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.

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.