Brave New World - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 58

By the turn of the twenty-first century, experts understood that a broad array of pollut-
ants affect our waterways—from age-old contaminants such as bacteria, sewage, lead,
and rust; to the rising problem of nutrients from agricultural runoff; to the latest emer-
ging contaminants such as industrial chemicals, estrogen, pharmaceuticals, and narcot-
ics. Some waterways suffer from all of these contaminants at once, and scientists are
only now beginning to investigate the effect of such cocktails on aquatic and human life.
Ironically, one of the nation's most dire and complex cases of water pollution has oc-
curred in Chesapeake Bay, which lies almost literally at the feet of the White House and
federal regulators, in Washington, DC.