INTERPRETIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS 337availability from the BLM and university libraries. I also reviewed 3 marked-up draft EISs and 3
memos, all conveying comments from reviewers in Washington, D.C. I already had data about
the study process from interviews with 3 staff members from the BLM Washington Office, a staff
member from the OEPR, and 3 BLM field personnel.^3 In addition, I observed a review meeting
and participated in efforts in one state to revise a draft EIS into final form.
The following four subsections describe components of my analysis of these data. They in-
clude a description of the creation of the “future scenarios” that form the core of the technical
analyses in the documents, as well as assessments of document structure, information content,
and arguments.
Constructing Future Scenarios—Storytelling in EISs
To understand the EISs as a forum for telling stories, I considered how field personnel in the BLM
constructed future scenarios. Understanding future scenarios is important for three reasons. One,
I learned from internal memos from reviewers (Bureau of Land Management 1983; Office of
Environmental Project Review 1983, 1986) and in interviews with field personnel and reviewers
(field notes, Interviews 103, 404, and 406) that developing scenarios of what would happen in the
wilderness study areas with and without their designation as wilderness became an important
analytical task for resource specialists in the field offices. Two, Roe (1994) suggests that scenarios
are a form of stories. Three, the way in which field personnel constructed scenarios illustrates that
agency analysts play a role as advocates in promoting the use of particular resource values on the
public lands.
Comment memos from Washington, D.C., reviewers emphasized the need to make future
scenarios detailed and specific to each study area, including predictions about development and
its impacts. An excerpt from one memo illustrates this point:
The descriptions of alternatives, especially for minerals, contain some information, but stop
short of providing estimates of major actions that will occur in the wilderness study areas.
A projection of the type, amount, and location of development is needed before an analysis
can be completed. Projections should describe what development would involve, including
roads, drill pads, open pit mines, underground mines and ancillary facilities, and how dis-
turbance would be distributed in the wilderness study area. (Office of Environmental Project
Review 1986, 4)One of the people I interviewed, a wilderness specialist, commented on changes between the
draft and final EISs relative to future scenarios and the request for specific analyses:
In this state we had lengthy scenarios [in the finals] because they [the OEPR] were not happy
with the drafts, with the mineral guy just saying, a hundred thousand acres of high-value
mineral land and twenty thousand acres of low-value mineral land would be withdrawn for-
ever from useful exploitation by mining interests. Those were the analyses in the draft. In the
final it was, they have that same fact about potential zones of high, medium, low mineral
values but, in addition, we project that sixteen medium mines, four large mines, sixteen pros-
pecting operations would be denied under the all wilderness alternative. [We] got very spe-
cific and put numbers, people, and, in large mines, even dollar impacts. (Interview 404)This interviewee described the pressure to increase the level of specificity in the documents