CONCLUSION - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 298

as the Colorado River, the Everglades, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Sacra-
mento Delta. Today, water scarcity, population growth, and environmental degradation
have combined to force the kind of reckoning that the United States has not seen in
forty years.
In the 1970s, the American environmental movement forced the passage of the
Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the founding of the Environ-
mental Protection Agency. Thus began a remarkable period of collective action when
Americans, for the first time, agreed on the need to protect the nation's water supply.
But since then, the nation's attention has drited, and many important hydrologic lessons
have been forgotten or no longer apply.
Laws designed to protect drinking supplies have become outdated, and the agencies
responsible for enforcing them have been marginalized.
Since 1981 (at least), when President Ronald Reagan named James Watt as his secret-
ary of the interior and Anne Gorsuch as his administrator of the EPA—both of whom
were antiregulation and business-friendly—presidential administrations of both parties
have weakened environmental protections. The EPA has been underfunded, politicized,
and demoralized. The US Army Corps of Engineers has failed to build effective flood
defenses. Employees of the Minerals Management Service were found literally and fig-
uratively in bed with the company representatives they were supposed to regulate, al-
lowing industries to cut corners, and resulting in such disasters as the 2010 sinking of
the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.
In mischievous rulings such as the 2006 Rapanosdecision, the US Supreme Court
has undermined the Clean Water Act, muddied the definition of which waterways can
be regulated, and tacitly sided with developers who fill in wetlands to build shopping
malls. Congress has likewise turned a blind eye to polluters, failed to invest in crucial
hydro-infrastructure, encouraged waste ( by providing irrigators with federal subsidies
while not requiring them to measure how much water they use), and generally taken a
short-term, uncoordinated approach to water governance.
Nearly half a century after the Clean Water Act was signed in 1972, America and the
world face a second defining period in which our actions, and inactions, will have seri-
ous consequences for water supplies for years to come.
There are plenty of suggestions, and sharp disagreements, over how to respond. One
camp favors building up water supplies by increasing the nation's reservoirs, canals, and
pipelines (as the Schwarzenegger administration pushed for in California); this is es-
sentially an updated version of nineteenth- and twentieth-century strategies. Another
group favors a new water ethic built on the opposite approach: conserving existing wa-
ter supplies and limiting new demand through efficient technologies, stringent regula-
tion, price incentives, and broad public education.