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At present there are 1,194 Superfund sites throughout the United States that are on the National Priorities List, because past releases of hazardous substances have contaminated natural resources and pose a human health risk. Section 107 of the Superfund Act (more formally, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) allows federal and state government agencies, acting as natural resource trustees, to collect monetary damages from responsible parties for residual losses incurred by the public as a result of injuries to natural resources (such as ground water) caused by hazardous-substance releases. Residual losses may include losses incurred prior to and/or after the completion of remediation activities. The agencies must use the recovered natural resource damages to restore, rehabilitate, replace, or acquire the equivalent of the injured natural resources. This article focuses on estimating natural resource damages from ground-water contamination at Superfund and other sites where hazardous substances have been released. The first section briefly describes the application of the natural resource damage assessment process to ground-water contamination. The second section discusses some techniques for valuing reductions in the services provided by ground water. The third section examines the applicability and measurement of so-called nonuse values associated with ground water. The fourth section addresses natural resource damage assessment issues that may arise at actual ground-water-contamination sites. The last section summarizes the main results of this article and presents some conclusions.

Several major federal environmental statutes enacted in the 1970s designate federal, state, and tribal resource management agencies as trustees of natural resources on behalf of the public and enable the trustees to recover damages for injuries to public resources. The measure of damages in the statutes is the cost of restoring the resources to baseline conditions, plus the interim loss in value from the time of the incident until full recovery of the resources. The statutory restriction limiting use of the monies to enhancing or creating natural resources motivated the development of an alternative measure for interim losses - the cost of compensatory restoration actions providing in-kind compensation. In this paper alternative measures of damages are outlined and approaches and methods for scaling compensatory restoration are discussed. Two basic scaling approaches are presented: a simplified in-kind trading procedure and the more general valuation approach, in which a variety of economic methods may be employed to assess the trade-offs between gains from proposed actions and interim losses from the injuries. Experience indicates that natural resource liability actions represent a potent tool for federal and state resource managers to address injuries to public resources.

A US executive order of Aug 12 1999 should help speed up support for clean energy sources and alternative technology using products from agriculture and forestry. Congress has to approve funding, and both main parties support similar goals. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has announced over $13 million awarded in grants to help the biomass industry to develop, and help cut costs involved in using biomass for products, such as benign plastics, fuels and energy.

Three works on US national parks offer little in the way of illustrations but instead have unrelieved earnest prose. Alfred Runte's 'National Parks: The American Experience' is the most interesting in general terms, detailing their history from the 1860s through the 1980s. Rebecca Conrad's 'Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Preserves and Environmentalism' describes the history of parks in Iowa, and is only partly successful in going beyond the form of a narrative local history. Charles Davis has edited 'Western Public Lands and Environmental Politics', which uses different social science perspectives to assess land usage.

US policymakers have initiated and established a number of programs, initiatives and agencies to address global environmental change, beginning in the 1960s. The earliest of these was the President's Science Advisory Committee and the Environmental Science Services Administration, established in 1965. They were followed by legislation such as the Marine Resources and Engineering Act and the National Sea Grant Act, both passed in 1996. One of the latest environmental initiatives launched in the US is the Global Change Research Program which was started in 1989.

Biodiversity conservation programs can be made by adopting a national strategy that will encourage active participation of public and private sectors. Scientists should suggest, based on their vast knowledge, viable solutions for ecological problems and government should make and implement laws. In a suggested US national strategy, it is cited that knowledge of and education on biodiversity and its conservation plays an important role.

A multi-agency interdisciplinary approach is needed to solve environmental problems. In 1993, the National Science and Technology Council was created and its Committee on Environment and Natural Resources will coordinate the $6 billion environmental R&D agenda.

This paper examines the national trends behind recent efforts to link scientific research more closely to policy-making. It discusses the evolution of these efforts within the Clinton Administration in general and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in particular. The paper describes the politics surrounding the establishment of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and its Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, of which the USGCRP is a part, and concludes with an appraisal of the NSTC and of the 'assessments' component of the USGCRP.