Restoring protection to all waters

Promising to restore protections stripped from thousands of miles of small streams and hundreds of acres of wetlands in Michigan, at least 173 members of Congress have endorsed the Clean Water Restoration Act in recent months.

Over the past five years, the Bush administration and the U.S. Supreme Court have chipped away at protections for our waterways, especially smaller streams and wetlands, by defying years of precedent and narrowly defining the Clean Water Act to apply to only “navigable waterways.”

So far, Michigan Reps. John Conyers (Dearborn), John Dingell (Ann Arbor), Vernon Ehlers (Grand Rapids), Dale Kildee (Flint), Carolyn Kilpatrick (Grosse Pointe), Sander Levin (Warren) and Bart Stupak (Marquette) have co-sponsored legislation that would overturn what we call the Bush administration’s “No Protection” policy.

“Failing to protect the small streams, ponds and wetlands that feed the Great Lakes is simply foolhardy,” said Environment Michigan’s Abby Rubley. “Whatever goes in the stream ends up in the river. Pave over the wetlands and you lose the wetlands’ ability to filter pollutants before they reach larger waterways.”

Troubled Waters

On the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act’s passage, we released our “Troubled Waters” report. The report exposes facilities that exceeded their Clean Water Act permits during 2005 (the most recent year for which data is available).

By revealing the type of pollutants that industrial facilities are discharging into our waterways and the extent to which these facilities are exceeding their permit levels, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the troubled state of our state’s and our nation’s important waterways.

The goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act were to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into waterways and make all U.S. waters swimmable and fishable. But the report showed that 94 facilities statewide violated Clean Water Act permits 488 times in 2005.

Rep. James Oberstar (Minn.) joined our federal clean water advocate, Christy Leavitt, at the Washington, D.C., release of the report. Rep. Oberstar is the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the committee that will pass our bill to the full House of Representatives.

A long-time champion for clean water, Rep. Oberstar said, “We are at a turning point in history, and our responsibility to this generation and our legacy to future generations is to advance the cause of protecting the most precious of natural resources—clean water.”