During the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come under increasing pressure to rectify what some segments of industry, the public, and the Carter Administration see as the excessive compliance costs and overly intrusive character of certain environmental standards and requirements.

One of the most tortured pieces of environmental legislation produced in the last session of the 95th Congress¹ was a set of amendments to the Endangered Species Act (ESA).² The intent of the amendments was to moderate the Act's strict §7 prohibition against any federal action which threatens the survival of an endangered species of animal or plant.

The mishap at the Three Mile Island generating plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is but the latest spur to an intensifying national debate over the merits of nuclear power. In an attempt to gain greater control over their nuclear destinies, a number of states and municipalities have enacted statutes within the last five years which impose a variety of limitations and conditions on the siting of new nuclear reactors within their borders.

The shattering disruption of the health and lives of residents near an abandoned burial site for toxic industrial chemicals at Love Canal in Niagara Falls and the poisoned stream flowing out of the "Valley of the Drums" near Louisville, Kentucky are only two manifestations of a chronic environmental problem that has finally become a full-blown crisis. These and similar stories have fostered a growing public realization of the staggering task the nation faces in protecting its citizens and its environment from the torrent of hazardous waste produced by its technological society.

The inherent tension between energy production and environmental quality is a theme which in recent years has grown all too familiar. Proponents of a given source of energy (e.g., nuclear fission or coal) typically assert that it cannot fulfill its potential contribution to the nation's energy difficulties unless existing environmental restriction (e.g., nuclear licensing laws or Clean Air Act regulations) are eased or postponed temporarily.

In its landmark 1972 decision in Sierra Club v.

On April 26, 1979, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit wrote another chapter in the saga of the State of Illinois' protracted battle to end the City of Milwaukee's discharges of raw and inadequately treated sewage into Lake Michigan. In Illinois v. City of Milwaukee¹ the court of appeals affirmed a trial court's decision that Milwaukee's raw sewage "overflows" into the lake constitute an enjoinable public nuisance under federal common law and upheld the lower court's order to the city to eliminate those overflows within eight years.

One area of agreement among environmentalists, their business counterparts, and governmental regulators is that none will admit satisfaction with the current state of the federal regulatory process. For years the business sector has lamented both the cost of participating in the process as well as the cost of complying with the restrictions and requirements it produces.

The doctrine of state ownership of wildlife, as enunciated in the late 19th century United States Supreme Court decision in Geer v. Connecticut,¹ has long been used to justify state restrictions on the taking of wildlife, particularly measures which discriminate against nonresidents. In the last half century, however, the Court's decisions have chipped away at the Geer rationale while preserving its result, thus creating an anomaly in the law. When the Court finally abandoned Geer altogether on April 24, it came almost as an anticlimax.

On June 11, 1979, a unanimous Supreme Court reversed¹ a controversial 1978 decision by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit² and ruled that federal agency appropriations requests constitute neither "proposals for legislation" nor recommendations for "major Federal actions" within the meaning of §102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).³ The Court held that NEPA's requirements for the preparation of environmental impact statements (EISs) are therefore inapplicable to budget re