Obliged to enforce myriad laws that lack built-in incentives to compliance, buffeted by literally hundreds of conflicting lawsuits, whipsawed by a congressional combination of strict legislative deadlines and skimpy budgets, and straitjacketed by OMB overseers, the Environmental Protection Agency must be the most beleaguered administrative agency in American history.¹

The recent case of Sierra Club v. Department of Interior¹ may supply a legal basis for compelling the Department of Interior to curtail activities on lands peripheral to any National Park when such activities have an adverse effect on it. The case may even permit the National Park Service to force the Secretary of Interior to go to Congress for funds for such environmentally protective actions if the Office of Management and Budget fails to provide them.

The Environmental Protection Agency won a signigicant victory in its battle to require stack gas scrubbers as the primary strategy for the control of sulfur oxides under the Clean Air Act¹ with the recent Sixth Circuit decision in Big Rivers Electric Corp. v. EPA.² The court in Big Rivers held that a power company that burns high sulfur fuel must provide for permanent emission controls (i.e., scrubbers) or show that such controls are unavailable.

When in the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis jobs began to disappear and prices to rise, it came to be widely believed that pocketbook issues would soon eclipse the public's recently-developed fervor for cleaning up the environment.¹ This view was shared, albeit covertly, by many environmental groups, which responded by reducing public visibility.

The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has upheld on appeal¹ a subordinate's commitment to more vigorous protection of the marine environment from the adverse effects of ocean dumping. In a test case² involving the city of Philadelphia's dumping of sewage sludge, Mr. Train, adopting the recommendations of a Hearing Panel, affirmed imposition by the Regional Administrator for Region III, of a significant condition on the city's latest one-year interim dumping permit.

The environmental hazards most often associated with pesticides are those posed by chronic low-level exposure: bioaccumulation of toxic and possibly carcinogenic chemicals in both man and animals. While these relatively diffuse and long-term harms are real enough, persons who come into direct contact with such chemicals because of their occupations face greater dangers. This category includes both persons who apply pesticides to fields and farmworkers who must go into fields after these applications.

One of the more urgent problems of environmental law concerns the siting of industrial and other major constructed facilities required to meet societal needs. Although the siting problem may be diminished as a result of the use of energy conservation measures and other techniques affecting the need for certain facilities, the problem will remain a significant one for environmental decisionmaking.

The passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments¹ in 1972 marked a turning point in the approach taken toward the problem of water pollution control in this country.

An important development in international environmental law was announced recently by the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), a specialized agency of the United Nations. In April 1975, IMCO revealed that the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage¹ now has been ratified by the required number of nations to bring that treaty into operation.

Even though the highly-publicized problem of vessel-source oil pollution has generated much discussion among attorneys in the United States and in other nations,¹ the private-law remedies for oil pollution damage both here and abroad remain grossly inadequate. The vast majority of those United States citizens who are exposed to detrimental aftereffects of oil spills from ships still have little or no chance to recover any compensation for their losses under state or federal law.