One area of agreement among environmentalists, their business counterparts, and governmental regulators is that none will admit satisfaction with the current state of the federal regulatory process. For years the business sector has lamented both the cost of participating in the process as well as the cost of complying with the restrictions and requirements it produces.

The doctrine of state ownership of wildlife, as enunciated in the late 19th century United States Supreme Court decision in Geer v. Connecticut,¹ has long been used to justify state restrictions on the taking of wildlife, particularly measures which discriminate against nonresidents. In the last half century, however, the Court's decisions have chipped away at the Geer rationale while preserving its result, thus creating an anomaly in the law. When the Court finally abandoned Geer altogether on April 24, it came almost as an anticlimax.

On June 11, 1979, a unanimous Supreme Court reversed¹ a controversial 1978 decision by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit² and ruled that federal agency appropriations requests constitute neither "proposals for legislation" nor recommendations for "major Federal actions" within the meaning of §102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).³ The Court held that NEPA's requirements for the preparation of environmental impact statements (EISs) are therefore inapplicable to budget re

The Federal Water Pollution Control Act's (FWPCA's) provisions requiring self-reporting¹ of oil spills followed by the mandatory imposition of "civil" penalties² have long been the subject of controversy.

On August 2, President Carter delivered to the Congress his second Environmental Message, a document which reaffirms his awareness of environmental issues but suggests a lessening in his commitment to protect the quality of the nation's environment.¹ Indeed, some observers saw the timing of its release as an obvious attempt to buttress the President's standing with environmentalists worried by his recent proposals for increasing domestic energy production.² In fact, the Message, which is mainly concerned with resource protection, is the cu

The Michigan Environmental Protection Act (MEPA),¹ long and widely heralded² as one of the most ambitious legislative attempts ever to protect environmental quality, was polished to a new lustre by the Michigan Supreme Court in two decisions handed down earlier this year. In Western Michigan Environmental Action Council, Inc. v.

Amidst the clamor of political rhetoric and the barrage of proposals and counterproposals, the nation's energy problem emerges rather starkly: a precarious combination of needless inefficiency, lagging domestic energy production, and increasingly expensive and unreliable foreign supplies of oil. President Carter's response¹ has been to impose a ceiling on imports of foreign oil and to propose a massive commitment of public funds to develop on a crash basis a new synthetic fuel industry.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA),¹ which has been in effect less than three years, represents perhaps the deepest penetration by the federal government into the activities of the private sector for the purpose of regulating environmental hazards. Recently, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal court to interpret a key data-gathering provision of TSCA, and, in so doing, it left the regulators pleased and the chemical manufacturers unhappy.

Until the early part of this decade, the federal common law of nuisance consisted of little more than a nebulous theory asserting the authority of the federal courts to remedy serious instances of interstate pollution. In 1972, Justice Douglas penned his landmark opinion in Illinois v. City of Milwaukee,¹ in which the Supreme Court announced that the federal question statute² conferred jurisdiction upon the district courts to entertain common law nuisance cases.

Recognizing that many areas of the country had failed to achieve the Clean Air Act's ambitious air quality goals, Congress in 1977 ordered major revisions in state implementation plans (SIPs) to incorporate more stringent regulatory requirements for polluting activities in those regions. As a necessary first step in this program, the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977 directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to designate those areas in which national ambient air quality standards had not been attained.