Without conservation efforts, we could lose all hunting & fishing entirely. Just because some "conservation" efforts have gone too far, doesn't make all conservation part of liberal conspiracy.

Chad you gotta get mad every now and then to get your point across don't ya. People tick me of when they say keeping the air and water clean aren't cost effective. You need both to live and the cleaner both are the healthier you are. There is always a business that will forge new technology to make things cost effective and that company will prosper over others who just complain about being regulated into not poisoning citizens. That is capitalism at the heart. It is not sitting back saying the economic impact or cost benefit ratios don't work because you don't want to work to stay on top of your game.

Andrew Ferraro,

The Cuyahoga River catching fire wasn't just one "ancient story about one oil slick catching fire on one river" and if you think that's what it was, then maybe you need to bone up on your environmental history.

The Cuyahoga wasn't the impetus for the CWA, but it was a potent and famous (at least to anyone concerned with such matters) symbol of just how bad our waterways had become by the mid-60s.

So are you claiming things really weren't all that bad prior to the CWA? I really have no idea what point, if any, you're trying to make. And when you start throwing around meaningless corporate talking point terms like "cost-benefit analysis" when it comes to environmental regulation then I tend to not take what you have to say seriously, because that useless jeremiad is a completely invalid metric when talking about the relative merits and value of clean air and clean water.

As for why I chose to quote the NYT rather than DU in the original blog, well, again, I would think it would be obvious: The NY Times, not DU, is the publication running the series examining how and why the CWA has been, yes, gutted (if it was a "gross exaggeration" there would be no need for the Clean Water Restoration Act) and being circumvented by industrial polluters.

So, if the CWA hadn't been utterly eviscerated then why would every single conservation organization in the nation be supporting the CWRA?

" If you plan on having soup tomorrow, don't use the soup pot as a bedpan tonight"

Yep that just about explains it.
SBW

I'm loving this. Everyone is singing accolades to the Obama and his effective use of the EPA. Yet we're importing food to a California Food Bank to keep those farmers from starving to death because they can't have water. This same administration, however, is content to fill the Great Lakes with Asian Carp because controlling the carp will cost their friends money. We all want two things. We want high quality water. We want someone else to pay for that water.

Instant replay: Saranac River in Plattsburgh, NY used to run with sludge andink colors of the rainbow(loaded with toxic chemicals) from a wallpaper mill in the 1970's. The river historically was full of huge browns, and had major runs of fish from Lake Champlain. It took a new public mentality to clean it up to be the beautiful river it is again. Fast forward to Appalachians 2010 where hundreds of natural gas wells are being drilled that will eject millions of gallons of shale fracturing chemicals into pristine trout streams, among the last in the eastern U.S. When will we learn ...our children will spit on our graves for ruining their world.

I don't know if some of this legislations is overreaching or not. However, when trying to decide on which side I want to err, I consider the following question:

Two generations from now, when our grandkids (or great grand-kids in some cases) are trying to teach their own children how to hunt and fish, how would we like them to consider us? As stewards of the land that fought tooth-and-nail for clean rivers and streams, greater public access, and preservation of species? Or as a group that allowed corporate interests to get a foothold in public lands and tempered our zeal for outdoorsmanship and conservation because we were more concerned with politics of the time.

We are creating a legacy that we will be known for for generations. I don't know about everyone else, but mine is very important to me.

Today on FOX News they showed off of California coast, they found in deep water 1100+ deep, piles of Military munitions and other stuff that have been dumped.

Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership? Everyone knows now that Teddy was an evil progressive. Progressive is the new scary word that has a new scary meaning. All bad. Glenn said so. Duh. Stupid liberals. I don't want no government cleaning up my water and messing with my life.

wags, you can't tell me that any company fears and respects any enviromental laws! they get caught dumping and they get a slap on the wrist by paying a rediculously small fine and make it back with in the next hour of business! it's just like the firearms laws. we don't enforce those to the point that anyone would think twice before shooting someone. the penalties are not tough enough so it goes on and on and on. the only difference is that these corporate execs are highly educated and not thugs on the street. the similarity is neither of them care because there is no real penalty for either offense.

