Protecting healthy watersheds and restoring degraded ones is one of this country's major unmet environmental challenges. Because watersheds do not respect political boundaries, effective watershed conservation will require cooperation and coordination among all levels of government, including local units. Watershed conservation is one of the increasingly significant environmental protection roles local governments are playing for a variety of reasons, ranging from choice to coercion.

Among certain academic circles, it has become common to assert that owners of private land take care of what they own. One encounters the claim most often in discussions about land-related environmental problems. Unowned lands, resources shared by many: these are the ones that are degraded, it is said, not lands that have a single owner vested with clear, secure rights. Private owners take care of what they own.

In a recent article in the Yale Law Journal, Profs. Thomas W. Merrill and Henry E. Smith express concerns about what they take to be the excessive abstraction of law-and-economics writing on private property. This scholarly discourse, they tell us, seems to have forgotten that property law has to do with things. It has become too focused on property as a bundle of legal entitlements and liabilities, overlooking the underlying res that a person might actually own.

Any analysis of U.S. progress toward meeting the goals of Agenda 21 must include a hard look at the political will and actions toward reforming our system of land use controls. Land development policies and decisions are inextricably intertwined with a significant number of items contained in Agenda 21, creating a perhaps unusual scenario requiring cross-disciplinary and interjurisdictional approaches to effectively implement strategies that will both promote and yield sustainable land development.

On June 18, 2001, all eight governors of the Great Lakes states and the premiers of the two Canadian provinces bordering the Great Lakes basin gathered at the impressive Prospect Point in Niagara Falls to sign a sweeping joint declaration. Known as "Annex 2001," the document is a supplementary agreement to the Great Lakes Charter of 1985. But unlike the loose and informal charter, Annex 2001 commits this diverse and multipartisan group of political leaders to find a way to collectively manage the Great Lakes basin.