The battle for the quality of the American environment is a battle against neglect, mismanagement, poor planning, and a piecemeal approach to problems of natural resources. It is a battle that will have to be fought on every level of government... we must re-examine all existing Federal programs with the aim of coordinating them.... We cannot afford a policy that promises much but delivers little. --President Richard M. Nixon, l

If the framers of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the expert witnesses and agency personnel who testified on its behalf, the staffers who massaged and drafted it, the legislators who enacted it, and the president of the United States who signed it were to see NEPA today, in what regard would they be the most surprised and disappointed? One would be the relegation of §101's principles to the scrap bin, and another would certainly be the extent to which §102 would be driven forward by litigation. The biggest surprise, however, might be the separation of environmental considerations from federal planning, which, per the legislative history, was the whole problem in the first place.

Forty years later, many federal agencies and programs have stuck with the notion of environmental planning and struggle to make it work. But not the biggest. Two federal actors whose projects more than any others generated the public anger and call for environmental reform that led to NEPA in the first place have managed to escape it. One is the Federal Highway Administration (FHwA) (nee Bureau of Roads), which by the l960s had converted a modest network of inter-city civil defense highways into the largest construction program in the world, funded by its own trust and impervious to opposition. "Highways," editorialized the New York Times in 1966, "march--imperially, relentlessly, inexorably--across stream, meadow and woodland" and "as neighborhoods are sliced in two and cemeteries are relocated, neither the quick nor the dead are safe." Years before the advent of NEPA, these were the first environmental lawsuits, based on slender legal threads, and the literature of the time speaks volumes of the frustration behind them: The Pavers and the Paved, Superhighway-Superhoax, Road to Ruin, The End of the Road. Small wonder, then, that following NEPA's passage, federal highway projects took a major hit.