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.

While the Republican's Contract With America has disappeared from the political landscape, many of its ideas continue to percolate in the 105th Congress. Development interests continue to promote federal legislation to expand opportunities for "takings" claims against the government. Through such takings claims developers or private landowners seek to be compensated for not polluting or not building on protected land.

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.

Conventional wisdom says that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) is an impediment to the reuse of brownfields. Examination of a decade of experience, however, reveals that properties "captured by the net" of RCRA jurisdiction have gone on to new, productive, and economically viable reuse. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is also a great potential for many more RCRA properties to do so.

There has been a great deal of federal-state conflict, termed the "Seaweed Rebellion," regarding the development of outer continental shelf (OCS) oil and gas resources. The crux of the conflict is that the benefits of OCS energy development are national, while the impacts are regional. One of the main issues of contention is the distribution and control of the revenues derived from OCS energy development. Presently, most of the revenues are deposited into the U.S. Treasury and utilized to pay for federal programs and deficit reduction.

Over the past 50 years, all 50 States and over 500 municipalities have enacted laws to encourage or require the preservation of buildings and areas with historic or aesthetic importance. These nationwide legislative efforts have been precipitated by two concerns. The first is recognition that, in recent years, large numbers of historic structures, landmarks, and areas have been destroyed without adequate consideration of either the values represented therein or the possibility of preserving the destroyed properties for use in economically productive ways.

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.