RE: First Impression of Policy Goals and Implementation

[David Sale <daves@ecoresourcegroup.com>]

I am a principal of the ECO Resource Group based in the Seattle area.  We provide communication, managment and strategic planning services regarding natural resource issues.  I would like to highlight a couple of issues raised or alluded to so far:  inclusion of information the public is uniquely able to provide, and the timing of public involvement processes.   

In our work with federal and state agencies, we try to incorporate a dialogue model of public participation that provides opportunities for the public to express the varying perspectives they hold in their own  way, their own "language" so to speak.  More often than not, the default information style is technical and scientific, and the stories that most people use to share their "unique information" are relegated to footnotes or anecdotes. Story can contain much valuable information about a place, values, relationships, and historical ecological patterns.  EPA's PIP needs to acknowledge that much of the relevant information from the public is contained in narrative formats(stories) and should incorporate a requirement that public involvement processes develop ways to take this information into account and appropriately weigh it with the technical and scientific perspectives. There are many methodologies for developing and using local knowledge in environmental assessments, such as the Traditional Ecological Knowledge work done in Canada with First Nations, and methods used in Narrative Psychology for evaluating stories.  We have found that using dialogue within initial scoping processes allows for the sharing of this type of information and a natural fitting of stories and technical data.

This is where the timing issue comes in however.  Dialogue frequently takes more time to evolve and come to fruition, and NEPA timeframes are often an impediment to an adequate sharing of perspectives by hurrying the process.  The section of the goals referring to concerns about delays should be expanded to acknowledge that some processes to truly elicit menaingful public involvement may simply take more time.