A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 34

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34th of a series

“I must compliment you on this series as the topic is of great interest and I am learning stuff as I read. Who knew we were selling our water to foreign governments? I also believe the Hudson is now a great deal cleaner than it was twenty years ago, although my friend who still swims in races under the George Washington bridge says it is not quite pristine yet!”

The Clean Water Act became law on Oct. 18th, 1972. Its impact has been extraordinary:

“Over the past half century, the Clean Water Act has brought our waters back to life – turning rivers and lakes from dumping grounds into productive, healthy waterways again,” wrote the National Wildlife Federation in a recent review of the EPA report, ‘Five Decades of Clean Water.’ “It keeps 700 billion pounds of pollutants out of our waters annually, has slowed the rate of wetland loss, and doubled the number of waters that are safe for fishing and swimming. Levels of metals like lead in our rivers have declined dramatically. Ultimately, the cost to clean our drinking water is lower because the entire system is healthier.”

In a political environment that now seems so long ago, the bill passed unanimously in the Senate and by a vote of 346-11 in the House. Richard Nixon, who gets so much posthumous credit for being an environmental visionary, promptly vetoed it. But later that same day, the Senate overrode his veto, 55-12. When the next day the House followed suit, 247-23, the bill became law.

So what’s the problem? Let me paint with a broad brush:

  • The act regulated so-called “point-source” pollutants. These come from an identifiable source, mostly some kind of a pipe. That alone made a huge difference because industries and municipalities had long been discharging their sewage directly into our waterways. However, “non-point-source” pollutants, which materialize primarily as run-off across the land, are much harder to isolate and regulate. Agriculture, which was largely exempted from the original act, is the primary source of such pollution.

  • What’s a river anyway? While the Hudsons, the Colorados, and the Mississippis get all the headlines, it’s the millions of small streams, many of them nameless and some even intermittent, that do most of the work, carrying the water into ever larger streams until they get to a big river and head for the ocean. More than 70 percent of our water is in those small streams, which remain largely unregulated.

  • We have expanded our definition of pollution to include phosphorus and nitrogen, which cause nutrient overload that can quickly kill stream life. Agriculture annually discharges millions of tons of nutrients into streams in the form of runoff. This wasn’t contemplated in the original act.

  • A lot of powerful interests have always loathed the Clean Water Act: business and industry; agriculture; developers; property-rights advocates, opponents of government regulation, and the list goes on. These groups use their money to buy a lot of things, including politicians.

  • The Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of “the waters of the United States” several times, most recently last year in Sackett v EPA, and the current Republican party actively seeks to roll the regulations back.

In summary, the Clean Water Act clearly demonstrated that it’s possible to clean up our streams and rivers, that the benefits of doing so are universal, and that it pays enormous economic as well as environmental dividends.

We should be trying to strengthen the Act, not undo it.