The Fight This Time

Forty- five years after the passage of the Clean Water Act (CWA), water pollution remains a profound problem. More than forty- seven thousand US waters are impaired. At the rate these lakes, rivers, and estuaries are being cleaned up, it will take more than five hundred years to make them all safe for swimming and fishing. Oliver Houck, a professor of law at Tulane University who has focused on environmental protection since the 1970s, sums up the situation: “We have not had clean water in America,” he writes, “in the lifetime of anyone living.” The major source of pollution in the waters of the US, as in other developed countries, is now runoff from farm fields and city streets. These nonpoint sources remain difficult to control. More than 75 percent of the rivers and lakes that fail to meet water quality standards are tainted by nonpoint sources. In terms of nutrient pollution, agricultural runoff is by far the dominant source, triggering harmful algal blooms from Chesapeake Bay to Puget Sound. The CWA of 1972 addressed point sources of pollution in a decisive and radical way. Section 402 of the CWA applies effluent standards based on the best available treatment technology to city sewage and industrial wastewaters, and puts regulatory power in the hands of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Regulation under this scheme has brought dramatic improvement in water quality. Before the CWA was enacted, major urban river systems throughout the country had such low levels of dissolved oxygen that fish kills became routine, and urban beaches were often closed due to fecal contamination. By the late 1990s, dissolved oxygen levels had improved in about 70 percent of river reaches and watersheds studied by the EPA, and fish had returned to many waters. Beach closures decreased. Problems remain, especially in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, where heavy rains can overwhelm treatment systems, releasing raw sewage downstream. Still, in terms of curbing point source pollution, the CWA has made a critical difference. The rise of pollution from unregulated nonpoint sources has eaten away at these water quality gains. The Mississippi River basin, whose waters flow into the northern Gulf of Mexico, may be the most dramatic example. In August 2017, the Gulf’s dead zone grew to an unprecedented 8,776 square miles, about the size of New Jersey.