Jon Devine's Blog: Health and the Environment

Earth Day (plus 7) and Your Water

2010-04-29T15:00:03Z

This is my what’s-up-with-water-on-Earth-Day post. Alas, it is a few days late, but every day is Earth Day, right? Truthfully, every day is a day with too much on the to-do list, and this one slipped. Anyhoo, please forgive the delay.

On Earth Day each year, a bevy of media stories remind Americans that rivers used to catch on fire and raw sewage floated around major cities. I am just as happy as the next environmentalist to honor Earth Day, but what I really like to celebrate is the law that stopped the fires and got rid of the sewage: the Clean Water Act.

Both the law and Earth Day grew out of the same spirit 40 years ago: a realization that pollution was pummeling our environment and a belief that we could stop it.

Four decades later, I use the Clean Water Act every day in my work, and I am awed by what it has accomplished. Yet there are days where I want to pull my hair out because I see entire classes of pollution get a free pass under the law, or critical water bodies being denied its protection.

Like anyone or anything nearing 40, it’s worth asking whether the Clean Water Act has lived up to its potential. Not quite, but it’s done a lot. The Act has transformed the way Americans view water. We used to treat water bodies like big wet trashcans--free and convenient places to dump everything from oil to chemicals to sewage.

The Clean Water Act changed that. By creating a legal obligation to control pollution, it put a value on the preservation of water bodies. And as water bodies got cleaner--even the famously burning Cuyahoga--Americans started to appreciate them more. People actually use the Cuyahoga, the Potomac (to which the small stream pictured below drains), the Hudson, and the Chesapeake for something other than dumping now.

The Clean Water Act accomplished this remarkable feat in two central ways. First, it prevented factories and other major sources from polluting without prior authorization--such as a permit. This requirement gives pollution control experts a chance to look at a discharging facility and insist on operating conditions that minimize pollution and consider how much pollution the receiving water body can withstand.

Second, it created technology standards--standards which ensured that as part of the cost of doing business, companies had to plan to minimize their discharges as much as possible. These standards apply no matter where you go in the country, and this “floor” of minimum control levels means that there is a consistent set of basic expectations. In other words, polluting waters in Colorado typically will mean the same thing for an industry as polluting waters in Rhode Island. This helps avoid state-shopping by companies seeking to minimize their regulatory obligations.

These mechanisms helped the Clean Water Act change the nature of how most companies interact with water resources. Yet there are still pollution problems that remain beyond the reach of the law, either because of the law’s basic structure, or because of problems that did not arise from the Act, but from misapplication of it.

In the first camp, the Clean Water Act doesn’t control diffuse sources of pollution like runoff from agricultural fields nearly as well as it deals with typical industrial and municipal facilities. This means that in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, some of the most troublesome pollutants-- phosphorous, nitrogen, sediment--go largely unregulated.

Similarly, the Act is limited in its ability to drive restoration. The law protects what we have against harm, but a whole lot of harm was inflicted before it was passed. Wetlands and floodplains--natural systems that filter and replenish water supplies--were decimated or disconnected from other parts of their watersheds, and yet the Clean Water Act doesn’t guide us in how we can revive wetlands, reconnect rivers with their floodplains, and make waterways more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

Adequately addressing these kinds of water quality stressors under the Act would improve the law greatly. For example, Congress is currently considering a Clean Water Act amendment focused on a watershed that is burdened by polluted runoff as well as conventional sources – the Chesapeake Bay – and the bill would hold states accountable for achieving necessary reductions from all sectors. This would be a welcome improvement. Congress is also weighing measures to incentivize efforts to enhance watershed resiliency; for instance, we have supported legislation to promote green infrastructure to reduce stormwater pollution from urban and suburban landscapes as well as legislation to promote planning by communities to adapt to the expected effects of climate change on water resources.

