water is fundamental

by Robert Wendelgass

Dirty water kills. Dirty water kills fish in our rivers and streams. Dirty water can sicken people, killing the most vulnerable…the young, the old or those with other illnesses. And dirty water kills jobs in fishing, tourism and other recreational businesses…multi-billion dollar industries in the US.

It seems like some legislators have forgotten how important clean water is, and the sorry state of our nation’s water resources forty years ago that led to passage of the Clean Water Act.

They’ve forgotten that before the Clean Water Act, rivers caught on fire, fish couldn’t survive in many of our rivers and streams and even some of our Great Lakes were declared dead. And now they want to go back to the bad old days before the Clean Water Act. We can’t let that happen.

Before the Clean Water Act, states set their own rules with little or no federal oversight. Some states had good rules, others had weak ones…but polluters could threaten to move their plants to another state unless states weakened their clean water rules. The bottom line: leaving water protection to the states alone doesn’t work, and results in dirty rivers, dead lakes and unsafe drinking water.

But some politicians have forgotten that lesson and want remove the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that state programs are consistent with the Clean Water Act. They want to make it easier for big polluters to dump in our rivers and streams, endangering special places like Chesapeake Bay, the Everglades, the Great Lakes and San Francisco Bay. They want to make it easier for mining companies to destroy rivers and streams, literally burying them under tons of waste from mountaintop mining.

Bills like HR 2018 would save some big companies money by allowing them to pollute our rivers and streams. But the rest of us would pay the price. It would hurt the multi-billion dollar fishing and tourism industries that depend on clean water, costing jobs. It would increase costs for drinking water systems that would have to work harder to make our tap water safe — raising the bills for consumers. And more of us would pay the price with our health as our wells and drinking water supplies get polluted.

We can’t let polluters and their allies in Congress turn back the clock. Contact your representatives in Congress and tell them to keep their hands off the Clean Water Act. Let them know that you don’t want to return to the days before the Clean Water Act when our waterways caught on fire or were dead. Tell them to oppose bills like HR 2018 that will protect polluters at the price of our health and our economy.

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