"Environmental justice" means many things to many people. To local communities feeling overburdened by environmental hazards and left out of the decisionmaking process, it captures their sense of the unfairness of the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws and policies. To regulated entities facing allegations that they have created or contributed to injustices, environmental justice is an amorphous term that wrongly suggests racial-based or class-based animus or, at the very least, indifference to the public health and welfare of distressed communities.

Lake Sevan is land-locked Armenia's chief water resource. The largest alpine lake in the Caucasus, Lake Sevan's catchment basin is one-sixth of Armenia's total geography. Almost one-half of the fish for the kitchens of Armenia come from Lake Sevan. Lake Sevan is a source of recreation, hydropower, croplands irrigation, habitat for fish and shellfish, nursery zones for aquatic and amphibian species, and a resting place for migratory birds. Not surprisingly, the lake figures importantly in Armenia history, literature, and culture.

I suspect that many readers are unfamiliar with the concept of, evidence for, or implications of, the biological principle of hormesis.¹ This is a shame, insofar as environmental policy purports to be based on scientific evidence.² There is a substantial body of evidence behind the theory that even very hazardous substances have a hormetic pattern of effects—that is, they may be beneficial to health at very low levels of exposure.

Formally or informally, scholars widely assume that political and bureaucratic self-interest largely determines the character of public policy in the United States. Previous research has indicated how the political self-interest of voters, interest groups, Congress, and the President might shape the goals and broad patterns of resource allocation in U.S. environmental policy.¹ This Dialogue complements that previous research. It explores the relationship between congressional self-interest, bureaucratic self-interest, and the implementation of U.S.

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent campaign to curtail congressional authority to legislate under the U.S. Commerce Clause has inevitably fostered speculation about the validity of parts of the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and other federal environmental laws—heightened by the Court's recent decision to hear just such a claim. One view is that the decisions since United States v.

The environmental justice movement seems to have come of age. The past two decades have seen increasing empirical evidence documenting racial disparities in sitinghazardous waste facilities and a nascent grass-roots movement bearing witness to the disproportionate effects of numerous environmental and health hazards in low-income communities of color.¹ Never have environmental justice claims been taken so seriously in environmental policymaking and adjudication than they have over the past five years.

Overview

In thoughtful dicta uttered 60 years ago, Justice Frankfurter observed that even a legislature clear as to its regulatory objectives faces hard choices in selecting remedies for the implementation of those objectives:

As we wrote last year, the U.S.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits federal agencies from providing financial assistance to recipients that commit discrimination. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Title VI regulations prohibit both intentional and unintentional discrimination by state and local agencies receiving Agency funds. However, these regulations were written before the question of environmental inequities became a serious public concern and do not explain how the Agency will define or measure adverse disparate impacts that result from a recipient's permitting decisions.