Nearly all current attempts at environmental impact analysis and technology assessment fall victim to an ethical and methodological assumption that Keniston termed “the fallacy of unfinished business.” Related to one version of the naturalistic fallacy, this assumption is that technological and environmental problems have only technical, but not social, ethical, or political solutions. After using several impact analyses to illustrate the policy consequences of the fallacy of unfinished business, I suggest how it might be overcome. Next I present three standard arguments, repeatedly used in technology and environmental impact assessments, by those who subscribe to this “fallacy.” I briefty examine the logical, consequentialist, and historical reasons for rejecting all three arguments in favor of this assumption. If my suggestions are correct, then environmental impact analysis is not only a matter of discovering how to finish our technological business, but also a question of learning how to recognize the ethical and epistemological dimensions of our assessment tasks.

User satisfaction as the ultimate goal of recreation planning and management is contested by a discussion of human adaptability which makes it possible for people to adjust to a progressively lower quality of recreation opportunities without loss of satisfaction. Recreation planning and management based on such satisfaction levels are then shown to perpetuate a deterioration in the quality of recreation environments themselves. To arrest this trend, a new goal for recreation planning and management is proposed based on the equation of quality of opportunity with diversity of environmental settings. The article concludes with a discussion of this goal in light of the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) concept developed recently by members of the United States Forest Service.

I criticize John Tallmadge’s attempt to derive an environmental ethic from Buber’s suggestion that we can enter into I-Thou relations with nature. I-Thou relations flourish only with beings who enter into dialogue with us, viz. human beings, and we can value other natural kinds without anthropomorphizing them.