To the Congress of the United States:

Four months after I took office, I presented to the Congress a comprehensive Message on the Environment, a charter for the first years of my Administration. Building on the record of the Congress in the 1970s, I sought both to protect our national heritage and to meet the competing demands on our natural resources.

While approximately 90 percent of the nation's 23,000 major stationary sources of air pollution are in compliance with applicable emission limitations,¹ the remaining 10 percent pose major air pollution problems.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been the target in recent years of growing criticism that its pollution control requirements are in many instances unnecessarily rigid and excessively expensive. These pressures, in combination with EPA's developing interest in economically based alternatives to traditional regulatory approaches to pollution abatement,¹ have led the Agency to take several steps toward a regime that will, in its view, reconcile improved environmental quality with economic growth at the lowest possible cost.

Few areas of federal environmental law show less clarity and consistency than the limits of the federal government's constitutional powers over the nation's navigable waters. In particular, the concept of the "navigational servitude"—the government's virtually unfettered privilege to preserve, enhance, or condemn rights in navigable waters—has evolved erratically from its various constitutional and common law sources to the point where it defies precise definition. The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged this unsteady history, for which it is itself largely responsible:

In Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA)¹, Congress created what it expected would be a comprehensive regulatory scheme for the management and disposal of hazardous waste. Over the last three years, the truly alarming nature of the threat to public health and the environment presented by the thousands of hazardous disposal sites throughout the nation has become more fully apparent, however. Congress' original underestimation of the scope and seriousness of the hazardous waste problem is reflected in RCRA itself.

According to at least some of the voluminous literature on the subject, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)¹ may be an excellent example of effective environmental legislation, but it suffers from one serious limitation: the lack of a "substantive mandate."² These commentators argue that NEPA falls short of its potential, and perhaps its goals, because it fails explicitly to impose upon federal agencies a legally enforceable directive to enhance and refrain from degrading the environment.

A question that has long eluded definitive judicial resolution is whether a federal agency's failure to prevent an environmental significant state or private activity from occurring can constitute major federal action for which an environmental impact statement (EIS) must be prepared under §102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).¹ It is well established that the Act requires a federal agency to prepare an EIS analyzing such a non-federal project when it proposes to approve financial assistance or issue a permit without which the activity could no

The stiff monetary sanctions, injunctions, and even prison terms that are authorized to be imposed upon violators of the federal pollution control laws¹ act as a "big stick" with which timely compliance is encouraged by federal and state enforcement authorities. There are circumstances, however, in which these remedies are simply not effective or realistically available. An example of such a case is where the noncompliant facility is publicly owned, such as a municipal electric utility.

The central mechanism in the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA)¹ for limiting discharges from industrial point sources is the national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES) permit program.

In one of two recent decisions¹ that promise to streamline administration of the national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES), the United States Supreme Court validated the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) refusal to hold a public hearing in connection with the granting of an extension of an NPDES permit for a California sewage treatment plant. In Costle v.