This article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Environmental Impact Assessment, or as we prefer Environmental Assessment (EA), as a tool for environmental management. EA has had many roles: a passive role of advising decision-makers, a more active role of mitigating impacts through design changes, an important educative role, and a community empowerment role. While EA has had a pivotal role in the development and evolution of environmental management in Australia and elsewhere, and remains an important tool, it is no longer at the cutting edge. By and large there has been far too much focus on procedural aspects of EA to the detriment of the substantive purpose of EA. We suggest in this article that we should steadily be moving beyond narrow conceptions of EA to incorporate the many valuable perspectives and techniques that have evolved as part of the collective experience of conducting environmental assessments directly into project design, land use planning and policy development activities.