reform and new access to the courts gave environmentalists new power to enact change. The movement that formed held three key values: ecology, health, and sustainability. These values—that we depend and are interconnected with the environment, that insults to the environment can affect our health, and that we should limit our dependence on non-renewable resources—along with a uniquely sympathetic president and Congress, led to great environmental policy change in the 1970s. In 1972 the Club of Rome report came out which was a scholarly effort to gauge the severity of the environmental problem. A team of researchers concluded with one of the most alarming appraisals of the time and set off widespread debates over the findings, its methods, and policy implications. The model was built mainly to investigate major trends of global concerns such as accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources and a deteriorating environment. They concluded that if the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion remains unchanged than the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. One lawsuit that has been widely recognized as one of the earliest environmental cases is Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, decided in 1965 by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, prior to passage of the major federal environmental statutes. The case helped halt the construction of a power plant on Storm King Mountain in New York State. The case has been described as giving birth to environmental litigation and helping create the legal doctrine of standing to bring environmental claims. The Scenic Hudson case also is said to have helped inspire the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, and the creation of such environmental advocacy groups as the Natural Resources Defense Council. Presidential involvements Nixon and the Environmental Decade (1970–1980) On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), beginning the 1970s that some have called the "environmental decade." NEPA created the Council on Environmental Quality which oversaw the environmental impact of federal actions. Later in the year, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which consolidated environmental programs from other agencies into a single entity. The legislation during this period concerned primarily first-generation pollutants in the air, surface water, groundwater, and solid waste disposal. Air pollutants such as particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen