At the start of the 114th Congress, lawmakers from both parties in the House and the Senate have voiced support for reviewing and reforming the 39-year old Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

Is there a human right to a particular environment, one that overrides conflicting human interests? Given that all humans require a particular environment in order to survive and thereby have interests, the question seems to answer itself. Assuming, then, that there is a right to a particular environment, what does that environment look like?

Over a number of decades, various rules have been imposed on humans intending to limit our obsession with exploiting the garden of Earth. During this time, differing management techniques have been tried to ensure that the garden could continue to provide the resources and natural systems for humans to survive. But despite all these rules and laws and institutional commands, the garden has seemed to be getting sicker. Why have environmental policies not worked very well? Why have governmental responses neither deterred the exploitative gardener nor much helped the garden?

The initiation of a government environmental criminal investigation or discovery of a serious compliance issue often triggers the need to conduct an internal investigation.

Given projections of sea-level rise and extreme precipitation from climate change, the United States will experience more frequent and more severe flood events in coming years. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies, therefore, should be geared toward making relocation the easiest and most attractive option for property owners to pursue. The authors propose that property owners should agree in advance not to rebuild following floods that cause substantial damage and, instead, to accept a government buyout of their property and relocate.

Since the 1980s, water governance has increasingly been linked to institutions and laws that engage local actors and closely relate to local ecosystems and catchments. These approaches, referred to as collaborative water governance, encompass new coalitions among governments, their agencies, and institutions of civil society, and are typically held together via guidelines, plans, and nonbinding agreements.

In practice, the Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ) has been treated as the “administering agency” for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and courts and most action agencies have regarded its rules as binding law. Yet, a close examination of NEPA’s language and evolution reveals that CEQ authority is grounded more in the president’s Article II power than in any statutory delegation from Congress. This executive-branch authority to implement NEPA has garnered strong judicial deference and remained unquestioned despite prevailing doctrine to the opposite effect.

It usually takes at least three to start a trend, but two recent appellate-level decisions suggest a new air pollution enforcement trend is in the making: Environmental plaintiffs may be able to avoid Clean Air Act (CAA) preemption by bringing state common-law tort claims against an intrastate emitting source. The plaintiffs in both Bell v. Cheswick and Freeman v. Grain Processing Corp. successfully convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the Iowa Supreme Court, respectively, that the CAA did not preempt their tort claims based on state common law.

In June 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed standards under §111(d) of the Clean Air Act (CAA)1 for state plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired electric generating units (EGUs). These standards do not require states to use any particular means of emission reduction.

More than one decade after two circuit courts struck down the regulatory definition of “adverse modification” of critical habitat, two agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, are now proposing a comprehensive package of changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In May 2014, the Services proposed two rules and one new policy regarding the ESA. The first rule redefines “adverse modification” to place additional emphasis on species recovery after being listed as endangered.