The Defining Resource - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 3

population rises from 6.8 billion in 2010 to nearly 9 billion by 2050, and climate change
disrupts familiar weather patterns, reliable supplies of freshwater will become increas-
ingly threatened. In Australia and Spain, record droughts have led to critical water
shortages; in China rampant pollution has led to health problems and environmental
degradation; in Africa tensions over water supplies have led to conflict; and in Central
America the privatization of water has led to suffering and violence.
At a glance, then, America seems to be hydrologically blessed. But if you look a little
closer, you will discover that the apparent success of our water management and con-
sumption masks a broad spectrum of underlying problems—from new kinds of water
pollution to aging infrastructure, intensifying disputes over water rights, obsolete regu-
lations, and shifting weather patterns, among many other things.
These problems are expensive to fix, difficult to adapt to, and politically unpopular.
Not surprisingly, people have tended to ignore them, pretending they don't exist in
the secret hope that they will cure themselves. Instead, America's water problems have
steadily grown worse. In recent years, the quality and quantity of American water has
undergone staggering changes, largely out of the public eye.
Between 2004 and 2009, the Clean Water Act (CWA) was violated at least 506,000 times
by more than twenty-three thousand companies and other facilities, according to EPA
data assessed by the NewYorkTimes.he EPA's comprehensive data covers only that
five-year span, but it shows that the number of facilities violating the CWA increased
more than 16 percent from 2004 to 2007. (Some polluters illegally withheld informa-
tion about their discharges, so the actual contamination was worse.) The culprits ranged
from small gas stations and dry-cleaning stores, to new housing developments, farms,
mines, factories, and vast city sewer systems. During that time, less than 3 percent of
polluters were punished or fined by EPA regulators, who were politically and financially
hamstrung.
During the same period, the quality of tap water deteriorated, as the Safe Drinking
Water Act (SDWA) was violated in every state. Between 2004 and 2009, a study by the
Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit watchdog organization, found, tap
water in forty-five states and the District of Columbia was contaminated by 316 dif-
ferent pollutants . More than half of those chemicals—including the gasoline additive
MTBE, the rocket-fuel component perchlorate, and industrial plasticizers called phthal-
ates—were unregulated by the EPA and thus not subject to environmental safety stand-
ards. Federal agencies have set limits for ninety-one chemicals in water supplies; the
EWG study found forty-nine of these pollutants in water at excessive levels. Translated,
this means that the drinking water of 53.6 million Americans was contaminated.