The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, general tightening of pollution laws, and increasing public concern for environmental quality make it mandatory that environmental impact studies be done for proposed construction of facilities such as major highways, airports, dams, and atomic power plants. So that the long-range impact of specific or alternative developments can be appraised, principles of environmental and systems sciences are being applied to the scaling and weighting of the factors. Increasingly, government is turning to academic centers for help and research on environmental impact studies. This paper is a brief account of how, by use of a simple linear vector analysis as and objective quantification of environmental impact, an organized interdisciplinary group at the University of Georgia responded to a specific request from the Georgia Department of Transportation. The paper also discusses how this was followed by a sequence of events that have profoundly influenced and improved the entire transportation process in the Southeast.