In addition to constructing these additions, policymakers who care about water should focus on the fact that the Act’s foundation also needs a big repair. As I’ve written a number of times before, the law desperately needs to be fixed to address the problems caused by two misguided Supreme Court decisions. There are now bills in both houses of Congress to do so, both of which represent compromises from prior legislative efforts in this regard, but which still retain the core aspect of restoring protections to a host of waters that have been cut out of the Act in the last decade or that are in legal limbo today. Expeditious movement on these efforts is critical.

So, there you have it – the Clean Water Act on Earth Day (well, a week after). It’s still an amazing law, even as it prepares to enter middle age, but we shouldn’t shy away from improvements that will make it effective into its golden years.

New Bill Would Finally Fix Clean Water Act

2010-04-21T18:35:15Z

Ever notice that when you discover something, you then start seeing it everywhere, and can’t believe you weren’t aware of it previously? That’s how I’ve spent the last several years of my life, with the object of my obsession being small, often unglamorous, ponds, streams, and wetlands. (Hey, cut me some slack – I’m a nerdy environmentalist.)

Everywhere I go now, ever since I learned that the Supreme Court decided a couple of cases and suggested that the Clean Water Act might not have been intended to reach various kinds of waters, I see water bodies that used to be covered by the pollution control programs of the law, but now are in legal limbo. Today, however, I am happy to report that Congress has taken another step forward in the push to set the law right again – leaders in the House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan bill they call America’s Commitment to Clean Water Act.

Let me try to put the issue in context with a few examples:

After the Supreme Court decisions and the administrative actions and litigation that they spawned, I’m not 100% sure that the stream in my neighborhood – Four Mile Run in Arlington, VA – will be fully protected. There are places where the stream is a far cry from its natural state, as in the picture above (the stream going under Route 66), and some industry lawyers have suggested that man-made features are less susceptible to protection. Further, a federal appeals court in the southeast ruled that even perennial streams like Four Mile Run need to be proven to be significant enough to the health of downstream “navigable” waters to be covered by the law.

I’m really worried that the little tributary above (which flows into Four Mile Run at the bottom of the picture) is in real trouble. It does not appear to flow continuously, making it more vulnerable under some interpretations of the Supreme Court’s decisions, and its small size will pose a challenge to demonstrating that it is important enough to deserve protection in light of the Court’s decisions.

On the other hand, since the law still at least protects so-called “traditionally navigable waters,” I have no concerns about the Patuxent River, seen above being navigated by a particularly handsome canoeist.

What’s funny – sad, really – is that even though all three of these streams ultimately drain to the Chesapeake Bay, they are in different positions legally, with some being more likely than others to be vulnerable to being polluted without the polluter following the Clean Water Act. Other water bodies, like so-called "isolated" wetlands (which perhaps include the one below in southern PA, depending on how "isolated" is "isolated"), are even worse off; such waters have essentially been written off since the Supreme Court's decisions.

None of this makes sense when you look at the history of the law. Since 1972, when Congress totally overhauled the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and re-made it into the law that we now call the Clean Water Act, a variety of anti-pollution safeguards have applied to "navigable waters," which Congress defined to mean "the waters of the United States." That is, any water body that is a "water of the U.S." is protected by the federal law from industrial and municipal wastewater discharges, sewage dumping, oil spills and outright destruction.

It had been clear since early on that "waters of the U.S." are not limited to navigable ones, so inland wetlands, small and intermittently-flowing streams, and other non-navigable features were protected. The Supreme Court upset that understanding by saying that "navigable" has some lingering -- though highly ambiguous -- meaning, and that waters can only be protected based on their connections to traditionally navigable ones. The confusion described above is the result.

The bill introduced today will effectively restore the law's clear protections to water bodies at risk. It eliminates the term “navigable waters” in order to avoid future judicial mischief, defines protected waters in keeping with longstanding regulations, and incorporates a set of principles for legislation the Obama administration laid out last May.

It is a compromise bill, in that it contains new exemptions that the statute did not previously include. It also removes provisions that were included in prior bills but had drawn fire from opponents of comprehensive clean water protections, who made outlandish claims that the bill over-reached in protecting waters. Nevertheless, we are grateful to the sponsors of the legislation for beginning this critical dialogue in the House, and look forward to speedy movement to get this through Congress and to President Obama's desk.

