The Clean Water Act 20 Years Later

Robert W. Adler, Jessica C. Landman, Diane M. Cameron

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781559632669, 9781559632652
• eBook ISBN: 9781610913324
• Subtopic: Environmental Law

This volume explores the issues associated with the complex subject of water quality protection in an assessment of the successes and failures of the Clean Water Act over the past twenty years. In addition to examining traditional indicators of water quality, the authors consider how health concerns of the public have been addressed, and present a detailed examination of the ecological health of our waters. Taken together, these measures present a far more complete and balanced picture than raw water quality data alone.

As well as reviewing past effectiveness, the book includes specific recommendations for the reauthorization of the Act, which is to be considered by Congress in 1995. This balanced and insightful account will surely shape the debate among legislative and policy experts and citizen activists at all levels who are concerned with issues of water quality.

Part I

A Clean Water Retrospective

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson condemned the quality of the Potomac River as part of his pledge of “Clean Water by 1975,” and in 1969, a conference in Washington, D.C., declared the river to be “a severe threat to anyone who comes in contact with it.” The modern war against air pollution began in 1970 with passage of the Clean Air Act. But the battle against water pollution remained in the nineteenth century, with an obscure law called the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 as its principal, badly outdated weapon.

President Richard Nixon ushered in the new decade by reminding the nation that “the 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.” The statement gave hope that the federal government would begin to take the war against water pollution seriously.

More visible political events, however, overshadowed President Nixon’s commitment to the environment. In an effort to honor his 1968 pledge to end the war, Nixon escalated the bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia. While the nation continued to debate the morality and the wisdom of the bombing and the war itself, an ever-present subtheme was the cost of the war to the U.S. economy and the federal budget and its impact on pressing domestic problems. Could the United States fight communism in Vietnam and still afford to fight pollution at home?

It was precisely this economic trade-off that led President Nixon to veto the Clean Water Act. Nixon’s veto message reiterated his rhetorical pledge to address water pollution but rejected Congress’s solutions on economic grounds:

I am also concerned, however, that we attack pollution in a way that does not ignore other very real threats to the quality of life, such as spiraling prices and increasingly onerous taxes. Legislation which would continue our efforts to raise water quality, but which would do so through extreme and needless overspending, does not serve the public interest. There is a much better way to get this job done.¹

It took Congress only one day to override Nixon’s veto, by overwhelming, bipartisan margins in both houses.² In the U.S. Senate, the most eloquent response came from Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, who led the fight for a more serious national water pollution control effort:

Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our Nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves. And those who say that raising the amounts of money called for in this legislation may require higher taxes, or that spending this much money may contribute to inflation simply do not understand . . . this crisis.³

Nor did partisan politics stand in the way of the Clean Water Act. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the ranking republican member of the Senate Environment Committee, responded:

I am deeply disappointed that President Nixon has chosen to veto the [act]. I hope that my colleagues will vote to override the President’s veto. . . .

I believe that the [act] is far and away the most significant and promising piece of environmental legislation ever enacted by Congress. . . . Of course such an ambitious program will cost money—public money and private money. The bill vetoed by the President strikes a fair and reasonable balance between financial investment and environmental quality. . . . If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?⁴

But the exchange between Nixon and Congress suggested questions that remain unanswered today: After two hundred years of neglect, can the integrity of the nation’s rivers, lakes, and coastal waters be restored? Is the nation willing to pay the short-term price for long-term improvements in the quality of our waters and aquatic resources? Are the benefits of clean water worth the cost? How successful has the Clean Water Act been in restoring our aquatic ecosystems? Do we even have the information needed to answer these questions? This study examines these questions two decades later.

Chapter 1 examines the state of U.S. waters before the 1972 Clean Water Act and reviews the basic goals and policies established by the law. Chapter 2 evaluates the best available evidence of how well the act has worked and looks at what more needs to be done to win the war against water pollution. This review suggests that, while much progress has been made in reducing chemical pollution, large amounts of toxic and other chemicals continue to be dumped into our nation’s waters each day. Worse, while we are making some progress on the chemical front, we are moving backward in our efforts to restore the overall biological health of the nation’s waters. Chapter 3 evaluates the economics of clean water by reviewing available information on the price we pay for this continuing pollution. Chapters 4 through 7 examine programs designed to protect the health of our waters and looks at how well they have worked in the real world. The last chapter suggests specific changes to the Clean Water Act that would help close the gap between the goals established in 1972 and the current state of our surface waters.

Chapter 1

The Need for Clean Water

The Impetus for the Clean Water Act

By the early 1970s, water pollution had reached crisis proportions in the United States. The most dramatic alarm rang on June 22, 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames, fueled by oil and other industrial wastes.¹

But the Cuyahoga conflagration was not an isolated accident. In 1971, a task force launched by Ralph Nader issued a detailed report, Water Wasteland, outlining the serious state of U.S. waters. Much of the report was anecdotal, as little comprehensive information existed on the condition of U.S. waters. Yet some data were based on nationwide studies, and the pattern portrayed by Nader’s researchers was telling:

• The Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Bureau of Water Hygiene reported in July 1970 that 30 percent of drinking water samples had chemicals exceeding the recommended Public Health Service limits. The Detroit River contained six times the Public Health Service limit for mercury.
• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported in February 1971 that 87 percent of swordfish samples had mercury at levels that were unfit for human consumption.
• A national pesticide survey conducted in 1967–68 by the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries (now part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS]) measured DDT in 584 of 590 fish samples, with levels up to nine times the FDA limit. In 1969, the FDA seized 28,150 pounds of Lake Michigan coho salmon that had been contaminated.
• Indiana’s Brandywine Creek was declared unfit for swimming in 1969. The Hudson River contained bacteria levels 170 times the safe limit.
• Record numbers of fish kills were reported in 1969. Over 41 million fish were killed, more than in 1966 through 1968 combined, including the largest recorded fish kill ever—26 million killed in Lake Thonotosassa, Florida, due to discharges from four food-processing plants.
• A 1966 survey found that almost 2 million acres of shellfishing beds had been closed due to pollution.
• Ecologist Dr. Charles F. Wurster, Jr., cautioned, in a recapitulation of Rachel Carson’s historic warning in Silent Spring almost a decade earlier, that we could lose fifty to one hundred species of birds by the turn of the century due to toxic chemicals.
• A 1968 survey found that pollution of the Chesapeake Bay caused $3 million in losses to the fishing industry, and Federal Water Quality Administration economist Edwin Johnson estimated that water pollution cost the nation $12.8 billion a year.²

The Nader report, which thrust water pollution into the light of national media attention, was confirmed by official government sources. In 1971, the Second Annual Report of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) paralleled, although in less dramatic language, many of the findings of Water Wasteland. More than one-fifth of the nation’s shellfish beds were closed because of pollution, and the annual commercial harvest of shrimp from coastal areas had dropped from more than 6.3 million pounds before 1936 to only 10,000 pounds in 1965.³ The number of fish reported killed each year from pollution increased from 6 million in 1960 to 15 million in 1968 and 41 million in 1969.⁴ According to EPA estimates, almost one-third of U.S. waters were “characteristically polluted,” that is, known to v...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Preface - Why a Book on the Clean Water Act?
• Part I - A Clean Water Retrospective
• Part II - Assessing Clean Water Act Programs
• NOTES
• Acronyms
• Index
• ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS