Upstream And Out of Mind

The following July President Bush set in motion a major weakening of EPA regulations for controlling such non-point pollution as oil, street grit, salt, pesticides, animal waste and fertilizers—all the pollution we haven't got a handle on. Written into the Clean Water Act is a provision that might have been effective at controlling non-point pollution—the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program. It requires the states and the EPA to identify "impaired" waterways, rank them according to which is in most need of rehabilitation, then come up with discharge limits. For years the TMDL program was ignored, but in 2000, responding to a barrage of citizen lawsuits, Clinton's EPA implemented a moderately effective TMDL rule. When Bush took office polluters urged him to make it go away. Accordingly, the administration hatched a proposal to redefine "impaired" waters as clean, and let the states—which had ignored the TMDL program—worry about discharges.

Sportsmen and an element of the environmental community (the practical, politically savvy one) urged President Bush to preserve Clinton's TMDL rule. "We liked it," says Trout Unlimited's Eastern conservation director and general counsel, Leon Szeptycki. "It set up a road map for states and localities to clean up impaired waters. The centerpiece, which we thought was great, was the required implementation plan--a narrative on how you were going to clean up an impaired water. And there were enforceable deadlines. We thought that people in the watershed actually sitting down and writing up how they were going to do a cleanup, especially when you're talking non-point-source pollution, was a really positive thing. The point polluters loved it because it was going to take some of the burden off them. The ag and timber people hated it." Bush killed the rule on Dec. 27, 2002. So now its back to the old, useless TMDL standards, and some insiders say they'll get disappeared, too.

Last year President Bush liberalized the Corps' nationwide permit program by which it can virtually waive Clean Water Act prohibitions against discharging fill or dredged material into wetlands and streams—provided the damage is deemed "minimal," whatever that means. Stream alterations carried out under such permits do not require public notice or comment or rigorous review. The new nationwide permits let the Corps discard the 300-foot limit for destruction of ephemeral streams, reduce protection for floodplain wetlands, and do away with the requirement that at least one acre of wetlands has to be created or protected for every acre destroyed.

Meanwhile, the Clean Water Act provisions that survive aren't being enforced. Almost a third of the nation's largest industrial, municipal and federal facilities were in serious violation of their Clean Water Act permits at least once between January 2000 and March 2001, according to EPA documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the US Public Interest Research Group. In the face of this gross defiance the Bush administration has cut the EPA's enforcement budget for 2003.

Now is the worst of times to weaken the Clean Water Act. No other environmental law in the world has been more effective. American rivers don't catch fire anymore. Lake Erie has risen from the grave to produce the best smallmouth and walleye fishing in the nation. Where Maine's Kennebec River threads through the capitol city of Augusta, under the same trees festooned with toilet paper in the 1970's, brown trout and even brook trout are now alive and well. But largely because of non-point pollution the percentage of impaired lakes, streams and estuaries—based on water-monitoring data collected by states and tribes—has increased for the first time since the act was passed in 1972.

As Bush, Vice-President Cheney and other members of the administration were gutting the Clean Water Act, they were appearing at celebrations for its thirtieth birthday, whooping it up for its successes, trying to take credit. "I encourage Americans to join me in renewing our commitment to protecting the environment and leaving our children and grandchildren with a legacy of clean water," proclaimed the President.

Cheney is a dedicated, passionate fly fisher. He adores trout—except, apparently, when they get in the way of rich developers. When he served in Congress he was one of only eight House members to vote against reauthorization of the Clean Water Act, and he voted seven times against authorizing clean water programs.

"These guys have been masterful at talking about regulatory streamlining," says Jamie Clark, former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and now a senior vice president for conservation with the National Wildlife Federation. "They're great at saying this is all about good government, clarification, reduced bureaucratic process, putting the decision back in the hands of the people who are closest to the waterway." It's all talk.

And talk is how George W. Bush got most of America's sportsmen to vote for him. He told them he loved guns, hunted, fished and that, therefore, he was their friend. The first three claims may have been true, but the fourth was not; nor did it follow logically. The Bush Administration's attack on the Clean Water Act is more proof for those who need it that one can never judge a politician by what he says, only by what he does and, especially, by what the people who work for him do.