Blind Justices

2010-03-01T18:02:12Z

When I was applying to law schools, I remember writing that I wanted to become a lawyer, rather than a scientist, because that’s where the action was – lawyers would actually make environmental policy. This was ridiculously small-minded of me, and over the course of my career I have come to learn that the worlds of science and policy are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, not everyone learned this lesson -- today’s New York Times has a compelling story of what happens when a bunch of lawyers (in this case, five members of the United States Supreme Court) ignore science.

As I have written here, here, here, here, here, and here, the Clean Water Act – our country’s chief safeguard against water pollution – has been broken by a pair of Supreme Court decisions that suggest the law as it is currently written cannot protect certain kinds of water bodies. The decisions upset the longstanding rule that protected water bodies broadly, including wetlands and other “non-navigable” water bodies that are not connected to other surface waters, as well as a host of small streams (such as ones that do not flow year-round).

That principle was based on basic science -- so basic, in fact, that when I told my then 7- or 8-year-old son what I was working on, he was dumbstruck by the idea that it would be okay to pollute smaller headwaters, given their obvious relationship to the rest of the watershed. Scientists tell us that wetlands, even so-called “isolated” ones, curtail flooding, filter polluted runoff, provide critical habitat for a host of critters, and recharge underground drinking water sources. The smaller streams in the upper reaches of watersheds perform similar functions, and their destruction or pollution has predictable results for downstream waters.

The Supreme Court’s contrary approach was wrong on the law – the decisions overturned previously settled understandings that were faithful to the Act and to how Congress intended it to operate, and that prior interpretation had served the nation well for most of three decades. But the decisions were even worse on the facts; when the Court ignored elementary school science in favor of a legalistic reading, it forced pollution control officials to go through a time- and resource-intensive process to prove that a given water body has a significant enough relationship to a “navigable” one before protecting it. The practical result has been that thousands of water bodies have been cast aside as unprotected, as NRDC and a number of other conservation groups described in a pair of reports, available here and here.

Thankfully, as the Times describes today, there is a ready solution. The Supreme Court said that its decisions were based on the language of the Clean Water Act -- language that Congress can change. A bill called the Clean Water Restoration Act is pending in Congress right now; it would restore protections to the kinds of water bodies that the law previously protected and that today are in limbo. A compromise version of the bill has already passed a key Senate committee thanks to the leadership of Chairman Boxer and Senators Baucus and Klobuchar. The House of Representatives needs to act next, and the Chairman of the relevant House committee, Representative James Oberstar of Minnesota, has vowed to move companion legislation to fix the problem. You can help, by telling Chairman Oberstar that you support moving now to finally fix the law, and by getting in touch with your own representative to urge him or her to support a fix. Please do.

We need to make ourselves heard on this because there are powerful political forces working against it. Several industries that historically have been regulated by the Clean Water Act have lined up to oppose the bill, and have orchestrated a scheme to try to convince Congress to ignore the scientific need to correct the legal problem. As the Times reports:

“The game plan is to emphasize the scary possibilities,” said one member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, which has fought the legislation and is supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Home Builders and other groups representing industries affected by the Clean Water Act.

“If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards,” said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.

Let’s hope that our leaders in Congress can see through the scare tactics to the scary scientific fact that failing to protect our critical water bodies will hurt public health and the environment.

New Bill Gives Americans Good Jobs and Clean Water at the Same Time

2009-12-17T20:05:57Z

On Wednesday the House of Representatives passed a jobs bill that will dedicate $2 billion for “ready-to-go” drinking water and wastewater projects -- projects that will employ engineers, construction workers, plumbers, architects, maintenance workers, and more. The House also targeted at least 20 percent of these funds for greener projects.

The clean water provisions will bring immediate relief to American workers now when they need it most AND create long-term benefits in the form of cleaner water for drinking and safer beaches for swimming.

