Testimony and other comment about the US National Environmental Policy Act and the environmental impact statements it requires tends toward advocacy, for or against, says Greenberg (environmental policy, Rutgers, U.), so he decided that if he wanted actual evaluation, he would have to do it himself. Writing for students and their instructors in a course on or encompassing the statements, he measures selected environmental impact statements against a set of standard questions. He begins, however, with a statement of values and 40 years of field trials. The statements are for such projects and concerns as metropolitan New Jersey: transportation, sprawl, and urban revitalization; Johnston Island: destruction of the US chemical weapons stockpile; and Animas-La Plata, Four Corners: water rights and the Ute legacy. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
This book is about a subject that Michael Greenberg has worked on and lived with for almost forty years. He was brought up in the south Bronx at a time when his neighborhood suffered from terrible air and noise pollution, and domestic waste went untreated into the Hudson River. For him, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was a blessing. It included an ethical position about the environment, and the law required some level of accountability in the form of an environmental impact statement, or EIS.
After forty years of thinking about and working with NEPA and the EIS process, Greenberg decided to conduct his own evaluation from the perspective of a person trained in science who focuses on environmental and environmental health policies. This book of carefully chosen real case studies goes beyond the familiar checklists of what to do, and shows students and practitioners alike what really happens during the creation and implementation of an EIS.
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