Volume 43 (2016)

The Clean Air Act, like many federal environmental statutes, relies upon the cooperation of state environmental agencies for its execution and enforcement. If states do not cooperate, the Clean Air Act obligates the federal government to regulate in their stead as well as to impose potentially draconian sanctions. Specifically, the ...

Fueled by increasing demand for marijuana, illegal cultivation of the drug on public lands is causing massive environmental harm. The federal government lacks the resources to wage what would be a difficult and costly campaign to eradicate these illegal grow sites and instead focuses its limited resources on enforcing the ...

The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by a group of armed militants led by Ammon Bundy during January 2016 spotlighted public land management for a largely oblivious American public. The militants’ month-long occupation was only the latest of several armed confrontations in recent years, one of ...

Decentralization is becoming a dominant trend in many industries, and the electricity industry is no exception. Increasing numbers of energy consumers generate their own electricity and/or provide essential grid services such as storage, efficiency, and demand response. This Article offers a positive account of the emergence of these new energy ...

Scientists around the world are actively working toward de-extinction, the concept of bringing extinct species back to life. Before herds of woolly mammoths roam and flocks of passenger pigeons soar once again, the international community needs to consider what should be done about de- extinct species from a legal and ...

To the extent that litigation makes a muddle of private-party ordering, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act has created more messes than it has cleaned up. Congress enacted the Act to clean up hazardous waste spills. The litigious explosion that resulted, however, caused widespread and pervasive private sector ...

We are honored to introduce Ecology Law Quarterly’s 2015–2016 Annual Review of Environmental and Natural Resource Law. Now in its seventeenth year, the Annual Review is a collaborative endeavor. It is founded on Berkeley Law’s renowned environmental law program, which itself is built upon some of the leading scholars in ...

Recklessly gambling with Kansas’s water rights to the Republican River, Nebraska used 17 percent more water than it was allocated by the interstate Republican River Compact during a drought in 2005–06. Kansas sued Nebraska for this breach of compact in the Supreme Court. While the Court ultimately found that Nebraska ...

Cottonwood Environmental Law Center v. United States Forest Service presents a troubling development for environmental plaintiffs seeking injunctive relief for procedural violations of the Endangered Species Act. The panel majority overturned a thirty-year-old presumption of irreparable harm, in a move that undermines the precautionary purpose of the Endangered Species Act.

This Note provides a broad overview of section 404 of the Clean Water Act and the implications of its implementation regarding what constitutes “waters of the United States.” This Note focuses on the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to clarify the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act through the Clean Water ...

Through the doctrine of constitutional standing, federal courts have consistently attempted to limit their jurisdiction to claims in which they can redress the plaintiff’s injury. This determination becomes more complicated when a third party asserts that it would “replace” the defendant’s role and cause the same injury to the plaintiff ...

After over a decade of controversy and litigation, the Ninth Circuit finally shielded the Tongass National Forest from road construction and timber harvest. In Organized Village of Kake v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, the court’s en banc panel struck down the Forest Service’s decision to exempt the Tongass from the ...

The Clean Water Rule was the latest attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to define “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. While both politics and scholarship around this issue have typically centered on the jurisdictional status of rural waters, like ...

In Sierra Club v. ICG Hazard, the Sixth Circuit held that a general permit holder is only liable for discharges expressly prohibited by his/her permit terms as long as 1) he/she adequately disclosed other discharges and 2) the permitting agency reasonably contemplated those discharges at the time the permit was ...

The United States leads the world in natural gas production, and by the end of 2014, domestic oil production had reached its highest rate in thirty years. While this U.S. natural gas production occurred on both private and public property, this In Brief focuses specifically on public lands managed by ...

After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, one of the worst environmental man-made disasters and the largest ever oil spill in the United States, scholars and government investigators analyzed the offshore regulatory regime and its implementation in search of failures that led to the accident and possible solutions. Relatively ...

Since the 1970s, the Gulf of Mexico has suffered from human-produced nutrient pollution. The ongoing pollution from the Mississippi River Basin has created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico that harms biodiversity and the fishing and tourism industries. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected a petition from ...

The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) prohibits the sale or distribution of any pesticide without prior registration and approval by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). EPA may deny applications for pesticide registration when “necessary to prevent unreasonable adverse effects on the environment.” On September 10, 2015, the Ninth ...

In the midst of a Northern Arizona plateau, a rust-colored hill rises steeply from a base of sandstone to a summit of volcanic rock. The Havasupai Tribe (“the Tribe”) refers to this land as the “mountain of the clenched fist,” and it is one of their most sacred spaces. More ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s final rule that limits carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants—the Clean Power Plan—is an environmental regulation that powerfully influences energy law and forms a key part of the U.S. plan to meet its voluntary international commitments under the December 2015 Paris Agreement on climate ...