The investigation and prosecution of environmental crimes has steadily increased over the past decade.¹ Regulatory agencies responsible for overseeing compliance with environmental statutes have become aggressive prosecutors of environmental crimes. This change in posture, first witnessed in the early 1980s, has been contagious and is today evident at all levels of the law enforcement community. For example, in recent years, legislatures have enacted new environmental statutes and strengthened existing ones.

Theory Becomes Practice

Of all the proliferating ideas for reinventing environmental regulation, none are more portentous than those grouped loosely under the heading "civic environmentalism." In a nutshell, such proposa's urge the delegation of crucial decisions and their implementation to grassroots groups of interested parties who would collaborate in the development of creative solutions to the problems that have stymied traditional regulation.¹

A growing number of business, government, and environmental interest groups have concluded that environmental policy in the United States is inadequate to deal with the complexities of environmental protection in the 21st century.

Regional haze and visibility impairment results from particles and gases in the atmosphere scattering and absorbing light.¹ The primary pollutants that affect visibility throughout much of the United States are sulfates and nitrates.² This Dialogue addresses the statutory commands, regulatory programs, and other forces that are likely to drive future regulation of industry in this evolving, highly complex area.

In an effort to address the well-documented and serious problem of environmental justice in the United States, President William J. Clinton issued Executive Order (EO) No. 12898¹ on February 11, 1994. The EO represented the culmination of a century of rapid changes in society's attitudes toward the placement of hazardous facilities in poor, disadvantaged, and minority communities, as well as the denial of services to these communities. This survey examines the impact of the EO on federal agencies.²

Prior to the New Deal, the American judiciary was highly suspicious of regulatory legislation, which was viewed as upsetting the common law's support for private property interests and freedom of contract. Laissez-faire policies reigned. Regulatory statutes were vulnerable to invalidation under a variety of constitutional theories, including substantive due process, federalism and, for a brief period of time, delegating legislative authority to the executive branch, a constitutional offense under separation-of-powers principles.

In recent years, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and Secretary of Commerce have accumulated hundreds of lawsuits challenging fisheries management rules made by the agency. Litigation is not new to these parties; controversy has pervaded fisheries management since the 1976 passage of the primary U.S. fisheries statute—the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson Act).¹ However, the magnitude of litigation has reached historic levels in the years since its 1996 Amendments.

While scores of western commentators criticize the nontransparency¹ of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in their examination of "green" trade-environment issues, they often ignore the linkage between domestic politics in powerful states and international trade measures. Consciously or unconsciously, they blur this crucial linkage that divides WTO members and exacerbates conflicts and scuttles them to the WTO in the first place.

Sovereignty: a: supreme power especially over a body politic;

b: freedom from external control.¹

Jurisdictional issues have been a part of the lives of Native Americans since before the Indian wars and continue to be at the center of all disputes involving both their environment and their natural resources. Modern jurisdictional issues usually concern sovereignty, treaties, and the rights of states and tribal courts. More recently, transboundary issues have become a part of environmental disputes.

In January 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC),¹ held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) lacks jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to require landowners and developers to obtain § 404 permits to dredge or fill isolated ponds and wetlands which are not navigable and not connected to navigable waters, but are used by migratory birds that fly across state lines.