As urban populations in ever increasing numbers flee the smog and heat of city summers, they bring with them to formerly rural and wild areas the urban problems of crowding and environmental degradation. A case in point is the once remote Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge bordering the Atlantic Ocean in extreme southeastern Virginia, which today is sandwiched between burgeoning "second home" beach developments. Vacationers' use of the beach as a "sand freeway" to their vacation spots to the south spawned so many visitor safety, beach erosion, and wildlife protection problems that the Interior Department moved to severely restrict access to the refuge, declaring the 150-vehicle-per-hour weekend rate inimical to the wildlife protective purposes of the refuge. The resultant furor raised by landowners thus denied convenient motorized access to their property culminated in a recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit¹ upholding Interior's authority to take radical steps to protect the environmental integrity of lands under its jurisdiction.

The Court of Appeals affirmed the right of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (recently renamed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to ban driving on the refuge beach to all but a handful of year-round beach residents who traverse the beach on their way to nearby Virginia Beach. The two-page decision affirmed an outspoken district court opinion that found specious plaintiffs' arguments that the United States does not own the foreshore² of the refuge, that the foreshore is held in public trust for the common use of citizens, and that the Bureau's final environmental impact statement on the proposal to close the refuge to vehicular traffic was inadequate.