—however fictional in many cases—of an exclusive procedural concern.

NEPA passed the Congress with little objection; most members, in fact, had little idea of the implications of the law. This reflected to a degree a conscious strategy on the part of the environmental proponents. As Lindstrom and Smith acknowledge, there was insufficient political support for a “frontal challenge to the missions of existing agencies” (p. 124) in the service of the environment. An approach more likely to be successful would be to enact a vague law and then leave it to the courts to require the necessary changes in agency practices. To a surprising extent, this strategy worked—for a time at least.

Environmental advocates, in fact, faced a dilemma. They lacked the democratic support in the 1960s to prevail in their agenda. Yet if they had bypassed normal democratic processes, their actions would have lacked full social legitimacy. If the Supreme Court eventually did act to limit the influence of NEPA, it reflected in part an unwillingness to impose a revolution in administrative practice without a clearer statement of such an intent from the Congress.

NEPA is ultimately a planning law; as Lindstrom and Smith declare, the law is intended to provide “a mechanism for more rational planning regarding the environment” (p. 126). It was part of a general effort in the 1960s and 1970s to require more and better planning by federal agencies. The National Forest Management Act of 1976 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, for example, mandate that the basic management of the public lands must be based on formal land-use plans. As implemented by the agencies, the land-use plans would also serve as the impact statements required by NEPA.

Yet Lindstrom and Smith do not provide any discussion of planning theory and how NEPA might be integrated into a wider vision of an overall planning process. The book simply seems to assume that if “politics” does not interfere, the experts will be able to obtain the necessary information and provide objective answers. Implicitly, the authors offer yet another version of “scientific management,” an idea that dates back to the progressive era early in the twentieth century.

This vision, however, has been widely rejected in political science and public administration circles over the past 50 years. Public decision making, as is now generally understood, frequently involves basic conflicts of social values that cannot be resolved by scientific methods. If NEPA is limited to a procedural role, it can serve to inform the participants in a democratic process. If it is to have a substantive role backed by the courts, as Lindstrom and Smith advocate, the effect would instead be to supersede the democratic process.

An intense wish for a more rational world spawned many forms of utopian thought in the twentieth century. Socialist planners early in the century sought the “comprehensive” economic planning of society. In their naïveté, they believed that planning simply required the development of a comprehensive set of prescriptions and then the administrative systems to implement the prescriptions directly.

Because of many unfortunate experiences in the real world, such idealistic visions of comprehensive planning had been widely abandoned by the 1960s. Old ideas do not die easily, however. The advocates of NEPA, such as Lynton Caldwell, created a new language and a new set of metaphors—“holistic” planning, for example, rather than comprehensive planning —for much the same set of old dreams.

In any event, the new planning requirements of the 1970s—the product in large part of environmental advocacy—were as much a failure as their predecessors earlier in the twentieth century. On the public lands, they have yielded today an almost total state of gridlock that is widely lamented by observers of all political stripes.

If NEPA failed to achieve the revolution in government planning and administration sought by Lindstrom and Smith, it did give environmental advocates many new “handles” that they exploited successfully to challenge federal agencies. In the real world, NEPA was a major success for its time. But it has become tired and stale by now. Unfortunately, there is little in this book to guide us to a new and better way of integrating environmental considerations with other social concerns in government planning and decision making. The book does, nevertheless, contain useful information about the legislative history and the environmental aspirations that led to the enactment of one of the most important environmental laws of the twentieth century.