Resource extraction on a large scale has recently begun in some national parks, dwarfing the modest diggings and pickings of old-time gold bugs and causing consternation in Congress. As a result, a rash of measures have been introduced which would curtail, regulate or ban mining operations within the boundaries of the National Parks.

"The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done," declared Edmund Burke nearly two centuries ago. At the turn of this decade, in pursuit of the public interest, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act¹—a comprehensive national policy for restoring, protecting, and enhancing the quality of our environment.

On January 3, 1975, the Deepwater Ports Act of 1974¹ was signed into law, and the United States thereby prepared to join the sizeable fraternity of nations already using this type of facility. Congressional consideration of deepwater ports—offshore tanker moorings at which oil is unloaded and piped ashore—led House and Senate committees through a tangle of vexing issues, including supertanker design, conflicting local and national interests, international law, antitrust implications, and the ubiquitous clash between energy needs and environmental considerations.

On February 5, 1974, a Consent Judgment in the case of Conservation Council of North Carolina v. Froehlke,¹ signed by District Court Judge Eugene A. Gordon, was docketed in the United States District Court of North Carolina, thereby concluding a principal phase of litigation in the B. Everett Jordan Dam (formerly New Hope Dam) project controversy.

At the molecular level, it has always been a chemical world. But since the 1930s, when the chemical industry began its phenomenal 15 percent annual growth, it has become a synthetic chemical world.

In an action reminiscent of his predecessor's handling of the DDT cancellation case,¹ EPA Administrator Russell Train recently declined to follow an administrative law judge's recommendation and suspended registrations for the major uses of the pesticides chlordane and heptachlor.² The ruling is expected to result in a drop of 70 and 85 percent, respectively, in the use of the chemicals.

In mid-November 1975, a congressional conference committee¹ finally settled a bitter conflict which had broken out last summer between conservationists and farming interests over federal pesticide policy. The focus of the adversaries' well-prepared legislative campaigns, which quickly polarized the houses of Congress, was the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA),² the funding authorization for which was due to expire November 15.

The latest brief in a protracted legal struggle between environmentalists and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was filed in early November when the SEC published its proposed revised corporate environmental disclosure rules under the securities acts and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Beauty can indeed by viewed by the eyes of the law, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has concluded, rejecting a statutory and constitutional challenge to a town by-law prohibiting off-premise advertising signs in residential, industrial or business zones.¹ The court held that a police power regulation does not violate due process simply because it is based solely on aesthetic considerations, and that municipalities may enact reasonable billboard regulations in order to preserve or enhance their urban environment.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded the Environmental Law Institute an eight-month contract to prepare a handbook which will assist local governmental bodies known as "208 planning agencies" in the design of regulatory programs for the control of water pollution. The handbook will focus on the legal and institutional aspects of programs regulating water pollution and will supplement other EPA technical studies.