America’s water infrastructure desperately needs these long-range investments. In cities across the nation, aging urban pipes and over-taxed sewage plants dump raw sewage and polluted stormwater right into our beaches after heavy rains.

In 2008, there were more than 20,000 days of closings and advisories at America’s vacation beaches because beachwater exceeded public health standards. Even with the closings, swimmers routinely contract rashes, diarrhea, and other GI illnesses.

The good news is that solving these problems will require the work of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Putting people to work in green jobs for water protection and conservation is just plain smart.

Green infrastructure is an excellent example. Green infrastructure – things like urban forestry, street-edge gardens, and green roofs – prevents polluted rainwater from entering drainage pipes, overflowing sewage systems, and releasing untreated sewage and toxic contaminants into our waterways.

But that’s not all. Green infrastructure also creates jobs. A $10 billion nationwide initiative to install green roofs alone would result in almost 200,000 jobs, according to an analysis by American Rivers and the Alliance for Water Efficiency.

Likewise, water efficiency is good for the environment and for employment. Using less water to accomplish the same goals decreases the stress on already burdened infrastructure. But saving water also saves energy. Collecting, distributing, and treating drinking water and wastewater nationwide consume tremendous amounts of energy and release approximately 116 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year – as much global warming pollution each year as 10 million cars.

In addition to these benefits, the Alliance for Water Efficiency reported that measures to increase water efficiency could generate between 15 and 22 jobs per million dollars invested.

Philadelphia is already beginning to reap the benefits of this kind of investment. As my colleague Nancy Stoner recently blogged about, the city is investing in green infrastructure to deal with its stormwater problem, and analysts of the city’s plan found that these green measures create more opportunities to hire local labor than conventional approaches to stormwater. Indeed, stormwater landscaping and restoration could generate more than 15,250 new entry-level green jobs, in addition to highly skilled construction positions.

Philadelphia’s investments in pocket parks, creek restoration, and green roofs will benefit all residents, not just the workers.

And the new House bill will bring these benefits of cleaner water and meaningful work to more communities around the nation. Now it’s time for the Senate to do the same. The Senate is expected to consider its own version of the bill in early 2010, and I hope our Senators remember that clean water investments will benefit all of us.

Prosecuting Polluters Poorly

2009-09-14T20:19:02Z

It was great to see Charles Duhigg's article about under-enforcement of water pollution laws yesterday. Quite apart from the water angle, which we obviously care a whole lot about, it was wonderful to see that good print journalism is still alive and well. The story included both analysis of pollution and enforcement data and extensive investigative reporting based on interviews with regulatory officials and victims of water pollution. We need more of this kind of reporting.

I have some ideas about why enforcement is failing today. I suspect a fair bit of it is coziness between regulators and the regulated industries, and that problem is worse in some places as compared to others. Also, it can be resource-intensive to bring enforcement actions, and when those resources are cut, it's harder to ensure compliance.

Sadly, enforcement has been a target for funding cuts - a couple years ago, the Government Accountability Office found that EPA's total budget for enforcement fell 5 percent in real terms from 1997 to 2006, with funding to regional enforcement (where most of the enforcement activity occurs) declining 8 percent in real terms. EPA grants to states for environmental program implementation dropped 9 percent in real terms over the same period. Consistent with these declines, "EPA reduced the size of the regional enforcement workforce by about 5 percent over the 10 years," a problem exacerbated by the fact that "[t]hese reductions in funding occurred during a period when statutory and regulatory changes increased enforcement and other environmental program responsibilities."

