Too often environmental debates turn on rhetoric and emotion rather than carefully considered data and analysis.¹ Firmer factual foundations and a higher degree of analytic rigor would help to narrow the range of dispute over which environmental battles rage and to move us beyond the current polarization over how best to achieve environmental goals.² At the heart of any shift toward more systematic environmental decisionmaking lies a need for reliable environmental "indicators" or "metrics" and other data that clarify the issues and the tr

I. Biodiversity and Biotechnology: Debate as Distraction

I. Introduction¹

The relationship between new technologies and the environment is a complex one. On the one hand, various human technologies—ranging from "low" technologies like slash-and-burn agriculture, to "high" technologies like nuclear weapons—have done more than their share of environmental harm. On the other hand, new technologies are often cleaner and safer than the older technologies they replace, and may offer ways of remedying environmental harms previously thought of as beyond help.

On August 15, 2000, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California issued a landmark ruling, in the case National Wildlife Federation v. Babbitt (NWF v. Babbitt),¹ interpreting key provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This ruling provides important new direction to local governments, developers, federal wildlife agencies, and others seeking to design habitat conservation plans (HCPs).

From Wednesday, January 3d, through Sunday, January 7th, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) held its 101st annual meeting in San Francisco. Among the numerous panel discussions, workshops, luncheons, receptions, and field trips that took place at that event was a lively and well-attended session (held on Friday, January 5th) entitled "Dinosaur or Phoenix?: Choosing Between Old-Fashioned Regulation and Second-Generation Strategies in the New Millennium."

The electricity crisis of 2001 produced more than rolling blackouts in California, skyrocketing prices throughout the West, and calls from the Bush Administration to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development. It also revealed that the historic imbalance between hydropower generation and salmon protection in the Columbia Basin remains a fixture of life in the Northwest.

I. Introduction

Introduction

How clean is clean? National policy on human health and ecological risk assessment has proceeded for some time on a precautionary approach to remediation requirements. Conservative assumptions on "safe" levels of exposure have created underlying assumptions of "clean up to background" levels of contamination as anything less would not guarantee safety for future residential use.