A recent decision by a district court in Minnesota, Izaak Walton League v. St. Clair,¹ has brought again to national consciousness the anomalous exemption granted to mining activities² in the Wilderness Act of 1964.³ That exemption,⁴ allegedly inserted into the Wilderness Act by former Rep.

The proliferating field of environmental law presents a timely example of the always fascinating interplay of law and fact, of science and jurisprudence. It also tests the vitality of many traditional notions of the functions of courts in a republic, the relative distribution of power among appointed judges, the people's elected representatives in Congress, and administrative officials who in most instances are neither elected nor directly chosen by anyone who has been elected.

The Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere¹ was introduced in an article in the May issue of ELR,² in the context of an analysis of the recent decision in Izaak Walton League v. St. Clair.³ The author suggested that the Convention provided independent grounds for support of Judge Neville's opinion enjoining mining activities in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of the National Wilderness Preservation System.

On January 1, 1970, the Council on Environmental Quality came into existence with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act.¹ The CEQ was to serve as the guardian of environmental concerns within the Executive Branch. It was given the functions of advising the president, monitoring other agencies' compliance with NEPA, and providing information to the public on environmental matters.²

Section 309 of the Clean Air Act¹ makes the Environmental Protection Agency full partner of the Council on Environmental Quality in the task of overseeing implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act.² Congress gave EPA responsibilities complementary to those of CEQ so that both agencies could accomplish together what each alone would be unable to do. Section 309 lays the groundwork for a formidable administrative team fully capable of ensuring compliance with NEPA in government decisionmaking.

On July 23, 1973, a consent judgment was entered against the defendants in a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., titled National Wildlife Federation v. Tiemann.¹ This Article explains the terms of a settlement agreement included in the consent judgment and suggests ways in which citizens concerned about ongoing construction of the federal-aid highways affected by the settlement agreement may take advantage of it.

The comment is often made that the states are experimental laboratories for environmental legislation.¹ In the instance of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the opposite has been the case. The federal government has served as an experimental laboratory for the various states. The experiment has proven successful, and that states are now adopting their own "little NEPAs." It is the purpose of this Article to summarize the state provisions.

Over the past three years, the courts have had many opportunities to interpret NEPA. The Act has been involved in 149 separate litigations, some of which have produced several opinions. Yet, Chapters IV, V, and VI abundantly confirm that the bulk of these interpretations focuses on the one short action-forcing provision set out in §102(2) (C). As important as that section is, its role is nevertheless an essentially subservient one. An archive of disregarded assessments that bring about no real improvement in federal decisionmaking might satisfy §102(2) (C), but would fail NEPA as a whole.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969¹ (NEPA) was intended to bring about fundamental reform on all levels of the federal decisionmaking process where the environment was concerned. On its fourth anniversary (the law was signed on New Year's Day, 1970), the Act still has far to go in achieving its ambitious goals. Yet, the progress that it has made has revitalized many of the bureaucratic processes that slight environmental values.

To citizens who perceive the government's regulatory agencies as invariably bent on aggrandizing their power, it may come as a surprise to learn that these agencies have sometimes opposed efforts to make them assume new authority. The Federal Power Commission is one of these; for more than half a century, it has resisted attempts to expand its jurisdiction.