5 Wishes for the Clean Water Act on Its 40th Birthday - EcoWatch
The Clean Water Act turns 40 today. As many know, a 40th birthday can be a momentous occasion for some, an “it’s all downhill” moment for others and just another year for the indifferent. We have many successes to celebrate for the Clean Water Act’s 40th, but our industry-controlled Congress is making it awfully hard to feel good about blowing out the candles.
After a year of kowtowing to big polluters with piecemeal attempts to gut the Act, last month, House Republicans decided to go whole hog and try to pass a super polluter bill—the ">Stop the War on Coal“—which more properly belongs on the pages of Mad magazine. Unfortunately, some members of Congress are dead serious on threatening your right to clean air and water. The bill included attacks on the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Surface Mining Control Act and U.S. EPA, among other things, including rejecting the science on climate change.
Let’s review where we’ve gotten with the Clean Water Act since 1972:
Forty years ago the Hudson River was more of an industrial waste conveyance than a great waterway. Today, thanks to the Clean Water Act and citizen action from groups like Hudson Riverkeeper, who stood up to polluters and gave meaning and force to the Clean Water Act, the Hudson River is a model of ecosystem revitalization.
Using the Clean Water Act, Puget Soundkeeper forced the City of Bremerton, Washington, to reduce the volume of its combined sewer overflows by 99 percent, which directly led to the reopening of nearby commercial shellfish beds in Puget Sound. These shellfish beds, which had been closed for more than 40 years, are culturally and economically important to the Suquamish Tribe, who now can harvest their ancestral fishing grounds once again.
Clean Water Act successes are by no means limited to the Hudson River and Puget Sound, and there are hundreds of advocates using the Act to fight for your right to clean water. Waterways across America have been brought back from the perilous brink they had reached 40 years ago.
At the same time, many of our waterways remain in decline or have suffered at the hands of greedy polluters. Just ask the citizens of Pike County, Kentucky, whose drinking water would catch fire, turn black or orange, and burn their skin after it was contaminated by the coal industry. Or talk to surfers in Malibu, California, and you’re sure to find someone who became sick—some with life-threatening illnesses—after coming into contact with raw sewage and runoff.
Read Marc Yaggis full article: 5 Wishes for the Clean Water Act on Its 40th Birthday « EcoWatch: Uniting the Voice of the Grassroots Environmental Movement.