attempts will be made within the immediate future to review the ocean dumping 

 criteria and to develop new criteria that might more accurately reflect the potential 

 for environmental degradation. Such revised criteria should take into account the 

 need for an assessment of ecological effects in the region of the dumpsite itself either 

 to replace the laboratory bioassays and bioaccumulation tests or to supplement these 

 laboratory results and facilitate their interpretation. Criteria revised in this manner 

 would not only allow the current bioaccumulation test controversy to be resolved 

 but would also aid in better identifying the nature and extent of the overall environ- 

 mental impact of dredged material ocean disposal. 



LIMITATIONS OF STATUTES AND REGULATIONS 



Historically, the seventies will be viewed as the decade of environmental legisla- 

 tion. The decade began with the signing into law of the National Environmental 

 Policy Act [NEPA] on January 3, 1970. After NEPA came the Clean Air Act of 1970 

 and then, in the 92d Congress, six new statutes came into being: the Federal Water 

 Pollution and Control Act; the Federal Insecticide. Fungicide and Rodenticide Act; 

 the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Marine Protection Research and Sanctu- 

 aries Act; the Noise Control Act; and the Coastal Zone Management Act. The 93d. 

 Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the 

 Deep Water Port Act. The 94th Congress enacted the Toxic Substance Control Act 

 and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The 95th Congress passed major 

 amendments to the Clean Air Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Safe 

 Drinking Water Act, and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. 



One major drawback to the piecemeal approach taken to environmental protec- 

 tion in the 1970s is that it resulted in a disjointed management of the environment by 

 medium, rather than an integrated approach to dealing with environmental prob- 

 lems. Regulations promulgated pursuant to the various environmental laws each 

 adopt substantially different approaches to determining whether discharge or dis- 

 posal of a material is acceptable under each given Act. As a result instead of compar- 

 ing waste disposal options in different media and selecting the optimal option on 

 environmental, social, and economic grounds, an industry or a municipality faced 

 with the need to dispose of its wastes will often seek to find the option that is least 

 stringently regulated. One particularly notable example of this problem relates to the 

 disposal of dredged material, which is regulated under the Federal Water Pollution 

 Control Act for inland waters and the territorial sea (40 CFR S230), and under the 

 Marine Protection. Research, and Sanctuaries Act for the territorial sea and contig- 

 uous ocean (40 CFR S220-229). The regulations for ocean disposal are significantly 

 more stringent than those for inland water disposal, thus encouraging inland water 

 disposal, which may be more harmful than ocean disposal. Aside from the problems 

 caused by fragmentation of statutes and regulations, additional problems occur be- 

 cause of inexperience with environmental law and regulations and their operation. 

 Ten years is simply too short a time for a body of case law to be laid down sufficient 

 to identify all the problems with existing legislative and regulatory approaches let 

 alone to permit amendment and modification of the approaches such that they result 

 in efficient application. 



Our ability to efficiently and effectively manage and control pollution of the envi- 

 ronment in general and the ocean environment in particular is constrained by the 

 lack of conformity among the various environmental statutes and also by short- 

 comings in the regulatory framework built around those statutes. During the next 

 decade it should be our aim to learn to apply the existing statutes, to modify them so 

 as to bring a degree of uniformity and efficiency into their operation, and, as an out- 

 come, to produce optimal solutions to environmental problems. The areas where 

 such amendments to statutes or to regulations will be needed are numerous. It is 

 instructive to rev iew a few of these areas as they apply to problems within the New 

 York Bight. 



59 



