Progress has been made but challenges lie ahead
Remember the Cuyahoga River fire? This Cleveland calamity in 1969 suddenly woke up the nation to the realities of industrial pollution. It was one of the key factors that led to the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. So this year we celebrate a half-century of progress in restoring and maintaining the cleanliness and integrity of our nation’s waters. Driven by the river fire and other industrial pollution disasters, this landmark water protection legislation introduced a permit system for industrial and sewage treatment plant discharges which, over time, did much to improve the quality of the nation’s waters.
Recent years have been marked by a political back-and-forth between the courts and the executive branch on definitions of water subject to EPA jurisdiction and oversight, regulation, and enforcement authority. Although the Biden administration is currently writing new rules, the divided nature of our national politics likely assures a continued struggle between the reach of government and the operations of industry in the coming years. Although the Clean Water Act’s lofty goal of making all U.S. waters fishable and swimmable by 1983 was not met, there has been much success in industrial pollution control. The law has contributed to much cleaner waterways across the country.
But even as we celebrate these successes, we note there are still many clean water challenges ahead. Although the law has been successful in controlling point-source pollution like the kind that may flow from a single offending factory, climate change has introduced new factors that present greater ongoing risks to our water from non-point sources, notably the general rural and urban landscapes. When increasingly frequent violent rainstorms wash soil, nutrients, and trash from the land into streams, rivers, and lakes, our pollution problems grow, and so does the challenge of controlling the runoff from these vast areas.
As we look ahead to the next 50 years, we are heartened by the priorities we see in the new 2022-2026 EPA Strategic Plan. This Plan addresses “emerging threats such as climate change, drought, sea-level rise, invasive species, plastics, and nutrient pollution.” The plan offers tools for early and rapid detection of harmful algal blooms and pathogens in recreational waters. It also seeks to implement programs that prevent or reduce non-point source pollution, including nutrients and plastics. Because the EPA shares its implementation and oversight burden with states and tribes, our hope is that all who share these goals strive diligently to meet them.
This new plan also promotes environmental justice as a major theme and will target many of its most significant pollution control and clean-up efforts to disadvantaged communities that have historically borne undue burdens. While this goal is laudable, it may also result in an uneven emphasis of effort across the country as programs and initiatives are implemented.
Beyond this, there are other risks. Current world events will lead to new pressures to produce more oil and gas domestically, which may result in increased fracking activity in the shale oil deposits in our region. This will increase risks of pollution and contamination that could test the oversight and regulatory capacities of local, state, and federal environmental policing.
Clearly, we are getting to the point where it will take all of us who care about clean water and a clean environment to aid in the effort to see, report, and help remediate water pollution problems. As stewards and keepers of the Chautauqua-Conewango watershed we take this responsibility seriously, so we invite all of you to join us in an upcoming Chautauqua Lake Outlet clean-up day on May 21. We will not only work together to clean our waterways but we will also offer education about the alarms we sound here – about excess nutrients in our waters, about plastics, and about climate change. Most important, we will highlight what we all can do to keep our waterways clean for the next 50 years.