When in the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis jobs began to disappear and prices to rise, it came to be widely believed that pocketbook issues would soon eclipse the public's recently-developed fervor for cleaning up the environment.¹ This view was shared, albeit covertly, by many environmental groups, which responded by reducing public visibility.

The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has upheld on appeal¹ a subordinate's commitment to more vigorous protection of the marine environment from the adverse effects of ocean dumping. In a test case² involving the city of Philadelphia's dumping of sewage sludge, Mr. Train, adopting the recommendations of a Hearing Panel, affirmed imposition by the Regional Administrator for Region III, of a significant condition on the city's latest one-year interim dumping permit.

The environmental hazards most often associated with pesticides are those posed by chronic low-level exposure: bioaccumulation of toxic and possibly carcinogenic chemicals in both man and animals. While these relatively diffuse and long-term harms are real enough, persons who come into direct contact with such chemicals because of their occupations face greater dangers. This category includes both persons who apply pesticides to fields and farmworkers who must go into fields after these applications.

One of the more urgent problems of environmental law concerns the siting of industrial and other major constructed facilities required to meet societal needs. Although the siting problem may be diminished as a result of the use of energy conservation measures and other techniques affecting the need for certain facilities, the problem will remain a significant one for environmental decisionmaking.

The passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments¹ in 1972 marked a turning point in the approach taken toward the problem of water pollution control in this country.

An important development in international environmental law was announced recently by the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), a specialized agency of the United Nations. In April 1975, IMCO revealed that the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage¹ now has been ratified by the required number of nations to bring that treaty into operation.

Even though the highly-publicized problem of vessel-source oil pollution has generated much discussion among attorneys in the United States and in other nations,¹ the private-law remedies for oil pollution damage both here and abroad remain grossly inadequate. The vast majority of those United States citizens who are exposed to detrimental aftereffects of oil spills from ships still have little or no chance to recover any compensation for their losses under state or federal law.

Though the Arab oil embargo recedes mercifully into history, its legislative progeny remain with us. One such creation is the Energy Supply and Environmental Coordination Act of 1974¹ (ESECA), a proclamation by Congress that the oil- and gas-burning electric utilities of the nation would, where feasible, have to convert to the use of coal.

In their efforts to learn why the incidence of cancer and other fatal and serious diseases is on the rise, researchers are concentrating more and more on the health effects of products and waste products of modern industrial society. One such product, vinyl chloride, the principal ingredient of the second most widely used plastic, has recently been shown to cause cancer in humans. Gasoline combustion products have been linked to chronic respiratory difficulties.

On January 28, 1975, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the EPA regulation to reduce the level of tetraethyl lead in gasoline was arbitrary and capricious. Within only slightly more than one month, the Environmental Protection Agency itself reversed a previously held position concerning the schedule for clamping down on automotive exhaust emissions. The reversal was occasioned, it was said, because of the likelihood of sulfuric acid mist emissions from the catalytic devices necessary to meet the more restrictive standards.