My wife and I enjoy walking around OSU's Wetland Research Park which has some cool trails within walking distance of our home. I never paid attention to the output of the center though, so I was impressed when I saw that the director had just written a big Policy Forum article in Science. Here's my super-brief summary of what it says:

Everyone deserves clean freshwater. In recent years we've built a good body of evidence describing how dangerous widespread water pollution can be, in part because you don't need to dump pollutants into a river for those pollutants to get there eventually via groundwater, ephemeral streams, etc. That's why the EPA adopted new protections to keep our water clean, updating the Clean Water Act (1972) in 2015 to be in-line with what we know. Now, despite the EPA's own advisory board saying the scientific equivalent of "removing these protections would be ill-informed and harmful " the EPA did just that as of June 22nd.

Back to me: it’s disappointing that the EPA of 2020 is throwing its hands up and saying "not my job" and everyone's too busy being distracted by everything else going on to hear about it. Despite what all water quality experts are saying, the EPA has decided that not all of the country's freshwater supply is worth protecting because- surely- the pollutants won't trickle down anyways (tell that to anyone living on Lake Erie in the summer time). I miss having an EPA with leadership that earnestly tried to protect our environment, and I hope we get one soon.

Written by TPS Fellow Alex Turo

Reference

Sullivan, S. M., Rains, M. C., Rodewald, A. D., Buzbee, W. W. & Roseomond, A. D. (2020). Distorting science, putting water at risk. Science, 369(6505), 766-768.