Clean Water (and Clean Water Act) At Risk

Recent legislative initiatives at the federal and state government levels jeopardize not only individual gold medal trout streams, but the Clean Water Act itself, with laws in the works to remove restrictions for pesticide spraying near streams.

As Sharon Lance and Jo Evans write in the Boulder Daily Camera, on February 19, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to revoke the EPA`s authority to use the Clean Water Act to protect places like the South Platte River. Meanwhile the “Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act of 2011” (H.R. 872) is being hailed by developers and agriculture for promising to cancel the restrictions on the use of pesticides near streams that are due to go into effect April 9.

As William D. Ruckelshaus and and Christine Todd Whitman write in the Washington Post, “It has taken four decades to put in place the infrastructure to ensure that pollution is controlled through limitations on corporate, municipal and individual conduct. Dismantle that infrastructure today, and a new one would have to be created tomorrow at great expense and at great sacrifice to America’s public health and environment.”