Emerging Legal Strategies: Judicial Intervention

Citizen-initiated environmental litigation is a response to the inability of traditional administrative agencies to accommodate to newly recognized ecological perspectives in the management of natural resources. Old-line agencies, freighted by single-mindedness, a particular sense of mission and alignment with limited constituencies, are often unequal to the broadened perspectives which modern legislation and new public attitudes demand of them. Highway departments, for example, are charged with continuing to attend to the building of the "shortest, cheapest and straightest" roads, minimizing or ignoring new mandates to concern themselves with the environmental effects of their work. In conse quence, important policy decisions are undermined or dis torted. Judicial assistance is sought to return important policy decisions to a forum in which democratic processes work more effectively. One such incipient technique is the judicial "remand" of administrative action to the legislatures.