October 18th is the 52nd anniversary of the passage of the Clean Water Act, so it’s a good moment to reflect on where we stand on clean water nationally. The headline: not so hot. But that doesn’t mean we should despair—clean water advocates across the country are fighting hard, and we know what we need to do. This post highlights one area of action that might not be obvious but that is critical for us to pursue if we want to protect water resources at a time when our principal tool for preventing harm to aquatic ecosystems, the Clean Water Act, is limited.
The Clean Water Act helped restore our waterways
In 1972, the United States took a monumental step toward protecting its waterways with the passage of the Clean Water Act. This landmark legislation emerged at a time when the nation’s waters were in crisis, with industrial waste, sewage, and chemicals regularly discharged into rivers and lakes without restriction.
The state of America’s waters in the early 1970s was dire. One of the most infamous examples was the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, which caught fire multiple times in the prior decades due to oil and other pollutants floating on its surface. A river on fire became a symbol of environmental neglect, capturing public attention and sparking a national outcry. Industrial facilities were using rivers as waste disposal systems, and cities were dumping untreated sewage directly into waterways. The result was widespread pollution that threatened public health, wildlife, and the integrity of ecosystems across the country.
The Clean Water Act, which bipartisan majorities in Congress passed overwhelmingly, had a single objective: to restore and maintain the integrity of the nation’s waters. It aimed to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters by 1985 and achieve water quality levels that are “fishable and swimmable” by 1983. While these specific deadlines proved overly optimistic, the law marked a turning point in environmental policy and set the foundation for decades of progress.
Over the past five decades, the Clean Water Act has led to remarkable improvements in water quality across the United States. Many water bodies once considered “dead” due to pollution have been revitalized, providing habitats for fish and wildlife to thrive once again. Cities and municipalities were required to build wastewater treatment plants, leading to cleaner water for urban and rural communities alike. Industries that had long used rivers as waste disposal systems were forced to comply with new pollution limits. But things were not perfect—not by a long shot.
Progress toward healthy waters has been lagging
As we discuss below, the biggest threat to clean water today is the fallout of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that dramatically limited the federal Clean Water Act’s ability to protect wetlands and many streams from pollution and destruction. But it’s worth noting that our streams, ponds, and wetlands were not in great shape even before the Court made things much worse.
- In a 2017 report to Congress, 55 percent of the rivers and streams assessed by states were found not to meet water quality standards. A recent nationwide analysis found that, in 2018–19, only 28 percent of river/stream miles had healthy biological communities and only 35 percent had healthy fish communities.
- The National Lakes Assessment, evaluating the health of our nation’s lakes between 2017 to 2022, found that roughly half of country’s lakes are in poor condition due to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.
- A 2024 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service report revealed that the rate of wetlands loss in the country accelerated from 2009 to 2019 and that the nation lost approximately 670,000 acres of vegetated wetlands during that span.
So when the Supreme Court announced that it would decide which water bodies are protected by the Clean Water Act’s critical pollution control and cleanup programs, we had already fallen far short of achieving the law’s objective, such that the country couldn’t afford the law to be weakened.
