Public Lands
The Ever-Growing Crisis Over the Nation’s Nuclear Waste Non-Solution
The Associated Press reports that six underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking a witches’ brew of high-level nuclear wastes into the soil that threatens regional groundwater supplies. This news highlights a crisis of national proportions that has for too long gone unaddressed. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?
The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …
CONTINUE READINGCall for Cabinet Nominations!
With all the heat generated by the nominations for the Secretaries of State and Defense, it is easy to overlook that President Obama must make nominations for four agencies critical to environmental policy: EPA, Interior, Energy, and USTR. And it says something that there do not seem to be obvious, strong candidates that environmentalists can …
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CONTINUE READINGOf Mollusks and Men: The Wilderness Act and Drakes Bay Oyster Company
The debate over Drakes Bay Oyster Company’s continued operation within the Point Reyes National Seashore created two unlikely foes: environmentalists in favor of transitioning the land to wilderness, and supporters of local, organic food and a longstanding family business. The San Francisco Chronicle aptly termed it a “legal and philosophical slugfest.” The door seems to …
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CONTINUE READINGGuest bloggers from Berkeley Law Environmental Law Society: Contextualizing Secretary Salazar’s Recent Decision on Oyster Farming at Point Reyes
NOTE: This post is by Legal Planet guest bloggers Nell Green Nylen, Heather Welles, Dan Carlin, Elisabeth Long, and Mary Loum, all members of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Society during the 2011–12 academic year. (See more details about the work of these law students and new lawyers at the end of the post.) If you …
CONTINUE READINGSupreme Court Rules Federal Flooding of State Forest Lands an Unconstitutional Taking
Today was a busy day for the environment in the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only did the justices hear arguments in a potentially-important Clean Water Act case. (More on that in a future post.) The Court also issued its first decision among the five environmental cases pending before it this Term–three of which involve property …
CONTINUE READINGDeconstructing Today’s Supreme Court Arguments in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center
Legal Planet colleague Holly Doremus did an excellent job last week of previewing today’s U.S. Supreme Court arguments in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, a potentially important case involving the scope of USEPA’s point source permit jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act. But given the results of those arguments and a major, late-breaking regulatory …
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Proposition 30 and the Environment
With so much attention paid to the presidential race, it’s easy to overlook the fact that California’s fiscal future is on the ballot tomorrow, with consequences for the environment. Proposition 30 represents Governor Jerry Brown’s attempt to stave off harsh cuts to the state budget, a situation brought on by declining tax revenues in the …
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CONTINUE READINGDraining Hetch Hetchy — Some History for San Francisco’s “Measure F”
San Franciscans will be voting next week on Measure F to study the draining of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. Hetch Hetchy, for those who don’t know, is a spectacular, glacier-formed valley of equal proportion to its neighbor Yosemite Valley. Congress authorized a dam in 1913 to provide public hydroelectric power and a …
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CONTINUE READINGHeller versus Berkley in the Silver State
As in other states, the Nevada Senate race features a gap between the “greener” Democratic candidate, Shelley Berkley, and the Republican Dean Heller. But it plays out a little differently. Heller’s website is strangely reticent about energy and environmental issues, while Berkley focuses heavily on the issues most relevant to Nevada — renewable energy and …
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