Pacific Northwest Research Station

NEPA for the 21st Century: Learning, adjusting, and solving problems

David Seesholtz, Initiative Lead
1249 S Vinnell Way, Suite 200
Boise, ID 83709
Phone: (208) 373-4170

Opportunities for improvement

Conducting NEPA analyses is one of the most publicly visible functions of the Forest Service, and places considerable demand on the agency's budgets and human capital. NEPA also creates opportunities to solve common problems, share lessons learned, and devise new ways to do business. We launched the NEPA for the 21st Century project to examine these challenges and opportunities.

What is the NEPA for the 21st Century project?

This collaborative project between the Washington Office's Ecosystem Management Coordination staff and Forest Service Research was identified as high priority by the Deputy Chief of Research, who provided its funding. We are using this opportunity to sow the seeds for a NEPA think tank that we can turn to for answers about how to improve the agency's environmental analysis and disclosure process. We used these funds to attract some of the best policy analysts in the country and in the process we identified an even larger cadre of academics, consultants, lawyers, and others who we can call on to help us with specific issues.

Through this initial set of studies, we are seeking to find aspects of the NEPA process that are working well, aspects that could become more efficient, and aspects that commonly become pitfalls. As the Forest Service considers better ways to comply with NEPA, our goal is to provide information that will inform future reshaping of the process. We will identify which elements of the process are inevitable and unlikely to change, and which elements we might be able to improve. As we gain insight on the individual activities within the NEPA process, we will also develop a holistic picture of the agency's approach to NEPA. Is it being used as a tool for producing informed and transparent decisions? Or is it viewed as a task that stands in the way of expedient management actions? Answering this question will help the agency find the best direction to take as it works to improve the process. If NEPA is a tool. we need to learn how to use it effectively. If it is a task, we need to minimize its impact on our time and resources.

What have we accomplished so far?

To understand how the NEPA process is viewed by the people involved in it, we held a series of 50 informal conversations with Forest Service staff who participate in NEPA at all administrative levels, and other agency staff who interact witht the Forest Service NEPA process. We focused on project-level activities and individual experience, emphasizing issues such as the effective use of science, consequences associated with taking too long to complete the process, how confident the staff feels in addressing conflict, and how efficiently various functions have been handled. Results from this scoping phase gave us a sense of what the most persistent issues are, and helped us understand what aspects of NEPA require closer study. Like any complicated system, NEPA is made up of many interdependent elements. To make our analyses easier we have begun to think of NEPA as a set of four interactive subsystems.

• Administrative processes—the way the agency responds to laws, regulations, and judicial rulings.
• Business processes—the orginizational structure, management, and support the agency has to conduct NEPA analyses.
• Human capital management—the types of skills the agency hires to conduct NEPA analyses, and the way these people are managed and trained.
• Integration—the way in which staff navigates through and combines the processes listed above.

Where are we heading?

To explore these component parts, we solicited study proposals from a diverse group of policy analysts. Out of the 30 we received, we selected a set of nine studies that will address what our scoping process suggested were the most enduring and pertinent NEPA issues. We will also sponsor a workshop to summarize study findings and discuss possible courses of action. Our study selections represent a range of thought and analytical styles, enabling the project as whole to come at questions from different angles. We chose the set of studies with the intent of creating a coordinated package of information aimed at addressing elements of the NEPA process that we can briefly summarize with the following questions:

• Are we constraining management with our own rules?
• How do we pick and manage the projects that become the focus of NEPA analyses? What information goes into making land management decisions?
• What can we learn from past evaluations of the Forest Service NEPA processes?
• Do different Forest Service regions approach NEPA differently? Is one way more effective that another?
• Under the same law, what do different agencies do differently?
• Are there other business models for reaching management goals that we can learn from?
• How do organizations like the Forest Service successfully prepare for change?
• How can we create a corporate process to strengthen the use of science in our environmental analyses?

We selected studies that took us from a very introspective look at the ways we do business to broad evaluations of other organizations. We tried to select areas where our results would make a difference even if the Forest Service's NEPA process were radically changed in the future. But most of all, we are trying to build a true partnership between Forest Service managers and researchers in a way that taps into the vast pool of knowledge that is available from experts outside the agency.