But another significant problem is the practical difficulty of doing enforcement today, in the wake of two Supreme Court decisions questioning which water bodies the Clean Water Act even covers, a subject I've written about here, here, and here, among other places. These opinions have injected such uncertainty into the implementation of the law that even career enforcement professionals do not know with certainty which water bodies are covered by several pollution control programs in the law. Because of the Supreme Court's misapplication of the Act:

In a speech at the National Press Club, EPA Administrator Jackson indicated that some EPA staff were spending as much as 40-60 percent of their time on figuring out whether various water bodies were protected by the law. (Video here)
Because of conflicting lower court rulings following the Supreme Court decisions, the legal standard for determining whether a water body is protected is different in certain States.
Earlier this year, multiple government agencies wrote to members of Congress that "[c]urrent agency guidance implementing the decisions contemplates complex findings that sometimes result in jurisdictional determinations that lack consistency across the country and can be time-consuming and expensive. Delayed and unpredictable decisions are frustrating and costly to persons seeking approval of projects related to these waters."

A recent summary by EPA's Office of Inspector General underscores these points; the internal watchdog interviewed EPA personnel about the challenges to implementation of the Act caused by the Supreme Court's decisions. EPA enforcement professionals reported that the most recent decision "has been a major resource drain for the program," that the decision "has created a lot of uncertainty with regards to EPA's compliance and enforcement activities," and that "it has become 'almost impossible' for EPA to refer" certain kinds of Clean Water Act cases to the Department of Justice. The report also noted that "[a]n estimated total of 489 enforcement cases . . . have been affected such that formal enforcement was not pursued as a result of jurisdictional uncertainty, case priority was lowered as a result of jurisdictional uncertainty, or lack of jurisdiction was asserted as an affirmative defense to an enforcement action."

Thus, fixing this problem is critically important, and EPA's first enforcement priority should be working with Congress to pass the Clean Water Restoration Act, which will ensure that all waters of the U.S. are protected.

Beyond the problems the Supreme Court created, a large portion of the pollution sources with Clean Water Act discharge permits consist of stormwater systems, large animal feedlots, and other sources regulated for the most part under general permits that lack clear, enforceable standards. The history of the Act demonstrates that a regulatory system works best when compliance with objective standards is required for all discharges, and all facilities are required to be permitted. Self-monitoring and self-reporting requirements (verified as needed by outside inspections) can promote compliance and ease burdens on enforcement authorities.

An example of how to do it wrong is EPA's rule governing water pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations, a regulation that fails to clearly identify the facilities that need to obtain permits and which even neglects to gather information from facilities that claim not to need such permits, in order to substantiate their claims. NRDC and other groups have challenged this rule in a case now pending in federal court, but EPA can - and should -- address these problems by revisiting the rule, and putting a more protective and enforceable rule in place.

Here's hoping that the New York Times' incredible reporting spurs EPA to address these and other failings in the enforcement program.

Clean Water Champions Stand Up in the Senate

2009-06-18T20:07:04Z

Today, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the Clean Water Restoration Act, a landmark bill that will reinstate Clean Water Act protections against umpermitted dumping of pollution, filling, or destruction for a host of water bodies jeopardized by a pair of Supreme Court decisions. It was quite an interesting morning; the meeting at which the Committee debated the bill and proposed amendments can be seen here.

This debate often becomes esoteric, as you'll see from the video. We lawyers tend to talk about the role of the word "navigable" in the statute, the legislative history surrounding the consideration of the law in 1972 and 1977, and the extent to which the Constitution authorizes Congress to enact a strong pollution control program for a wide range of water bodies. But the meeting this morning - called a "mark-up" by Capitol Hill experts - was a great reminder of why we've been working on this so hard for so long. And the person who reminded me was one of the staunchest opponents of the bill there - Senator Barrasso of Wyoming.

Senator Barrasso offered a series of amendments seeking to exclude a variety of water bodies from the bill, including natural lakes, streams, and wetlands. As he offered his amendments, he held up pictures of a number of the features in question, as if to ask whether such a thing ought to be protected by the federal law, and each time, I thought to myself, "heck, yes." Excluding water bodies from the federal law is equivalent to saying that it would be acceptable to destroy those waters or pollute them with untreated sewage or industrial waste. Dropping water bodies from the Clean Water Act does not guarantee they will be polluted, but it is tantamount to saying that they are not important enough to warrant uniform minimum pollution prevention standards to keep them from such a fate.

