The economic success of the United States over the past century has prompted observers around the world to look to it for lessons on stimulating growth. Compared with many countries, the United States is plainly doing something right in terms of fostering the energies of its people. One cause of U.S. success has been the fertile land of central North America, and no study can overlook that unearned natural blessing. Still, American culture and its many institutions have played chief roles in the nation's cornucopia.

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.

To the extent the city argues that, as a matter of law, its landuse decisions are immune from judicial scrutiny under all circumstances, its position is contrary to settled regulatory takings principles. We reject this claim of error.

Improperly planned urban development has resulted in catastrophic sprawl. The present land use zeitgeist hails urban and suburban mixed-use zoning as the solution. Mixed-use zoning combines—rather than segregates—residential, commercial, and sometimes industrial land uses, and thereby decreases housing costs, decreases commuting periods, decreases vehicle miles traveled and air emissions, increases the efficient use of land and time, and increases consumer convenience.

Smart Growth admits of no clear definition. It provides a popular label for a growth strategy that addresses current concerns about traffic congestion, disappearing open space, nonpoint source pollution, the high cost of housing, increasing local property taxes, longer commutes, and the diminishing quality of community life. To accomplish smart growth, government must take two related actions. The first is the designation of discrete geographical areas into which private market growth pressures are directed.

In the west Chicago suburb of Sugar Grove—population 4,000, twice what it was 10 years ago—new large-lot developments spread spider-like from the downtown public library, police station, and village hall out into open farmland. The village has no sizeable employers or large shopping centers, and has limited recreational facilities. All those things are available close by in other suburbs and, of course, in the city of Chicago. After elementary school, children travel to neighboring suburbs for high school.

Timothy S. Bishop and Cristina C. Tilley, litigators in the Chicago office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, offered up a Dialogue in the July 2002, issue of the Environmental Law Reporter News & Analysis entitled Smart Growth or Dumb Bureaucracy? They didn't cite the Article I wrote with my law partner of 25 years, Gurdon H. (Don) Buck, Smart Growth, Dumb Takings, which was also published in this august periodical. I don't think we own the form of the title beginning with "Smart" and linked to "Dumb," but it would have been nice to have been recognized.