In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC), courts have scrambled to reevaluate the scope and reach of the government's regulatory authority over "navigable waters" pursuant to the Clean Water Act (CWA). A growing majority of courts, especially the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and the U.S.

Editors' Summary: This Article is the first in a series intended to supplement Federal Wetlands Law, a primer that ELR published in 1993 and subsequently incorporated into the Wetlands Deskbook. The Article, which refers to the primer but stands on its own, focuses primarily on where wetlands law has changed since publication of the primer. The Article first provides an update of legislative and executive branch developments in wetlands law and policy.

Editors' Summary: Combined sewer overflows and sanitary sewer overlows present unique problems for regulators. Although these problems were largely ignored until recently, EPA has finally begun to address the significant environmental and public health hazards these pollution sources pose. The author first provides a brief overview of the problems of combined and sanitary sewer overflows and the basis for their regulation under the FWPCA. He next discusses EPA's policy and guidance efforts to date, including the relevant documents' specific requirements and the concerns that shaped them.

Nearly three decades after enactment of the modern Clean Water Act (CWA), efforts to address the largest remaining source of water pollution—runoff and other types of aquatic ecosystem impairment from diffuse activities—remain elusive. Every two years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirms in its biennial National Water Quality Inventory that nonpoint source water pollution, or "polluted runoff," causes the majority of water body impairment throughout the country.

Thirty years in the making, the total maximum daily load (TMDL) program of §303(d) of the Clean Water Act (CWA) has never seemed farther from implementation. As state governments increasingly have flexed their regulatory muscles with respect to the environment, ironically they have shied away—to put it mildly—from their environmental responsibilities under the TMDL program. Their reticence and outright opposition to improving water quality are that much more striking given their adamant insistence in 1972 that this obligation be reserved to and exercised by them.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of redesigning the Clean Water Act's (CWA's) total maximum daily load (TMDL) program. Section 303 of the Act requires states and, if necessary, EPA to: (1) identify waters that do not meet water quality standards; (2) establish the TMDLs for pollutants discharged into these waters that will achieve these standards; and (3) incorporate these loads into state planning. These are of course the classic steps of ambient-based water quality management.

Congress passed the Clean Water Act on October 4, 1972, by overwhelming margins—unanimously in the Senate and with a bare 11 dissenters in the House of Representatives. Rising on the Senate floor that day a full quarter-century ago, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Me.), chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution and leader of the Senate's clean water forces, explained with simple gravity why Congress was about to pass by such large margins such a powerful and unprecedented law:

Through the post-World War II era the U.S. Congress, by an incremental process of experimentation and error, developed the knowledge and experience that led to the imposition of individual permits based on uniform technology-based effluent limitations to regulate industrial water pollution. The resulting permit system has gradually reduced the amount of industrial pollution that enters our national waterways.

Agricultural biotechnology has generated much debate about the environmental consequences of field trials and commercialization of transgenic crops. Thus far, the debate has focused on opponents' claims of alleged risks presented by transgenic crops and the proponents' responses to those asserted risks. To date, three issues have dominated the debate:

. the risk of gene flow;

. the risk of weediness; and

. the risk of insect-resistance.

In recent years, the western states have often struggled with the federal government over control and management of natural resources, particularly water. For its part, federal law defers to states in many matters of water resource allocation.