The Council on Environmental Quality published final guidelines for the preparation of environmental impact statements in the Federal Register on August 1, 1973.¹ These guidelines are reprinted in ELR at 46003, and are codified in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 40, Chapter V, Part 1500. All federal agencies and departments are required to prepare their own NEPA procedures in accordance with these guidelines within 180 days.

A comment in last month's ELR¹ described three suits filed by the National Wildlife Federation seeking to reform Federal Highway Administration procedures. That comment suggested that FHwA might want to settle these suits, which challenged FHwA's practice of exempting from NEPA requirements federal-aid highway construction projects that received design approval before February 1, 1971. As it turns out, in the meantime, a consent judgment has been approved and appears in the Litigation section of this month's ELR.²

In an article in this month's ELR,¹ Nicholas C. Yost, Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Environmental Unit of the California Attorney General's office, reviews and analyzes state enactments parallelling NEPA. NEPA, he observes, reversed the pattern by which innovative ideas for environmental legislation are first adopted at the state level and later incorporated into federal law. Here, a novel federal law fathered equivalents in 18 jurisdictions, in most cases by legislation, but in a few states by administrative action.

This month's issue of ELR contains a reprint of a chapter from NEPA in the Courts: A Legal Analysis of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.¹ The study, which is the first book-length analysis of NEPA, was written by Frederick R. Anderson, ELR's editor-in-chief and Executive Director of the Environmental Law Institute. NEPA in the Courts examines the judicial interpretations of NEPA to date.

On June 20, 1973, New Jersey Governor William Cahill signed into law the Coastal Area Facility Review Act,¹ a strong coastal zone protection measure designed to control industrial development along the Jersey coast. According to the terms of the law, permits must be issued by the State Commissioner of Environmental Protection before any industrial facilities may be constructed in the coastal area. Praised by its principal sponsor Assembly Speaker Thomas H.

In recent years, the frantic pace of land speculation and development in rural areas of the Northeast has threatened to alter irreversibly the traditional character of New England. As urban environments deteriorate, residents of New York, Boston, and other cities have begun in increasing numbers to buy second homes in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Occasionally, a locality has tried on an ad hoc basis to stem the tide of developers and their customers: In Steel Hill Development, Inc. v.

Although it became effective in early 1969, the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act of 1968 (ILSFDA)¹ has seen little use as a tool to control unscrupulous sales and development techniques used by subdividers who market their projects to distant audiences.

(See Comment, Litigation Under the Clean Air Act, 3 ELR 10007, and Tables at 3 ELR 10022, 10090.)

Starting January 1, 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency will issue "environmental explanations" written in laymen's terms for proposed new standards, regulations, and guidelines of national application.¹ The new policy, a response to what EPA called the "growing demand by the judiciary and the public" for full disclosure of the reasons for governmental decisions, would apply to national standards of environmental quality and to emission, effluent, and performance standards.

On August 23, 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would request auto manufacturers to label 1974 model year cars to show customers the model's weight, probable mile-per-gallon rating, and estimated operating cost.¹ The proposed program is to be voluntary, although EPA's Assistant Administrator, Robert Sansom, noted that the Federal Trade Commission may already possess the authority to make such disclosure mandatory.