I'm all for the Clean Water Act. I get tired of opening the DGIF fishing guides and or online river guides or being at rivers that have signs warning not to eat or consume fish or more than 8 ounces a month because we (including factories) have elevated the levels of Mercury, PCB's, Pharmacueticals and petroleum spills.

We've depleted the natural filters (wetlands, trees, fence rows between fields, roads and our water ways).

We have to filter or treat our drinking water as it is perfect example towns/cities and any supplied water.

So the CWA is very much needed it has been in place for yrs and no one president can take credit for it. They try because they put a new twist on it but it isn't their plan of action. It is a contiuence and update to an existing plan of action

MPN, I agree whole heartedly...

Great post.

Wags, you hit the nail precisely on the head, and Mr. Love your passion with this issue is comendable though the ramifications of this simple definition is as dangerous as it was to list all the wolves in the Western United States as a single population. Your are slightly off in saying that all conservation organizations are getting behind it. As with any grouping of organizations there are some differences. While as a whole they all are working toward the same goal, certain organizations are more quick to jump behind an idea. As for the comment on the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership on here earlier, indeed he was a progressive but he was also for the multiple use of natural resources and claiming that any ephermal pond is in need of federal protection, that goes against his original intents when starting the conservation movement. I am in no way supporting industry in the reckless destruction of wildlife habitat but just because the prairie pothole region is a significantly ephemeral region, is not reason to paint the entire country with a blanket bill to protect a certain area critical to duck production. Remember the old addage that is if is too good to be true, it is. Tread lightly on this issue, labeling ephermals as qualifying under the CWA has far further reaching ramifications than putting more ducks in the air for us to watch and chase.
Again I am not saying anyone weighing in is wrong, this is just a far more complex issue than spring time ponds in duck habitat

The mill worker likely considers himself (or herself) lucky to have any job at all in this economy and doesn't dare say word one to criticise the dudes in suits who live elsewhere and tell him what to do. But it is the mill worker who will get sick when the mill deals irresponsibly with toxins, and it is the millworker who will die years before his (or her) time because of the stuff that has leached into the watersupply, not to mention his (or her) twisted sick kids. But the guys in the suits (who live elsewhere and drink bottled water) their kids have health insurance and go to private schools where they never see the sports and twists their parents decisions on cost effectiveness beget. But drive down the street of any dying American industrial town and you'll see the human refuse of post industrial society slowly wasting away on every other street corner. Universal health care? Horrors somebody might have to wind up paying for all that human wreckage!

Wow Shane, take a step back from FOX news...and try taking some english or writing classes...

It does seem as if regulations seem to mostly be used to hogtie little guys from doing innocuous things while moneybags developers seem to be able to grease palms or something and get what they want often enough. A developer bought the land adjoining my western and northern boundaries and likely would have condo-ised the whole acreage if I hadn't brought the conservation guy down so he could see the vernal pool with his own eyes (but the vernal pools still aren't on the water management zone map). But then I found I missed a bullet for replacing a footbridge over a stream. We always wanted a duckpond, but the crazed tangle of permitting discourages one. About a quarter of the land I have stewardship over is swamp, and I like swamp (being a natural born swamp yankee) we even have a moose now (saw his tracks on the cart path).

Maybe some of us are tired of liberal bias in the media and seek it out the same the way Jesse Jackson looks for "racism". Your article stated rivers were literally catching fire before the CWA and then quoted an ancient story about one oil slick catching fire on one river. You then went on to cite the New York Times (the same paper that claims most Americans support Obamacare) saying the SCOTUS gutted the CWA, which is another gross exaggeration. The ruling on state and federal regulation of interstate / intrastate water quality, decides who regulates, not if we regulate.

The EPA is one on the least effective regulators (if you want something to go to court for 25 years bring in the Feds, to clean something up cut a deal with the State DEP)and the CAA was one of the most expensive regulations ever and had some of the worst cost benefit analysis of anything Congress ever passed.

If legitimate hunting and fishing organizations line up behind the CWA great. Perhaps if you quoted Ducks Unlimited instead of the NYT you would have swayed more readers. As some in the Obama Administration want the EPA, or some other bureaucracy, to regulate recreational fishing, it would be nice if F & S found a government regulation, encroachment or ban you oppose, besides an occasional gun control measures.