As I've written before, because of the Supreme Court's decisions, government officials had declared thousands of bodies of waters - including lakes, streams, and wetlands - outside the purview of the Clean Water Act. As a result, the people who rely on those water bodies cannot depend on the Act's safeguards against unregulated industrial pollution and destruction. The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that these decisions have undermined the agency's enforcement of the Act. The Obama administration recently told Congress that "[i]t is essential that the Clean Water Act provide broad protection of the Nation's waters, consistent with full Congressional authority under the Constitution."

To address this crisis, Senator Russ Feingold and 24 other Senators sponsored the Clean Water Restoration Act, which the Committee considered today. The Committee ultimately approved a substitute amendment to the bill championed by Senators Baucus, Klobuchar, and Boxer that adds two exemptions from the law sought by farmers and by wastewater treatment plant operators. It also removes provisions that opponents of comprehensive clean water protections had wrongly suggested expanded the scope of the law, and it specifically directs federal agencies to implement the new law consistent with the historic practice prior to the Supreme Court's decisions.

We are very grateful that the Committee has taken this critical step. Congress cannot fix the Clean Water Act soon enough, and today's action reflects the urgency and importance of the problem. While the bill is definitely a compromise, Senators Baucus, Klobuchar, and Boxer deserve great credit for maintaining the core purpose of the legislation: returning protection to imperiled waters and charting a path forward that responds directly to claims made about the legislation. We also owe thanks to the Senators who joined them in moving the bill onward and opposing the radical amendments offered by Senator Barasso -- Senators Carper, Lautenberg, Cardin, Sanders, Whitehouse, Tom Udall, Merkley, Gillibrand, and Specter.

Caring for U.S. water on World Water Day

2009-03-20T22:35:00Z

World Water Day is Sunday. Because I work in NRDC's Water Program, my colleague Melanie Nakagawa encouraged me to offer my two drops, as it were, about the domestic fresh water issues on which we focus.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. Faced with the grim facts about people's lack of access to water and sanitation worldwide, it seems trivial to discuss water-related issues in the U.S., where such problems are rare. Over two and a half BILLION-WITH-A-"B" people in the world do not have access to a toilet and nearly a billion people lack safe drinking water. Meanwhile, most people here use toilets that we fill with drinking-quality water before flushing it away. Why would our water issues matter elsewhere?

I guess it's because here in the United States, we have an opportunity to get things right, to treat water as the precious resource that our friends abroad already see it as, and to demonstrate for the world the ways that water can be used responsibly. That is the focus of our domestic work -- ensuring safe and sufficient water for people and ecosystems. Despite the relative plenty and purity of our water resources, there is much to be done.

In the U.S., we waste water in a variety of ways, all of which we need to change. First, we often treat water as a waste product, as we have designed our cities and suburbs to try to move precipitation into concrete pipes and often out of the watershed in which it falls. Second, we routinely pollute or destroy feeder streams and wetlands -- resources that help purify our water supplies and recharge aquifers. Finally, we use way more water than is required in our homes and businesses, or use drinking water when less pure sources would suffice.

Smarter Stormwater

City planners historically treated stormwater as something to get rid of as soon as possible, and constructed sewer systems to whisk water that falls on the built environment away into rivers or out to sea. This strategy causes multiple problems: stormwater picks up pollution and carries it through storm sewers into our water bodies; rivers receiving stormwater discharges often suffer the effects of faster-moving water, like stream bank erosion; and many cities have combined their stormwater and domestic wastewater sewers, so that rain events frequently cause the dual system to overflow and dump untreated sewage into our waterways.

Because of antiquated systems, we have significant pollution problems. Approximately 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage flows into waterways in the U.S. each year, according to EPA. These and other pollution sources have real impacts as well; for each of the last several years, NRDC has documented more than 20,000 closings and advisories at ocean, bay, and Great Lakes beaches in the U.S.

