by Donella Meadows

About the author: Donella Meadows is an environmental writer and an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The good news is that our Clean Water Act, plus billions of dollars in municipal treatment plants and industrial wastewater processing, has rescued many of our streams and lakes from sewerhood.

The bad news is that, with the nastiest waste pipes cleaned up, we still insult our waterbodies with filled-in wetlands, runoff from lawns and farms, here a dam, there a dam, everywhere a little acid rain or toxic fallout. Ponds cloud up with strange weeds. Almost all the oysters are gone from Chesapeake Bay. Only one percent of the natural wetlands of Iowa remain. Warnings about contaminated local fish or shellfish are posted in 45 states.

Laws Are Not Enforced