Environmental regulation in the United States has been characterized by short-term decisions with unknown or unanticipated long-term public health consequences. Some propose to use our inability to predict possible long-term consequences of environmental health regulation as a justification for replacing risk assessment with the "precautionary principle" as the dominant paradigm for making regulatory decisions.

I must confess that I first read the U.S. Supreme Court's opinions in Palazzolo v. Rhode Island¹ with more than a bit of apprehension—not just because I was afraid about the fate of the nation's wetlands, but, more selfishly, because there was just the slightest chance that the Justices would abandon the highly problematic and unnecessarily confusing regulatory takings approach once and for all.

By the 1980s, deteriorating hulks of abandoned factories and overgrown vacant lots in many American cities served as notable symbols of urban decline. These sites had earned the label of "brownfields," which the U.S.

In recent years, the critical role of civil society and the public in protecting the environment has become clear. International declarations and agreements increasingly recognize that individuals, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and local governments are central to the sustainable management of natural resources and protection of critically important areas.

During 2001, an environmental justice suit by neighborhood groups challenging the siting of a cement plant in a minority neighborhood in South Camden, New Jersey, resulted in three complex and important decisions regarding whether there is a right to enforce in federal court the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Title VI regulations prohibiting disparate impact discrimination by recipients of the Agency's funding. The environmental justice plaintiffs won two decisions in the district court, but the U.S.

The historian Paul Kennedy has defined "grand strategy" as a commitment to a major result in international affairs, a commitment to be pursued flexibly but comprehensively and determinedly, until the end is realized. Grand strategy presumes that the ends are few; grand strategies address true strategic priorities. The grand strategies chosen by nations tend to define what those nations stand for in the world.

Should western nations have a grand strategy of promoting development in the poorer countries? Does the United States have such a strategy today, and is it pursuing it?

Any suggestion that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) enforcement activity is less than vigorous is incorrect. Instead, EPA is pushing enforcement on all fronts. Its cases are also increasingly innovative. EPA referrals of criminal cases to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) steadily and dramatically increased from 20 in fiscal year (FY) 1982 to 107 in FY 1992 to a record 278 in FY 1997 and declined slightly in FY 2000 to 236.

"I'm Not Dead Yet: Genetic Mutation That Lives Up to Its Name Is Found."¹ This heading from the December 15, 2000, New York Times is a precursor to one of the most fiercely debated issues of our times. Genetic modification with the use of biotechnology is now perceived as a goldmine due to the prospects that it holds for combating the problems that were hitherto considered mostly unsolvable.

What is the United States' obligation to conserve biodiversity? What is the relationship between biodiversity conservation and sustainable development? At both international and national levels, biodiversity conservation has recently emerged as a construct to unify a number of disparate, older environment objectives such as wildlife conservation, the preservation of endangered species,¹ and the dedication of land for heritage purposes such as parks, nature reserves, wildlife refuges and other similar categories into a single overarching legal category.

Introduction

Agriculture in the United States eludes easy categorization and description. The system is diverse in climate, geography, crops, and agronomic practices. For example, it includes the truly vast midwestern dryland grain belt as well as some 46 million acres of land in organized irrigation systems. Because this system is built upon the energies of successive waves of immigration, it also reflects a healthy diversity in its cultural approaches to farm production.