Editors' Summary: On February 7, 1983, the California Supreme Court issued an eagerly awaited decision on the application of the public trust doctrine to the appropriation of the waters feeding Northern California's Mono Lake by the City of Los Angeles. In a significant victory for environmentalists who seek to stop what they see as the draining of the unique ecological resource to slake the excessive thirst of the Southern California megalopolis, the court held that under California law the public trust must be taken into account in such appropriation decisions.

Editors' Summary: Section 404 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Corps of Engineers' dredge and fill permit program, is once again the focus of legislative and administrative reform efforts. Legislative reforms include proposed bills to return the Corps' jurisdiction to traditionally navigable waters and to limit permitting time to 90 days. Administrative reforms have been more concrete. In July 1982, the Corps issued amendments to its regulations in response to the goals of the President's Task Force on Regulatory Relief.

Editors' Summary: Almost 40 years ago, in First Iowa Hydro-Electric Cooperative v. Federal Power Commission, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Power Act preempted almost all state controls on hydroelectric development. Over the last 10 years, though, court decisions and statutes have afforded the states increasing power to regulate areas concurrently under federal control. In this Article, Mr. Arnold examines First Iowa in light of these trends.

Editors' Summary: In the landmark Mono Lake case, National Audubon Society v. Superior Court, 13 ELR 20272, the California Supreme Court ruled that long-established water rights are subject to limitations protecting the public trust in navigable waters. The decision is introduced in Rossmann, The Public Trust in Appropriated Waters: California High Court Decides Mono Lake Case, 13 ELR 10109 (1983). In this Article, Harrison C. Dunning analyzes the implications of the decision.

The environmental movement has long held as its basic tenet the conservation of natural resources, but conservationists traditionally have sought to protect only the more obvious components of our ecological heritage, such as wilderness and scenic areas, waterways, wetlands, coastlines, wildlife, and clean air. Energy-producing materials such as coal, oil, and gas have all too often been taken for granted as inexhaustible reservoirs predestined to feed the appetite of an ever-expanding technology.

As everyone knows by now, the Clean Air Act, once a relatively innocuous expression of congressional good wishes,¹ was amended in 1970 to become what is still the most sweeping and consequential environmental legislation on the books.² The Energy Supply and Environmental Coordination Act of 1974³ (ESECA) contains the first amendments to the Clean Air Act to clear Congress since that date. These amendments arose out of the hurried congressional and national reaction to the "energy crisis" of last winter.

On October 18, 1972, Congress overrode President Nixon's veto of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, and enacted the broadest, most complex, and most costly legislation ever to deal with this country's water pollution problem.

Editors' Summary: The Special Committee on Environmental Law of the American Bar Association held its annual meeting in April, 1974, at Airlie House in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. The conference focused on the capacity of the federal administrative process to deal with environmental issues.This month, ELR is pleased to present a selection of the participants' remarks, beginning with an overview by Frederick R. Anderson, Executive Director of the Environmental Law Institute.

Federal agency decisionmaking that affects the environment is influenced by a variety of factors. Among them are the statutes and executive orders that define an agency's mandate; the standards of review applied by the courts; the attitudes of agency personnel; the agency's relationships with groups in the private sector, the congressional committees with jurisdiction over its programs, other federal agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget, and the public; and the priorities and politics of the administration in power.

This morning, Fred Anderson described several assessments of the performance of federal regulatory agencies. He identified one as "pessimistic." That view held that federal agencies would always remain more responsive to money, economic and political power than to the "public interest." With some qualifications, I subscribe to that pessimistic view. My judgment, however, is tempered by sympathy for the plight of the bureaucrat at all levels of government. The problem, as I see it, is that the bureaucrat's constituency is unbalanced.