Editors' Summary: This past summer, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Ohio Forestry Ass'n v. Sierra Club, 118 S. Ct. 1665, 28 ELR 21119 (1998). The Court held that an environmental group's challenge to a U.S. Forest Service land and resource management plan for the Wayne National Forest in Ohio was not ripe for review. This Article examines how this decision affects the rules for judicial review of national forest plans.

At first glance, the California Desert Conservation Area (CDCA) is a 25-million-acre expanse of sand dunes, brush lands, rock formations, and loneliness and desolation. However, a cursory look at the landscape belies the desert's significant historical, scenic, archeological, environmental, biological, cultural, scientific, educational, recreational, and economic resources" that the U.S. Congress recognized when it dedicated the area in 1976.

In discussions of the economies of the Mountain West, natural landscapes tend to be looked upon from either of two perspectives. The first is tied to the history of European settlement of the region. Natural landscapes are looked upon as the source of the natural resource raw materials that supply the region's "basic" industries: mining and metal processing, farming and ranching and the food processing associated with them, and timber harvest and the manufacturing based on it. The second view focuses more on the present and expected future.

On March 1, 1999, at 11:56 p.m. Pacific Coast time, the people of the United States took title to the Headwaters Forest, the largest remaining stand of privately owned, old growth redwoods in the world. Uncertain until the end, the transaction was recorded only minutes before the $250 million appropriation of federal funds for the purchase expired.

The February 2000 issue of the Environmental Law Reporter (ELR) carried an Article by Deputy Secretary of the Interior David J. Hayes relating the dramatic negotiations that led to the settlement of the Headwaters controversy, whereby the federal government agreed to buy the Pacific Lumber Company's (PALCO's) Headwaters Forest, a 7,500-acre tract of old growth redwood trees, in order to preserve it as a national park. Though I was one of the lawyers for PALCO, and thus my perspective of this affair understandably differs from Mr.

From the enactment of the National Park Service Organic Act (the Organic Act or the Act) in 1916 until a 1998 decision by a federal district court in Utah, the National Park Service (NPS) had managed national parks without resolving theseeming contradiction between the Act's directive to conserve park resources "unimpaired" and its simultaneous directive to provide for visitors' "enjoyment" of those resources. Uncertainty, confusion, and disputes about the inevitably conflicting implications of these mandates were virtually guaranteed by the text of the Act, which requires the NPS to—

Our magnificent 40,000-mile National Trails System was established by Congress under the National Trails System Act (NTSA) of 1968 through the combined efforts of President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and Sens. Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash.) and Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.). Private and nonfederal public lands make up the lion's share of federally recognized long-distance trail corridors.

"In the ranchers' view, history has created expectations in respect to the security of 'grazing privileges'; they have relied upon those expectations; and the statute requires the Secretary to 'safeguard' that reliance."

"Their adamance derives from a recollection of history that never existed and from asserted promises that were never made."

Editors' Summary: Property rights advocates implicitly complained in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon that a Fish and Wildlife Service regulation that aimed to protect endangered and threatened species by defining "harm" to include habitat modification impinged on their rights as private landowners by asking them to share with the government responsibility for protecting such species. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the regulation as reasonable given the relevant language of the Endangered Species Act.

Editors' Summary: Although most talk in terms of wildlife protection seems to focus on the operation of the ESA, there are a host of other federal and state laws designed to protect wildlife from the impacts of resource-development projects—before the species become threatened or endangered.