Jonathan Z. Cannon

Adaptive Management in Superfund

Over the last three decades adaptive management has emerged as one of the most promising innovations in natural resource management and environmental regulation. Yet the possible benefits of this approach for Superfund, which is among the nation’s most expensive and controversial environmental programs, have not been comprehensively explored. A 2003 study by the National Research Council (NRC) represented the first serious effort to apply adaptive management principles to cleanup of contaminated sites, with specific attention to contaminated Navy facilities under Superfund, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and state regulatory statutes (NRC 2003; NRC et al. 2003). This chapter examines adaptive management for Superfund as a whole, including the privately owned sites that predominate within the Superfund universe. It elaborates the principles of adaptive management, explains how these principles might work within the legal and policy framework of Superfund, and explores their implications for managing individual Superfund sites as well as for administering the entire inventory of these sites. In the process, it sheds further light on the potential usefulness of adaptive management, which was developed for management of complex natural ecosystems, for a program dealing with local site contamination in largely urban settings.

Environmentalism and the Supreme Court: A Cultural Analysis

This paper traces the Supreme Court’s response to key tenets of environmentalism in decisions over the last four decades. It concludes that the Court’s interpretations have worked to both sanction environmentalism and to contain or even marginalize it. The cases make clear that, while environmentalism may not be opposed on its own terms within our political culture, it challenges beliefs and values that are deeply embedded in our core institutions – such as personal autonomy, limited government, and a laissez faire economy. Many of the Court’s environmental decisions have limited the reach of environmentalist values out of deference to these competing considerations. At the same time, however, the Court has accommodated environmentalist values where competing values were not seen to compel their rejection. Taken as a body, the Court’s environmental cases not only reflect the degree to which the movement has penetrated and changed the culture, but they also suggest promising pathways for furthering environmentalist beliefs and values in the future.