\When Congress overwhelmingly passed the landmark Clean Water Act in 1972, we set an incredibly ambitious goal: eliminate all water pollution. Before the Act, rivers like the Cuyahoga caught fire, Lake Erie was declared “dead”, untreated waste was routinely dumped in rivers and streams and wetlands were thought to be useless swamps that needed to be drained for development or agriculture. The Clean Water Act changed all of that. Over the past forty years we have seen amazing progress for our water.

The Act is visionary – it was a revolution in how we think about our nation’s relationship with water resources after more than a century of pollution and degradation – but it is also pragmatic

• We realized that we needed “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.”  
• t seeks to eliminate water pollution completely and to make all rivers, lakes and streams “fishable and swimmable”.
• It includes a revolutionary “citizen provision” that empowers concerned citizen to be effective “watchdogs” to protect the water resources they use, especially when government fails to do so.
• The Act established the basic structure for regulating the dumping of pollutants into water and gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to oversee pollution control programs.

We have made significant progress that would not have been possible without the Clean Water Act:

• Nearly 2/3 of all rivers, lakes, and streams are now “swimmable and fishable” – that’s twice as many as met those water quality standards in 1972.
• Wetland losses have fallen below 60,000 acres per year (in 1972 the country was losing 500,000 acres per year).
• Discharges of organic wastes from publically-owned waste treatment facilities have decreased by over 45% and decreased by 98% from industrial facilities.

But we still have a long way to go. We have a responsibility to renew our commitment to restore and protect our nation’s greatest natural resource – water – for current and future generations.