ES&T
CURRENTS INTERNATIONAL A Canadian Supreme Court judge has ruled that a mixture of herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T can be used safely by a pulp and paper company to kill unwanted weeds in forests on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Fifteen local landowners had asked the Court to stop the company from spraying the phenoxy herbicides near their homes. Trace amounts of 2,3,7,8TCDD are contained in 2,4,5-T. In arguing their case, the landowners cited both economics and possible health effects. Some witnesses maintained that the forests would be just as profitable with manual weeding or no weeding at all and that a diversity of species is necessary for healthy growth.
WASHINGTON The Senate voted 63-33 to place a moratorium on the leasing of federal coal reserves for six months until a special commission and Congress
Watt: resigned his position can review the leasing practices. The week prior to the vote, Interior Secretary James G. Watt defied a House Interior Committee directive by offering leases on 540 million tons of coal in North Dakota. The directive had stated that the offering should be delayed for environmental reasons. The vote marks the first time the Senate has strongly opposed Watt's policies. 512A
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Earlier the House had called for a delay in coal leasing. At press time, Watt had resigned his position but planned to remain on the job until a successor could be confirmed. In mid-October a new regulation went into effect that expands the rights of coal companies to develop strip mines on private property in national parks. It also expands the right to mine in national wildlife refuges, national forests, and other protected areas. The Interior Department's Board of Land Appeals has issued the new rules, which allow leasing of land within national parks to be considered for the first time in 25 years. The regulation says that state officials must decide whether a company may mine in a national park or other federally protected area within a state's boundaries. Extensive private lands within 55 units of the park system are believed to have coal deposits. Applications for oil and gas leases in national wildlife refuges are now being processed. The EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are preparing to regulate ethylene dibromide. As early as 1974, studies suggested that it is a powerful carcinogen. OSHA has asked the Office of Management and Budget to approve a reduction from 20 000 ppb to 100 ppb for average 8-h exposure in the workplace. EPA is preparing a report which will probably recommend that virtually all agricultural uses be phased out. Ethylene dibromide has been used as a soil fumigant for nematode control and as a grain and fruit fumigant. It has been found in drinking water supplies from Florida to California and in fresh produce, meat, and dairy products. Animals exposed to this chemical develop cancer in a relatively short period of time. An electronic catalog that identifies the existence, location, characteris-
tics, and availability of environmental data sets has been developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is known as the National Environmental Data Referral Service. It is expected that the service will eventually become a national network of federal, state, and private organizations that will cooperate to provide access to data to anyone who needs it. The service is located at NOAA's Assessment and Information Services Center, Washington, D.C. Recent analyses by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) of 10 to 15 years of water quality records for 47 headwater streams across the country show that sulfate concentrations have increased over a broad area of the continental U.S., from the Southeast to the mountain states and the Northwest, and decreased slightly in the Northeast. At the same time, acidity has decreased slightly in the Northeast, while increasing in most other regions. This pattern of changes is similar to the trends in sulfur emissions to the atmosphere during the same period. The water quality data were collected on streams that are relatively unaffected by land use. According to USGS scientists, "the results seem to indicate that the effects of relatively small changes in atmospheric emissions are observable as changes in stream quality."
STATES The EPA has released a seven-year study showing that the Chesapeake Bay is "clearly an ecosystem in decline." It states that the blue crab yield has been decreasing since 1970 while catches of freshwater fish such as striped bass and shad have dropped by more than 50%. The ecological decline of the bay is generally attributed to runoff of nitrogen, phosphorus, heavy metals,
