The Tax Reform Act of 1976, Pub. L. No. 94-455, signed by President Ford on October 4, 1976, includes among its hodge-podge of some 1,500 pages several provisions of interest to those involved with environmental protection. The Act establishes new lobbying rules for tax-exempt charitable organizations, adds tax incentives to encourage the preservation of historic structures, and changes the tax treatment of pollution control facilities.

In one of the first direct judicial responses to the Supreme Court's discussion last term in Kleppe v. Sierra Club¹ of NEPA's programmatic impact statement requirements, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has denied² a motion for rehearing of its earlier decision in Natural Resources Defense Council v.

Overlooked for many years as an enforcement tool, the doctrine of federal common law of water pollution rocketed to national prominence following the Supreme Court's historic decision in Illinois v. City of Milwaukee.¹ Although the Court declined to exercise its original jurisdiction over the allegation by Illinois that Milwaukee caused a public nuisance by its discharge of raw sewage into Lake Michigan, it did hold that the word "laws" in the federal question statute, §1331(a),² embraces federal court-created common law.

A number of judicial decisions have made 1976 a watershed year in the area of federal wildlife law, presaging increased litigation over the balance to be drawn between animals (particularly where Congress has mandated special consideration) and those forces that tend to promote commercial use of resources at the inevitable expense of wildlife. It is a battle that has been fought for years on the grand scale of the preservationists versus the developers, but now that greater interest has focused on the problem, the conflict has become particularized.

Successful referenda on the ballot in recent elections have added Michigan and Maine to the growing number of states that require deposits on beverage containers¹ and mark a significant gain toward improved control of solid waste. The new laws follow fairly closely the 1972 Oregon bottle bill, which is generally considered to be quite successful, and in combination with a very close race in Massachusetts indicate that the example set by Oregon may be catching on.²

On October 13, 1976, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found the United States Navy's environmental impact statement for construction of the Trident nuclear submarine base in Bangor, Washington, deficient in two respects, but allowed construction to continue.¹ Placing an interesting gloss on §§101(b)(1) and 102(2)(C)(iv) of NEPA, the court disapproved the Navy's failure to forecast Trident's environmental impacts beyond 1981, the projected completion date for the base.

So long as the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution exists, there will be litigation over the nature and extent of the takings question: when does governmental action abrogate private property rights through appropriation or arbitrariness? Equally certain is that there will be disagreement over the appropriate theoretical tests in takings litigation.

Without much fanfare, the Council on Environmental Quality has issued its seventh annual report, a document notable for both its brevity and relative punctuality.Entitled Environmental Quality—1976,¹ it totals only 378 pages, barely one-half the length of last year's report. As CEQ notes in the Preface, this shortening is purposeful; the Council has adopted a new format which it hopes will make the report more useful as a reference document.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)¹ has been heralded as the greatest piece of legislation in recent history for improving the environment. Some critics, However, believe it is vastly overrated and accomplishes little more than allowing a few lawyers to go to the courts and delay actions needed in the best intersest of the nation as a whole. Between these views lies a balanced appraisal of how NEPA has worked in its first six years.

It is the thesis of this Article that the ultimate success of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is strongly dependent upon reasonably complete and timely scientific information. Implementation of NEPA requires scientific descriptions of environmental quality and productivity, and the essence of the environmental impact statement (EIS) is a capability to anticipate the environmental consequences of a proposed action. Prediction of ecosystem behavior includes both degradation from technological change and recovery or improvement due to pollution abatement.