INTERPRETIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS 343for livestock grazing and minerals development purposes were a concern, and field office person-
nel wanted to include consideration of these issues throughout the documents, while OEPR re-
viewers said that addressing these resources was only important where impacts were expected.
Inclusions and omissions, then, were a central issue with organizational and political significance
far beyond the conformity of reports to a uniform structural outline.
This meeting suggests that it is important to consider the message conveyed about range and
mineral resources by an assessment of “no impacts.” A message of “no impacts” suggests that
commodity production will not be disturbed by wilderness designation; it downplays conflict. As
noted above, this message may appear as a statement at the beginning of a document that identi-
fies which resources will not be affected by wilderness designation and so are not included in the
analysis and report. Where an EIS repeats this point for each study area, the repetition itself
emphasizes that wilderness designation will not disturb commodity development. Furthermore,
given that Congress allows grazing in wilderness areas (U.S. Congress, H.R. 96-1126 [1980]),
the EISs that repeat the assessment of “no impacts” throughout the analysis do so with the as-
sumption that wilderness values and grazing use will coexist in the areas after their designation as
wilderness. I concluded that a repeated message of “no impacts” might be best understood as an
effort to defuse conflict between historical and emerging goals for public lands. Why this mes-
sage was repeated more often for minerals resources than range resources is not clear. It may
reflect the fact that Congress has established general allowances for grazing, but not for minerals
development, in wilderness areas.
The wilderness EISs illustrate how the organizational structure of analytical documents, to-
gether with decisions about what information to include in them, affects the framing of policy
issues. The evidence provided in the documents is linked to the cause-effect story they tell. In the
case of the wilderness EISs, as people made decisions about what information to include, Washington-
based reviewers established a general principle of including only the information deemed rel-
evant based on the presence of wilderness-designation impacts on study areas and resources.
Some field office personnel wanted to communicate information beyond such impacts in order to
recognize and address local commodity interests, such as grazing and minerals development,
which have the potential to conflict with wilderness designation. Although structural changes in
the draft reports produced more uniformity and potentially drew greater relative attention to wil-
derness values as compared to commodity values, some field offices responded to local concerns
by assessing commodity values whether or not they thought these values would be affected by
wilderness designation.
To understand how the structure of the EISs and decisions about what information to include
are related to policy decisions, it is necessary to examine the role of arguments in the documents.
Understanding Arguments as a Link Between Information and
Recommendations—Identifying Unstated Normative Premises
In proceeding with my analysis, I took account of an additional demand from the reviewers in
Washington, D.C., that the field staff treat assumptions associated with the future scenarios con-
sistently. I related the implications of this demand to general patterns of argument associated with
making wilderness designation recommendations. In taking this step, I also drew on data from
interviews and comment memos in order to assess the logical connections between premises and
conclusions within EIS arguments.
A reviewer from the OEPR said that a key problem with the draft EISs was a lack of consis-
tency in the use of assumptions in the analyses (Interview 103). This concern also appears in