The October 1979 Term of the United States Supreme Court is shaping up as a full one with respect to cases raising environmental issues.

The environmental and economic burdens resulting from the nation's burgeoning use and disposal of packaging materials—principally beer and soft drink cans and bottles—has been the subject of state legislation for more than 25 years. Not suprisingly, the history of packaging legislation has been a stormy one, due in large part to staunch industry opposition in every forum, including the media, legislative chambers, and the courts.

Surface-mined coal comprises over 50 percent of the nation's annual coal production, and strip mining operations affect hundreds of thousands of acres in more than half of the states.¹ Two years after enactment of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA),² substantial progress is finally being made toward establishment of a strong national program for controlling the environmentally detrimental aspects of surface mining.

When Congress, in §102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), directed federal agencies to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for every environmentally significant major federal action, it could hardly have foreseen the voluminous "detailed statement" that the federal courts would soon require agencies to produce. Modern impact statements have been known to occupy a foot or more of shelf space and cost as much as $100,000 to prepare. Such costs have been justified on the basis of the resulting improvement in agency decisionmaking and in project design.

Mexico's recent emergence as owner of the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere, if not the world, makes it ironic that its initial attempts to tap these holdings led to the largest oil spill in history. On June 3, 1979, a blowout occurred at the IXTOC I exploratory well in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a continuing discharge of approximately 30,000 barrels of oil per day. After a few days, the spill had exceeded the magnitude of the infamous Santa Barbara spill of 1969.

After nearly a decade of litigation and administrative proceedings, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seems finally to have established the extent of environmental disclosure required by corporations subject to the federal securities laws.¹ Environmental groups have long urged that a reporting corporation must be required to disclose not only the nature of environmental polluting effects of its activities but also the costs of achieving compliance with the relevant environmental laws.

To the Congress of the United States:

Four months after I took office, I presented to the Congress a comprehensive Message on the Environment, a charter for the first years of my Administration. Building on the record of the Congress in the 1970s, I sought both to protect our national heritage and to meet the competing demands on our natural resources.

While approximately 90 percent of the nation's 23,000 major stationary sources of air pollution are in compliance with applicable emission limitations,¹ the remaining 10 percent pose major air pollution problems.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been the target in recent years of growing criticism that its pollution control requirements are in many instances unnecessarily rigid and excessively expensive. These pressures, in combination with EPA's developing interest in economically based alternatives to traditional regulatory approaches to pollution abatement,¹ have led the Agency to take several steps toward a regime that will, in its view, reconcile improved environmental quality with economic growth at the lowest possible cost.

Few areas of federal environmental law show less clarity and consistency than the limits of the federal government's constitutional powers over the nation's navigable waters. In particular, the concept of the "navigational servitude"—the government's virtually unfettered privilege to preserve, enhance, or condemn rights in navigable waters—has evolved erratically from its various constitutional and common law sources to the point where it defies precise definition. The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged this unsteady history, for which it is itself largely responsible: