Overview and Initiating the Environmental Impact Analysis and Assessment - Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods - page 105

4
Overview and Initiating the Environmental
Impact Analysis and Assessment
The preceding two chapters dealt with the regulatory, institutional, admin-
istrative, and procedural aspects of environmental impact analysis and
assessment with a particular focus on NEPA, the first government-legislated
environmental analysis program. These two chapters laid the foundation for
environmental analysis, documenting the history, need, and requirements.
The discussion in Chapters 2 and 3 conveyed information on why an analy-
sis is necessary, the objectives of an analysis, and what can be accomplished
through environmental impact analysis, but there was little discussion on
how to actually conduct the analysis or use the results to address the overall
objectives and goals.
This chapter and the next address the technical approach to environmen-
tal analysis with a focus on how to conduct the analysis and then incorporate
the results to create a better and more environmentally sustainable project,
plan, or policy. Chapters 4 and 5 address the technical approach not in the
sense of scientific/engineering/planning disciplines, such as air-quality
modeling, toxicity testing, wildlife population studies, or comparable tech-
niques in the social sciences. The approach described in these chapters is
more focused on how to use the results of such truly technical disciplines
and methods to predict impacts and incorporate the results.
The information presented in this chapter and the next is somewhat analo-
gous to a description of the scientific method. The scientific method informs
the research scientist of a prescribed set of logical and rational steps to bet-
ter understand phenomena and explore the causes and implications of the
phenomena; it does not inform on how to conduct specific scientific tests
or experiments. For example, James D. Watson and Francis Crick used the
scientific method when they uncovered the structure of DNA in 1953. They
followed the prescribed procedures they knew intimately from a lifetime of
scientific research and they made observations, took measurements, formu-
lated a hypothesis, tested the hypothesis, and then modified the hypothesis
and retested until it explained the phenomena. The scientific method taught
them to follow these steps, but it told them absolutely nothing about physical
chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, or laboratory techniques that were critical
to making the discovery. It simply and directly helped them use the results
of sophisticated science to understand and explain the phenomena. The
intent of this and the next chapter is to convey a similar understanding of
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