Welcome. This evening I would like to trace for you the genesis and development of this program and then reflect on the issue with which it deals—federalism.

In this Article, I am to take EPA's three most sweeping pollution control statutes—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA)—and spell out how each of them deals with federal/state relations. Beyond that, I am supposed to plant the question in your minds whether the existing allocation of responsibilities makes sense, and how it might be reformed if it doesn't. I think we could ask that question either by taking each statute as a whole or by comparing them with each other, and I plan to do a little of both.

Senator Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Congressman Scheuer (D-N.Y.) are pushing legislation to make the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) into an independent commission. It is hardly necessary to recount the immediate reasons for the initiative; they are on the front pages of newspapers across the country. A press release announcing the legislation said simply:

We are paying the price, day in and day out, for an agency embroiled in controversy, paralyzed by distrust from without and defiance from within. It is time to begin anew.

It is time for a fresh, bipartisan review of outdoor recreation policy in this country to close a circle begun 25 years ago. In 1958, Congress created the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) to study the nation's outdoor recreation needs. The ORRRC was composed of four members of the Senate, two from each party, and four members of the House, again, two from each party. President Eisenhower appointed seven public members, including ORRRC's chairman, Laurance S. Rockefeller.

The recent negotiations between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and representatives of the steel industry and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) concerning the Steel Industry Effluent Guidelines provide a promising model for the resolution of future disputes over complex pollution control rules.

Editors' Summary: In 1980, Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, which provided a federal scheme for cleaning up hazardous waste sites and a so-called "Superfund" to finance the cleanups. Congress also considered but failed to include provisions to compensate victims of hazardous waste exposure. Instead, it created a study group, which in 1982 recommended a remedial system for hazardous waste injuries.

Editors' Summary: An important but rarely litigated issue under NEPA concerns the consideration that agencies must give to the human health consequences of federal projects. Although human health effects have understandably been characterized as the "most important issue to be covered in an EIS," on many occasions such effects have been neglected out of concern for the more traditional subjects of environmental analyses. In this Article, Mr.

Earlier this year in KFC Western, Inc. v. Meghrig, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that private parties may obtain restitution of the costs of cleaning up contaminated property under §7002(a)(1)(B) of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The Ninth Circuit's ruling in KFC Western opened the way for private parties to use the RCRA citizen suit provision to recover their costs of investigating, studying, and cleaning up contaminated property from responsible parties.

The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act¹ compelled the adjustment of traditional legal doctrines in order to accommodate the concerns of environmentalists. The courts expanded long-standing notions of justiciability,² standing,³ and irreparable injury⁴ to allow representation of environmental interests to the degree previously accorded the representation of economic interests.

The federal-aid highway approval process is a labyrinth of which Daedalus could be proud. A series of Policy and Procedure Memoranda (PPMs), Instructional Memoranda (IMs), and Orders creates an administrative maze that the Federal Highway Administration had until recently managed to protect from presentation in the Code of Federal Regulations.