Love That Dirty Water

But even before the Bush administration and the Supreme Court vandalized the Clean Water Act, the waters of the United States had stopped getting cleaner. One of the main reasons is the agricultural exemption that, for political purposes, Oberstar and Feingold had to retain in their bill. Preventing agricultural pollution is easy and cheap. In fact, it would save farmers and ranchers money.

For example, they aren’t required to erect the streamside fencing or maintain vegetated stream buffers that would prevent cattle from destroying forage, water supplies and the trout that, increasingly, provide them added income. Nor are they required to apply fertilizer in the spring so that it is taken up by plants instead being wasted by fall and winter rains and, in the process, nuking the nearest stream or lake. But every time these and other common-sense, best-management practices are proposed as regulations, the Farm Bureau Federation shouts them down. The Farm

Bureau has also prevented regulation of concentrated animal feedlots—a k a “factory farms”—which produce three times as much sewage as this nation’s human population.

Today, 40 percent of our waters flunk the federal quality standard. So now is not the time to stand by while they and others continue to degrade and while the Clean Water Act, less than adequate even in pre-SWANCC form, continues to slide toward irrelevancy.

With the Democrats in control of Congress and with a president who, through his campaign spokesmen, has pledged support for the Clean Water Restoration Act, the bill finally has a chance. Still, its enemies are richer, more politically powerful and, so far, more energetic and committed than its supporters. The fight will be long and vicious; and it will be lost unless fish-and-wildlife advocates make themselves heard. Any sportsman who doesn’t actively support this desperately needed reform won’t have the right to complain about lost fishing and hunting. And any sportsman who works against it is fronting for polluters…or just stupid.

Ted Williams has written about conservation for this magazine for more than 20 years. His latest book is Something’s Fishy; order it at flyrodreel.com.