The Battle for Clean Water: Regulate or Capitulate
Effluent pipe from a pulp mill draining into the Willamette River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Humans can survive for a rather astounding one to three months without food and in one case, a stunning 382 days, which the Guiness Book of Records places as the longest known survivor.
But without water, survival time drops to 3-7 days. Clearly, if we don’t drink water, we quickly die from dehydration. Given that the human body is 76% water, one might think as a society we would put the absolute highest priority on maintaining this most vitally necessary substance for our survival.
Unfortunately, that is not the case on either the federal or state level as politicians pander to the never-ending demands to lower water quality standards to appease industries, municipalities, water utilities, and to muster support by claiming deregulation is “cutting red tape.”
The average American would be shocked to know what’s in their water — as well as what passes through both fresh and wastewater treatment plants. Nor are the effects of the growing multitude of pollutants a mystery. Scientists and doctors know certain substances are extremely deleterious to human health. Yet, bowing to the pressures of commerce or cost, the current direction is to allow more, not less of these substances in our water.
The most recent egregious example is the move by Lee Zeldin, now the head of Trump’s mis-named Environmental Protection Agency, to roll back the limits on PFAS, that were first adopted by Biden’s administration just last year.
PFAS are a group of widely-used substances which are known as “forever chemicals” because they are basically impossible to remove once they are in the human body or environment. They are classified by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as “carcinogenic to humans.”
In March, only a month after being confirmed by the Senate, Zeldin claimed he was making “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history” by redirecting the EPA to favor deregulation and energy production. He claims his rollback of PFAS standards in drinking water is introducing “common-sense flexibility” by kicking the compliance date out to 2031 and rescinding standards on three PFAS substances. But continuing to poison the population surely doesn’t make much common sense.
While the deregulatory wrecking ball crashes into the federal water quality standards, Montana’s legislature and governor have similarly decided to turn our water quality regulations to a sort of mush by repealing “numerical standards” that measure the amount of pollutants actually in the water to “narrative standards.”
As reported, narrative standards are described by the Department of Environmental Quality as “more general statements of unacceptable conditions in and on the water.” To put it mildly, this change does not portend cleaner water for Montanans and is now the subject of a lawsuit by the Upper Missouri Waterkeeper group challenging the agency’s use of narrative standards in its refusal to list the Big Hole River as impaired due to nutrient pollution.
Despite being at the very headwaters of the nation’s mightiest rivers, studies in Montana’s major river valleys found an alarming number of chemical pollutants in our groundwater, domestic, and commercial wells. The Helena Valley study, for instance, found “pharmaceutically active” compounds including antibiotics, hormones, and drugs as well as the herbicide atrazine in the groundwater/well samples…all of which affect both humans and aquatic life.
Simply put, we’re heading in the wrong direction and fouling our own nest by moving to capitulate to commerce rather than regulating pollutants to protect the health of our citizens and environment. We know the damage is being done. And no amount of short-term profits can or ever will replace the most vitally necessary substance for life — good, clean water.
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