The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, signed into law on August 3, 1977, authorized the Department of the Interior to issue regulations implementing the Act's environmental protection provisions.1 The Secretary of the Interior was required to promulgate interim regulations within 90 days of the date of enactment2 and to issue permanent regulations within one year.3
The search for a viable national policy toward the marine environment has been an elusive one.
On November 29, 1978, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) opened a new chapter in the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)1 by issuing final regulations2 establishing substantially revised NEPA compliance procedures. The rules replace CEQ's 1973 Guidelines,3 which some agencies and reviewing courts considered merely advisory,4 with binding requirements that envision a set of uniform and streamlined procedures applicable to all federal agencies.
During the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come under increasing pressure to rectify what some segments of industry, the public, and the Carter Administration see as the excessive compliance costs and overly intrusive character of certain environmental standards and requirements.
One of the most tortured pieces of environmental legislation produced in the last session of the 95th Congress1 was a set of amendments to the Endangered Species Act (ESA).2 The intent of the amendments was to moderate the Act's strict §7 prohibition against any federal action which threatens the survival of an endangered species of animal or plant.
The mishap at the Three Mile Island generating plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is but the latest spur to an intensifying national debate over the merits of nuclear power. In an attempt to gain greater control over their nuclear destinies, a number of states and municipalities have enacted statutes within the last five years which impose a variety of limitations and conditions on the siting of new nuclear reactors within their borders.
The shattering disruption of the health and lives of residents near an abandoned burial site for toxic industrial chemicals at Love Canal in Niagara Falls and the poisoned stream flowing out of the "Valley of the Drums" near Louisville, Kentucky are only two manifestations of a chronic environmental problem that has finally become a full-blown crisis. These and similar stories have fostered a growing public realization of the staggering task the nation faces in protecting its citizens and its environment from the torrent of hazardous waste produced by its technological society.
The inherent tension between energy production and environmental quality is a theme which in recent years has grown all too familiar. Proponents of a given source of energy (e.g., nuclear fission or coal) typically assert that it cannot fulfill its potential contribution to the nation's energy difficulties unless existing environmental restriction (e.g., nuclear licensing laws or Clean Air Act regulations) are eased or postponed temporarily.
In its landmark 1972 decision in Sierra Club v.
On April 26, 1979, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit wrote another chapter in the saga of the State of Illinois' protracted battle to end the City of Milwaukee's discharges of raw and inadequately treated sewage into Lake Michigan. In Illinois v. City of Milwaukee1 the court of appeals affirmed a trial court's decision that Milwaukee's raw sewage "overflows" into the lake constitute an enjoinable public nuisance under federal common law and upheld the lower court's order to the city to eliminate those overflows within eight years.