Over the last several months, under pressureof court-ordered deadlines, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been promulgating long overdue Clean Water Act best available technology (BAT) standards for toxic pollutants. In the final BAT effluent limitations guide-lines BAT often is the same as the best practicable technology (BPT). Where the new BAT is more stringent than BPT, the difference is relatively small and potentially more effective technologies were rejected.

Editors' Summary: The Bureau of Land Management is in the process of reviewing 23.8 million acres of its lands for possible wilderness designation. During this review it must manage these wilderness study areas under §603(c), an ambiguous provision which mandates the application of a strict nonimpairment standard to WSAs but "grandfathers" certain poorly-defined pre-FLPMA activities. In 1978, the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior wrote a legal opinion construing the provision to provide stringent limits on oil and gas leasing in WSAs.

Editors' Summary: Regulatory reform must be carried out through the same reasoned decisionmaking processes which the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires for the promulgation of new rules. This, Mr. Stohbehn argues, is the Third Circuit's message to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. v. Environmental Protection Agency, 12 ELR 20833.

Editors' Summary: As the 97th Congress came to a close, the Reagan Administration, natural resource development interests, the Congress, and conservationists had come to a stalemate in a high stakes battle over mineral development on the nation's public lands. Mr. Tundermann examines the reasons for the stalemate and discusses several congressional and administrative actions of the past year that have contributed to it. He explains that as much as 50 percent of the federal lands are currently withdrawn from mineral development.

Samuel Bleicher's recent article on ocean dumping, "The Battle Over Ocean Dumping," 12 ELR 15032, while providing an excellent analysis of many of the key issues in the debate over ocean disposal of contaminated wastes, fails to address a critical point: the national and international precedent that could well be established by a U.S. policy reversal on ocean dumping.

Editors' Summary: The long-range transport of sulfur dioxide emissions, their transformation into sulfates in the atmosphere, and their eventual return to earth through the phenomena popularly lumped together under the name "acid rain" is a serious environmental problem that many argue has been given inadequate attention in the Clean Air Act. In three decisions issued on December 1, 1982, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals analyzed carefully the Clean Air Act's response to the interstate transport of SO₂ and its transformation into sulfates.

Issues:

1. Is compliance with federal and state environmental statutes and regulations a defense to a federal or state common law negligence or nuisance action?

2. Does the existence of a federal regulatory statute governing a particular activity bar a federal or state common law claim with respect to that activity?

Congressional committees, the media, environmental groups and state officials are investigating and criticizing virtually all aspects of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) hazardous waste cleanup program under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (Superfund). Citations for contempt of Congress, constitutional confrontations between the executive and legislative branches, and firing of the top EPA hazardous waste regulator add an element of high drama.

Editors' Summary: Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980 to resolve the uncertainty over the fate of federal holdings in Alaska and speed transfer of lands owed to the state and natives. The Act puts millions of acres under protective management and prescribes the rights of inholders and natives. The Ninth Circuit, in the first appellate decision applying the Act to lands in Alaska, ruled that the Act requires the Forest Service to prepare an EIS before granting a special use permit to U.S.

Editors' Summary: Early this year, the Fifth Circuit, in Sierra Club v. Sigler, became the first court of appeals to interpret CEQ's "worst case" regulation for EISs. The rule requires agencies to perform a worst case analysis where significant scientific uncertainty or gaps in information exist concerning the environmental effects of a project. Because the rule is unique and only recently promulgated, it is unclear what types of projects are included within the rule or how broad the analysis must be.