by Paul Schneider

About the author: Paul Schneider is an environmental writer and the author of The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness.

The Clean Water Act is an immense piece of legislation, with more than 500 sections, so summarizing it is difficult. Suffice it to say that before it was passed there were no enforceable national standards for industrial or sewage discharge into surface waters; now all such “point sources” of pollution require state- or Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-issued permits. The act also established a national policy on the protection of wetlands, the crucial foundation to healthy surface-water ecosystems, which were filled in or drained at a rate of about half a million acres a year between 1950 and 1970.

Just as important as the regulations was that...