The harnessing of the sun's direct energy to heat and cool homes and to heat water for household uses is changing residential architecture across America. As the use of conventional fuels is reduced globally, residential solar systems will become a common sight in the 1980s and beyond. Today, there is a large variety of residential solar designs because the technology is young, decentralized, and rapidly growing and because there is much diversity in climates, latitudes, and architectural styles in the regions where the technology is applied. Each solar design has a unique visual impact.

Over the past 40 years, the United States Congress has constructed a body of law aimed at salvaging fish and wildlife resources from the impacts of federal water resource projects—dams, canals, channelization, and their attendant improvements.

In 1972, as part of the process of detente, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) entered into an Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection. One of the more than 40 specific projects under this exchange deals with "Legal and Administrative Measures for Environmental Protection." The scope of the project includes studying the roles of nongovernmental organizations: public interest groups in the U.S. and mass movements for nature protection in the Soviet Union.

In January 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took its first steps toward enforcing the noncompliance penalty program authorized by §120 of the Clean Air Act.¹ A novel enforcement tool established by the 1977 amendments to the Act, §120 prescribes automatic administrative money penalties equal to the economic benefit of delayed compliance for sources still in violation with Clean Air Act requirements two years after passage of the amendments.

Enforcement was much on the mind of Congress when it drafted the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970.¹ The Act gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad authority to monitor the emissions of individual polluting facilities and to seek the imposition of potentially severe sanctions on violators. In the first six years of the Act's existence, however, EPA's attention focused less on enforcement than on developing and defending a regulatory and institutional framework for implementing the Act.

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana, relatively uncelebrated until 1981, recently became the focus of a legal and political controversy raising crucial environmental as well as constitutional issues. Though the specific controversy has now subsided for the most part, it set in motion a heated debate over the basics of federal wilderness law and policy.

Controlling air pollution from automobiles has proved to be one of the most difficult objectives of the Clean Air Act to achieve.¹ Motor vehicle emissions account for a large percentage of the total concentrations of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide (CO), photochemical oxidants (ozone), and lead in urban air, and most of the 200 largest cities in the country have health-threatening levels of at least one of these pollutants in their air.² Nonetheless, attempts to control these emissions have generated intense political controversy.

Effluent limitations for industrial facilities that discharge pollution directly to surface waters are one of the cornerstones of the national clean water program established by the 1972 Amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA).¹ They embody Congress' decision to scrap an ineffective regulatory system based on water quality in favor of a more workable, technology-based system of effluent regulation.

The National Contingency Plan (NCP) is the federal government's handbook governing responses to oil and hazardous substance releases endangering human health and the environment.

To many, run-of-the-river dams, of which there are over 67,000 greater than 25 feet high in this county, appear environmentally benign. Indeed, hydroelectric dams are often praised as the least environmentally damaging of traditional energy sources. However, in addition to environmental problems stemming from dam construction, such as flooding, destruction of fish and wildlife habitat, and loss of natural river flows, the operation of dams, especially large impoundments such as hydroelectric projects, can create significant water quality problems.