At present, and for some time to come, the responsibilities of the federal agency with the duty to prepare an environmental impact statement will remain the key focus in the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

Section 102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) provides that preliminary environmental impact statements, along with the comments of appropriate federal, state, and local agencies "shall be made available to the President, the Council on Environmental Quality and to the public . . ." CEQ in its Revised Guidelines for §102 Statements, issued April 23, 1971, 1 ELR 46049, requires that draft environmental impact statements be made available to the public at least 90 days prior to an administrative action and that final statements, with agency comments, be m

The July 1971 issue of ELR included an extensive comment on the highway design public hearing requirments of federal highway law including an analysis of several judicial decisions interpreting those requirements. See 1 ELR 10103. Recent Judicial and administrative activity has affected the law discussed in that comment and perhaps affected the continuing viability of some of that comment's conclusions. The judicial activity is the most recent decision of the D.C. Circuit in D.C. Federation of Civic Associations v. Volpe, No. 24,838 (D.C. Cir. Oct. 12, 1971).

Four months ago, eight environmental groups filed suit in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia in an attempt to block the underground detonation by the Atomic Energy Commission of a five-megaton nuclear warhead on Amchitka, an island in the Aleutian chain off Alaska.

On April 30, 1970, the Council on Environmental Quality issued its interim guidelines for implementing the recently enacted National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. See Interim Guidelines at 1 ELR 46001. Those guidelines called upon federal agencies to develop systematic procedures detailing how individual agencies would prepare impact statements under §102(2)(C) of NEPA. Twenty departments, component agencies, and commissions complied, and their extensive guidelines were published in ELR's first issue in January 1971. See 1 ELR 46007-47.

This Primer is largely the work of James W. Moorman, who presented it as an "Outline of Federal Environmental Law for the Practicing Lawyer" at a conference on law and the environment held at Airlie House, Warrenton, Virginia, on September 11 and 12, 1969. The proceedings of the conference, including Mr. Moorman's paper, appear in Law and the Environment, Walker and Company (New York: October, 1970).

Title I of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969¹ (hereafter NEPA) imposes a broad scope of environmental responsibility upon federal agencies.

In the early 1960s, biologists first publized the value of wetlands in coastal zone ecosystems. But proponents of preservation of Maryland's marshes were faced with a problem.

Maryland's Chesapeake Bay waters afford an almost perfect environment for the growing of oysters.¹ Vast expanses of bottom are covered with waters of hospitable temperatures and salinities. These sheltered waters afford relative freedom from predators and diseases that have substantially impaired oyster production in Long Island Sound, Delaware Bay, and Virginia waters.

On January 1, 1970, as his first official act of the new decade, the President signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). That symbolic step has highlighted a year and a half of unprecedented development of the law relating to protection of the environment.