There has been a fair bit of activity recently from environmental and conservation groups to try and protect America’s clean drinking water – if you are member of the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, or various other groups, you’ve probably seen action alerts on the Clean Water Restoration Act (S. 787).
The Clean Water Restoration Act is a pretty simple bill – it simply restores the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act to what it was prior to 2001 (and again in 2006) when the Supreme Court ruled that isolated streams and wetlands were not eligible from protection from pollution and destruction. Obviously, as anyone who has taken note of gravity or basic plumbing, all water runs downhill and ends up somewhere – and even wetlands that look out in the middle of nowhere are connected to the groundwater supply, and streams that are dry in the hot summer months can be raging torrents in the spring and fall.
Pollutants in any of these will eventually taint our drinking and irrigation water, spreading heavy metals like arsenic and carcinogenic chemicals across our food and out of our faucets.
So clearly this is a bill that is based in reality, addressing the need to protect these waters – who could be against that?
Apparently, a lot of people - ranging from homebuilders to groups that claim to represent America’s farmers and ranchers. The American Farm Bureau has regular editorials excoriating the CWRA, claiming that it will regulate farmers into the stone age (it won’t – actually there is a specific line in both the CWRA and the original 1972 Clean Water Act that exempts farms and ranches from regulation) – although other farm groups like the Wisconsin Farmers Union broke ranks and supported the bill.
What is most interesting are the talking points that have been adopted by the anti-clean-water crowd. The most common are all related to some fear of the government taking all their land away – “the biggest land grab in federal history” – and mainstream groups like Farm Bureau and the National Association of Homebuilders are casting their lot with the lunatic fringe surprisingly quickly.
A good example of how far detached from reality these people are is this laughable “blog talk radio” from the Free American, which begins with a discussion of water, and ends with tinfoil-and-black-helicopter caliber ranting.
Thankfully there are groups that trying to actually do the right thing – both National Wildlife Federation and Ducks Unlimited have action centers and information to contact your members of Congress and tell them to not listen the lunatic fringe and protect our clean drinking water.