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AFTER seven years’experience, the nationwide Conservation Foundation has concluded that “environmental impact statements” have had only a limited effect in the United States. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) has not “ushered in an Age of Environmental Enlightenment,” the foundation reports in the current issue of its monthly newsletter, and the conclusionbased on experience in the Piedmont—seems to be an understatement.
Not only is there “too much evidence and expert opinion... that impact statements frequently are not relied upon by those who make policies and decisions, ’ ’ reports the foundation, there is also the fact that officials are often “locked into decisions before enenvironmental impact statements are even drafted. . .”
How true that was with the “EIS” prepared for 1-66 from Gainesville to Front Royal. First of all, the Virginia Highway Department was reluctant to even conduct such a study, and then it carefully chose a firm s taffed by former departmental employes to conduct the study! Then, taking the narrowest possible mandate of NEPA’s impact statement requirements, the study maintained that 1-66—a highway which has already been a major catalyst in the transformation of much of Northern Virginia from farmland to commuter neighborhoods and shopping centers—would not have all that much impact
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