Summary of the National Environmental Policy Act and Implementing Regulations - Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods - page 22

assist states in meeting their Clean Water Act obligation of developing water
quality standards. Also as presented in the discussion of programmatic
impact significance criteria (Section 5.3.3.3) the U.S. EPA funded research that
was critical in evaluating marine biota and water quality impacts and was
a determining factor in decisions involving the level of municipal wastewa-
ter treatment and discharge location. Since the passage of NEPA, numerous
method documents have been produced by EPA and other federal agencies
to advance and standardize technical impact analysis methodology. These
documents reflect all aspects of analysis including describing existing condi-
tions, predicting impacts, determining level of significance, and developing
mitigation. A number of methods were developed by federal environmental
and resource agencies initially after the passage of NEPA (Table 2.1) and the
development of analysis procedures has continued. The list presented is not
intended to be exhaustive but rather to give examples of the early attempts
at developing environmental analysis methods and the last entry reflects the
current practice of including the documents on agency web pages. As part
of the environmental analysis process, the agencies with jurisdiction and/
or technical expertise should be contacted to obtain guidance on the latest
analysis methods for resources potentially affected.

2.2.4 The Environmental Impact Statement

The most visible and best known aspect of NEPA is the EIS. The founda-
tion for the EIS is a “detailed statement” as required in Title I, Section 102 C:
“… include in every recommendation or report on proposals for legislation and other
major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, a
detailed statement by the responsible official… … [emph a si s added].” Mo st people
familiar with environmental analysis, including many NEPA practitioners,
consider EIS as the only meaningful aspect of NEPA. Although this may
be an exaggeration and represent incomplete knowledge of environmental
science and policy, the EIS certainly is the aspect of NEPA that has had the
greatest exposure, the most influence on environmental analysis, and been
a very large factor driving environmental analysis procedures, protection,
and enhancement.
NEPA contains very little guidance or specific requirements for an EIS.
It is only addressed in Section 102 C and in that section the only requirement
is that the detailed statement address:

r “the environmental impact of the proposed action….”
r “any adverse environmental effect which cannot be avoided…” (this
is redundant with the first requirement).
r “alternatives to the proposed action.”