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igned into law in January 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, was a response to the growing public concern through the 1960s over humans’ roles in environmental degradation and increasing pollution. The first major federal environmental law in the United States, the act mandated that federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their actions as well as alternative actions during the early stages of planning for a project.
NEPA was enacted to “declare a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment.” Sec. 2 [42 U.S. Code § 4321]. Fifty years later, the impacts of NEPA can be seen in efforts to prevent damage to our environment; a physical manifestation of the act is present in Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). Northwestern University’s Transportation Library holds the largest collection of print EISs in the U.S.
Under NEPA, every agency in the Executive Branch of the federal government has a responsibility to produce an EIS for any major action that significantly impacts the quality of the environment. This includes NASA, which has produced statements for actions including Overland Transport of the NASA Space Shuttle Orbiter and the Apollo Space Program, the National Parks Service for the Yosemite Fire Management Plan and a master plan for Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the Federal Highway Administration for the West Seattle Freeway, and the Interstate Commerce Commission for the abandonment of Lake Michigan car ferry service. 
EISs are used by students and faculty at the university and researchers from around the United States. In addition to documenting environmental effects of federal actions, EISs are valuable tools for understanding the history of land use, policy, and planning efforts related to these projects. In the case of the West Seattle Freeway project, the EIS might give a researcher insight into whether planners considered alternatives to the freeway project. The EIS for car ferry service on Lake Michigan includes significant coverage of the local economies, tourism impact, and employment in cities served by ferries including Ludington, MI and Manitowoc, Milwaukee, and Kewaunee, WI.
The afore-mentioned EISs are held in the collection of the Transportation Library. Our EIS collection came to us as a 1992 donation of over 20,000 titles from faculty member H. Paul Friesema, a leader in the environmental movement who was instrumental in developing the university’s Program in Environmental Policy and Culture. Since the initial donation, the library has continued to collect EISs and currently holds over 33,000 titles.
The print collection is housed in the Transportation Library, where a section is dedicated to EISs. Since 2012, EISs have been published electronically; our library downloads electronic EISs and makes them discoverable and accessible through our catalog, with policies in place for long-term storage and retention. EISs from our collection digitized by Google are available in full text through HathiTrust and through the library’s discovery tool, Transportation Library Collections.
To learn more about Environmental Impact Statements, and for a listing of key resources for locating and accessing EISs, please see our EIS research guide. In addition, a recording of a 2019 webinar, presented by Transportation Library Public Services Librarian Rachel Cole for the Federal Deposit Library Program, provides an in-depth view into this collection through a case study of a 1975 EIS on Lake Michigan car ferry service.