Editors' Summary: The federal government has broad authority to protect the public health and the environment from hazardous substance pollution, but that power often must sit idle until the nature of the hazard posed by a given disposal site can be determined. EPA can investigate apparently hazardous disposal sites itself, for example under §104(b) of CERCLA. The Agency also orders private parties to conduct preliminary investigations of sites.

William Ruckelshaus is on a crusade to persuade the American public to fundamentally change its ideals about public health and the environment. We should, he says, "accept" risk.¹ We should lower our expectations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We should not dare to hope for more than "reasonable" protection from carcinogens and other hazards.

Editors' Summary: The federal government has liberally interpreted CERCLA to give it great power and discretion in cleaning up unsafe hazardous waste disposal sites. The government has reserved the Superfund response monies for emergencies and sites where no solvent responsible party can be found, and has insisted that a broad group of waste handlers, including non-negligent, off-site waste generators, are jointly and severally liable for site cleanup. In some two dozen recent decisions, the courts have accepted most or all of the government's interpretation of the law.

Editors' Summary: The Chesapeake Bay is a precious ecological and economic resource whose productivity is declining, apparently due to water pollution. A dozen years after enactment of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, a comprehensive response to the industrial and municipal degradation of the nation's surface waters, the decline in Bay productivity continues. The author, head of Maryland's environmental protection programs, reports that a series of events have combined to produce regional action that could be effective in reversing the decline.

The EPA Journal recently asked six respected observers what their response would be to the question "how clean is clean at a hazardous waste site?" They received six different answers. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) decisions in regard to selecting remedies at hazardous waste disposal sites have emerged from experience, because nowhere do existing law or Agency policy define the level of cleanup that must be achieved during a response action.

Editors' Summary: This Comment surveys the environmental activity of the second session of the 98th Congress. The most important environmental product of that session is a tough new set of RCRA amendments. Otherwise, Congress, especially the Senate, found itself in a sort of gridlock on the big pollution control reauthorizations. Congress did pass a number of other environmental bills, including a whole raft of wilderness bills. The president signed all but two, which would have reauthorized the Equal Access to Justice Act and created an American Conservation Corps.

Editors' Summary: Just as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and states, after long delays, are primed to begin final implementation of the complicated hazardous waste control provisions of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA), the president has signed Amendments greatly adding to the scope and complexity of the program. The agencies must now, like Sisyphus, return to the bottom of the mountain and start the long upward trek again. Actually, their plight is less grim than his, since they need not recover the same ground.

OWEN OLPIN: Welcome to the 13th Annual Conference on the Environment, sponsored by the ABA's Standing Committee on Environmental Law. To open our discussion of hazardous waste siting issues, I am delighted to introduce Deputy Administrator Alvin Alm of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Congress has chosen in the past not to intervene directly in hazardous waste siting, and it is unlikely that they will change that course. The responsibility for siting new or expanded facilities has therefore become either a local one (from a land use perspective, the treatment, storage, and disposal (TSD) facility is treated as another conditional use for an industrial zone) or through preemption, a state function. Since Michigan's enactment of Mich. Comp. Laws §299.501-526 in 1978, all major industrial states and most others have passed some form of siting legislation.