ABSTRACT
The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), 1 and its reauthorizing amendments, the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA), 2 are among the most dramatic pieces of legislation regarding quantitative assessment of natural resource damages ever enacted in the United States. The sequence of events from legislatively defined mandates for damage assessments to development of rules by the Department of the Interior (DOI) on how to prepare such assessments, to court challenges, and ultimately to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has required nearly a decade. 3 While a number of cases have been initiated under the statutes, revised DOI rules have not yet been issued and I anticipate that it will require more time and experience before the full process of natural resources damage assessment is understood, clarified, and made practicable by the courts. Potentially of greatest significance, the court of appeals decision has modified common tort law to include consideration of hazardous waste releases occurring years and decades ago and “harm to future” uses of the environment even when the identity of future damaged parties (much less the extent of individual damages) is unknown, and has widened the definition of loss beyond simple market price calculations (see Boland and Milliman [1987]).
