Editors' Summary: Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980 to resolve the uncertainty over the fate of federal holdings in Alaska and speed transfer of lands owed to the state and natives. The Act puts millions of acres under protective management and prescribes the rights of inholders and natives. The Ninth Circuit, in the first appellate decision applying the Act to lands in Alaska, ruled that the Act requires the Forest Service to prepare an EIS before granting a special use permit to U.S. Borax for bulk sampling of its molybdenum claims in Misty Fjords National Monument. The court's interpretation heavily emphasized the Act's environmental purposes. Though the section of the Act at issue was narrow, the court's environmental reading could bear on other Alaska lands issues, notably control of access to other inholdings.