Background Principles of Wetlands Law: The Early History

15 pages. Contains 3 pages of references

Planning for a Bull Market for Wetlands

Until recently, wetlands had value in the marketplace only as targets for destruction. Today, wetlands often have market value for uses that do not require that they be dredged and filled. Such opportunities include: 1. Carbon storage offsets for greenhouse gas emissions; 2. Mitigation banks for destruction of other wetlands; 3. Conservation banks for wildlife protection; 4. Tradable water quality protection rights; 5. Sites for growing algae or other biofuel crops. These new uses have valid public benefits, but most laws and ordinances were not written with these possibilities in mind. Planners and lawyers need to think about ways to ensure that such proposals can be analyzed and regulated to consider their site-by-site impact on traditional wetland values

The Ecological Advantages of Nuclear Power

Major electric utilities are deciding whether to build nuclear power plants. How will their decision affect ecological processes and systems, both in the United States and globally? The article makes three arguments: (1) if nuclear power plants are not built, the gap will be filled by more coal-fired power plants; (2) the impact of coal-fired power plants on ecological processes and systems is likely to be increasingly disastrous; and (3) nuclear power’s ecological impacts are likely to be neutral or even positive