Editors' Summary: Property rights advocates implicitly complained in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon that a Fish and Wildlife Service regulation that aimed to protect endangered and threatened species by defining "harm" to include habitat modification impinged on their rights as private landowners by asking them to share with the government responsibility for protecting such species. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the regulation as reasonable given the relevant language of the Endangered Species Act.

Editors' Summary: Although most talk in terms of wildlife protection seems to focus on the operation of the ESA, there are a host of other federal and state laws designed to protect wildlife from the impacts of resource-development projects—before the species become threatened or endangered.

Editors' Summary: In 1989, a National Research Council study concluded that contaminated sediments are "widespread in U.S. coastal waters" and have "potentially far-reaching consequences to both public health and the environment." A 1996 interim EPA report reached a similar conclusion. This concern over contaminated sediments is not new. It has manifested itself in a dizzying array of statutory and regulatory restrictions on the disposal of these sediments.

 In November 1995, five federal agencies—the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—issued joint guidance concerning wetland mitigation banking. The guidance's chief virtue is its detailed explanation of the approval process for the establishment and operation of mitigation banks. Its chief flaw, however, flows from the complexity of this approval process.