CLEAN WATER ACT

Clean Water Act

Clean Water Act

History of Clean Water Act

Until the middle of the 20th century, legal solutions to water pollution in the United States were addressed mainly by common law, the system by which legal principles are established by judges through adjudication of individual cases. Although individual case decisions are limited to the facts of that case, a body of law evolves gradually through the accumulation of precedent in those decisions. Addressing a nationwide problem such as water pollution through such a dispersed system of decisions, however, was difficult.

Major sources of pollution were often localized, but the harm was spread over such a large population that few individual plaintiffs had sufficient incentive or resources to file lawsuits to abate the pollution. Where governments brought such cases, it was often difficult to meet the stringent requirement to show harm to obtain relief, in part because of the lack of scientific methods necessary to prove linkages between individual pollution sources and harm. For example, in the famous common law public nuisance case of Missouri v. Illinois (1906), Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes found that Missouri failed to prove a connection between sewage discharges from Chicago diverted downstream to the Mississippi River by reversing the flow of the Chicago River and an increased incidence of typhoid in St. Louis.

Clean Water Act

The Clean Water Act (CWA), sometimes referred to as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, is the major federal statute in the United States governing pollution of surface waters (rivers, lakes, coastal waters, and wetlands, as opposed to groundwater). The act's broad impact on U.S. water pollution control practices means that it is important for communicators and others interested in federal water policy to understand it. Congress adopted the statute essentially in its current form in 1972, thus revolutionizing water pollution control law and policy in the United States in two major ways. First, the CWA reversed the traditional view that it was acceptable to discharge pollutants into waterways unless and until harm was proven. Instead, discharges are now presumptively prohibited unless in compliance with a government-issued permit that imposes treatment requirements and other conditions to protect human health and the environment. (Richard, 2002)

The burden is now on the discharger to show compliance with applicable discharge limits and other requirements, rather than on the public or some affected downstream user to prove harm. Second, the law expands the concept of pollution beyond the notion of noxious chemical wastes or sewage. The statutory definition of pollution includes almost any man-made alteration of the integrity of the nation's waters, which can include changes in water body characteristics such as hydrology, stream bank conditions, sediment quality or condition, or biodiversity. The ambitious main goal of the law is not merely to prevent discharges of waste materials but to maintain the “chemical, physical, and biological integrity” of U.S. waters, as well as to restore them. (Richard, 2002)

Significant progress has been made in reducing some forms of water pollution since Congress adopted the ...