On January 28, 1975, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the EPA regulation to reduce the level of tetraethyl lead in gasoline was arbitrary and capricious. Within only slightly more than one month, the Environmental Protection Agency itself reversed a previously held position concerning the schedule for clamping down on automotive exhaust emissions. The reversal was occasioned, it was said, because of the likelihood of sulfuric acid mist emissions from the catalytic devices necessary to meet the more restrictive standards.

In legislation and administrative regulations of great potential significance, Congress and the federal executive departments have committed the United States to the protection of animal and plant species that are threatened with extinction. The primary instrument for implementing that commitment is the Endangered Species Act of 1973,¹ a statute that now is emerging as an important component of federal law.

Recent developments in both the Congress and various federal agencies may have significantly altered the once rosy future of the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) program.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, as in hundreds of other communities and states, air pollution is a vital concern. Consequently, the Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Board has been authorized to fight air pollution in several ways. One is to require that stationary sources of air pollution (e.g., incinerators, factories, hospitals, and even apartment complexes) obtain permits to continue emitting smoke and other gas or particulates into the atmosphere.

In 1972, the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment highlighted for all the world the significance of foreign practice and experience in the search for more effective environmental management at home. Less well-publicized is the mandate that the Conference imposed on the legal profession: to look through a foreign culture to the essence of its response, to translate it and, ultimately, to render it usable abroad.

In a decision¹ of national importance, the Army Corps of Engineers has denied two applications from a large land developer for dredging and filling more than 2,000 acres of mangrove swamps at Marco Island, Florida. The Corps has thus dramatically signalled its willingness to apply strictly its own recently developed policy of protecting the nation's wetlands from unnecessary destruction.

Draining the industrial heartland of America, Ol' Man River carries a massive load of industrial and municipal wastes to the sea. New Orleans draws its drinking water from the Mississippi, and so its residents have for decades complained of the city's off-color, off-taste water.

In key decisions concerning one of the most hotly contested ambiguities in the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, the Third¹ and Seventh² Circuit Courts of Appeals recently held that the Environmental Protection Agency has authority under §301³ of the statute to issue a uniform, single number nationwide effluent limitation applicable to all existing point sources within a particular industrial class or category.

It is an environmental truism that neither the ecosystem nor pollutants respect state lines. One state's factory emissions may become another's acid precipitation; one's polluted waste waters may cause bacteria blooms and fish kills in another's lakes. This phenomenon goes far to explain the federal government's growing involvement in air and water pollution control, traditionally a matter of state and local responsibility. The federal role now seems to some so pervasive as to strain the fabric of the federal system.

Four court of appeals have now considered the validity of the Environmental Protection Agency's attempt to compel the states to administer and enforce transportation controls under the Clean Air Act. The split in judicial authority which the first three decisions produced was analyzed in a previous ELR Comment.¹ The D.C.