In January 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took its first steps toward enforcing the noncompliance penalty program authorized by §120 of the Clean Air Act.¹ A novel enforcement tool established by the 1977 amendments to the Act, §120 prescribes automatic administrative money penalties equal to the economic benefit of delayed compliance for sources still in violation with Clean Air Act requirements two years after passage of the amendments.

Enforcement was much on the mind of Congress when it drafted the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970.¹ The Act gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad authority to monitor the emissions of individual polluting facilities and to seek the imposition of potentially severe sanctions on violators. In the first six years of the Act's existence, however, EPA's attention focused less on enforcement than on developing and defending a regulatory and institutional framework for implementing the Act.

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana, relatively uncelebrated until 1981, recently became the focus of a legal and political controversy raising crucial environmental as well as constitutional issues. Though the specific controversy has now subsided for the most part, it set in motion a heated debate over the basics of federal wilderness law and policy.

Controlling air pollution from automobiles has proved to be one of the most difficult objectives of the Clean Air Act to achieve.¹ Motor vehicle emissions account for a large percentage of the total concentrations of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide (CO), photochemical oxidants (ozone), and lead in urban air, and most of the 200 largest cities in the country have health-threatening levels of at least one of these pollutants in their air.² Nonetheless, attempts to control these emissions have generated intense political controversy.

Effluent limitations for industrial facilities that discharge pollution directly to surface waters are one of the cornerstones of the national clean water program established by the 1972 Amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA).¹ They embody Congress' decision to scrap an ineffective regulatory system based on water quality in favor of a more workable, technology-based system of effluent regulation.

The National Contingency Plan (NCP) is the federal government's handbook governing responses to oil and hazardous substance releases endangering human health and the environment.

To many, run-of-the-river dams, of which there are over 67,000 greater than 25 feet high in this county, appear environmentally benign. Indeed, hydroelectric dams are often praised as the least environmentally damaging of traditional energy sources. However, in addition to environmental problems stemming from dam construction, such as flooding, destruction of fish and wildlife habitat, and loss of natural river flows, the operation of dams, especially large impoundments such as hydroelectric projects, can create significant water quality problems.

In October of 1980, the National Wildlife Federation and two Alaskan communities lost in their bid to obtain an injunction against the Department of the Interior's sale of oil and gas development leases in the Beaufort Sea.¹ Nevertheless, they negotiated with the Department of Justice a stipulation under which they would receive just under $60,000 in attorney fees, pursuant to the attorney fees provisions in the Endangered Species Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

On February 1, 1982, a scant 11 months before the deadline by which all areas in the country except those with severe automobile-related pollution problems are to meet federal clean air standards, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) conditional state implementation plan (SIP) approval policy.¹ This ruling relieved EPA of its obligation to assume the regulatory responsibilities of those states that had not satisfied the rigorous planning requirements imposed by Congress in the 1977 Amendments to the Clean Air Act

Judicial enforcement of federal environmental statutes has resulted in some uncertainty over the extent of the discretion enjoyed by the courts in fashioning equitable remedies. Some courts have insisted that where they are faced with a clear violation of a statute containing a flat ban on or a mandatory precondition to an activity the court must enjoin the activity pending compliance. Others, apparently the majority, have held that while injunctions are not mandatory, there is a presumption in favor of furthering the statutory purposes.