There are ready solutions that address problems caused by stormwater and that turn rain into a resource. We can enhance the resiliency of urban and suburban watersheds using a suite of techniques that we call "green infrastructure." Green infrastructure means placing green roofs, permeable pavement, vegetated buffers and swales, and rain gardens on the landscape, so that rain infiltrates into the ground where it falls. When that happens, biological processes in the soil purify the water, and vegetation absorbs chemical constituents, while the infiltrated water refills underground water supplies.

Decision-makers have started to embrace these ideas. President Obama signed an economic recovery bill dedicating over $1 billion to green infrastructure and other environmentally innovative projects, and the House passed a water infrastructure bill last week that also prioritizes these techniques. Just this week, my colleague Nancy Stoner testified in Congress to suggest strategies to overcome obstacles to the use of green infrastructure.

Smarter Streams and Swamps

As I've written about here, here, and here, the most critical water pollution problem in the U.S. is that two Supreme Court decisions weakened requirements in the Clean Water Act against unregulated pollution so that they no longer clearly apply to many headwater streams and wetlands.

The legal uncertainty particularly affects water bodies that lack a surface connection to others, or flow infrequently, or are remotely located. The potential for harm is hard to overstate; in the continental U.S., there are some 20 million acres of "isolated" wetlands (an area roughly the size of 25 Rhode Islands), and nearly 2 million miles of streams that do not flow year-round (equal to about four round-trips to the moon). More than 110 million people get drinking water from suppliers drawing some water from one or more of these resources.

For this problem, the solution is simple - Congress can pass a bill that would re-establish clear legal protections under the law for all of the Nation's water bodies. Leaders in Congress have been building support for many years for a bill called the Clean Water Restoration Act to make certain that the Clean Water Act applies to all of the water bodies that the law previously kept free from unlicensed industrial discharges, oil spills, sewage dumping, and outright destruction. We expect that they will introduce the bill again soon, and we're especially hopeful about its chances this year, because President Obama indicated on the campaign trail that he would support and sign legislation fixing this problem.

Smarter Sinks, Showers and Sprinklers

Water supplies across the country are stretched. According to the General Accounting Office, "even under normal water conditions, water managers in 36 states anticipate water shortages in localities, regions, or statewide" by 2013. As my colleagues in California can tell you, it's really dry there right now. Unfortunately, even though we have these very real constraints, people and businesses use more potable water than they need for basic tasks.

If you have a toilet at home made in 1992 or before, chances are that it uses at least 3 ½ gallons per flush. Newer models can do the same job with much less water - the high-efficiency toilets now use only about 1.3 gallons/flush. Other household fixtures like showerheads and washing machines likewise can hog water, or can be replaced with more efficient models. And landscape irrigation can be done a whole lot better. For a quick overview of some of these ideas, EPA has a great site here.

But replacing these fixtures would only be the start of dealing with the problem. First, before water even gets to where it can be used, a great deal is lost through leaky pipes; systems regularly lose 10 percent or more in the distribution system. Second, it makes no sense for us to use high-quality drinking water in toilets and certain other applications at all; instead, re-using water from sinks and showers in toilets, or using harvested rainwater, would be perfectly fine.

In commercial, industrial, and institutional settings, the same holds true. Businesses, schools, and other operations can use more efficient equipment and substitute re-used water for drinking water in a variety of applications. NRDC published an issue paper (specific to California facilities) on this very topic recently.

Although many of these improvements actually save consumers money over the long run (and can also save energy, a topic NRDC explored here), we believe that incentives to make the initial investments will help spur the widespread use of water-saving measures, so we were delighted to see that water efficiency projects were among those specifically targeted for funding in the recent stimulus bill. But these funds alone won't ensure the full deployment of needed water efficiency equipment and techniques. To do that, we believe that the country needs a suite of strategies - tax incentives for the production and use of efficient appliances, water use efficiency standards for the most water-intensive products, well-recognized and up-to-date green certification programs that reward efficient practices, and performance targets for water suppliers to reduce the per capita usage across their service areas.