The Clean Water Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that has fundamentally changed water pollution in the U.S., is under attack when it should be strengthened instead
When a blaze ignited Ohio’s Cuyahoga River on June 22, 1969, it wasn’t the first—or worst—time the notoriously filthy waterway had caught fire. But national media outlets seized on it as a stark example of the abysmal state of the nation’s waters after decades of unchecked industrial and sewage pollution.
But the CWA is under attack in the court system by people who would weaken it, and there are multiple sources of pollution that the current law doesn’t adequately address. The National Resources Defense Council reports that as of 2019, more than 80 percent of bays and estuaries and around 55 percent of rivers and streams harbored unsafe levels of at least one pollutant.
Although the Biden administration has proposed rules that would restore protections to small streams and wetlands, a Supreme Court case on the docket for this fall could undermine them. In Sackett v. EPA, the petitioners argue that wetlands on their property—and by extension millions of acres of other wetlands—are not covered by the law.
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