The Bush Record on the Environment: What a Difference Two Years Make

Although the Bush Administration has proposed a few environmentally positive initiatives . . . these initiatives have been far over-shadowed by the efforts to weaken or roll back environmental protections

Advancing Environmental Justice Norms

Part I of this Article provides brief background on the environmental justice movement. Part 11 generally describes some of the challenges that environmental justice principles pose for the traditional environmental decision-making paradigm. Part III presents several specific examples of how environmental justice norms can be incorporated to improve the ethical outcomes of traditional agency decision making

Enforcing the Clean Water Act in the Twenty-First Century: Harnessing the Power of the Public Spotlight

Thirty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act, how can we strengthen enforcement of the CWA, increase rates of compliance, and move closer to achieving the statute\u27s un-derlying objectives? This Article argues that legislators and policymakers looking for solutions in this resource-strapped era should harness the power of the public spotlight to enhance enforcement efforts. Part I describes the strong Congressional and public support for vigorous enforcement of the statute. Part II discusses how successfully the NPDES program currently is being implemented by the states and the EPA. The record of performance shows that there are numerous deficiencies in the permitting and enforce-ment programs of many states and that rates of noncompliance by regulated entities are disturbingly high. Part III describes the large resource gap affecting many state NPDES programs, including state enforcement and com-pliance assistance programs. Part IV discusses various spotlighting ap-proaches that can be used to improve enforcement programs. These include (1) shining an EPA spotlight on the enforcement and compliance-related records of regulated firms; (2) shining an EPA spotlight on the performance of state NPDES programs in achieving compliance among regulated firms; and (3) requiring that publicly-traded corporations disclose more enforcement and compliance-related information to investors and the public

A Survey of Federal Agency Response to President Clinton\u27s Executive Order No. 12898 on Environmental Justice

In an effort to address the well-documented and serious problem of environmental justice in the United States, President William J. Clinton issued Executive Order (EO) No. 128981 on February 11, 1994. The EO represented the culmination of a century of rapid changes in society\u27s attitudes toward the placement of hazardous facilities in poor, disadvantaged, and minority communities, as well as the denial of services to these communities. This survey examines the impact of the EO on federal agencies