Some thoughts on...

The nature of water: Almost everything ends up in it sooner or later.

The absurdities of the system: It's fundamentally moronic to let the water get dirty and then clean it up, as opposed to just keeping it clean.

Federal water laws: In Congress, there are two different water laws -- the Clean Water Act, which regulates what I call 'the water out there,' and the Safe Drinking Water Act, which regulates the water at your tap. Now, one way to get clean water at the tap is to let really dirty water come in and then filter it like crazy. But the other way is to have clean water 'out there' because that's where tap water comes from. So although the laws and programs are separate, they're obviously pretty closely connected.

What the laws have saved us: Because of controls on industrial pollutants, it's estimated that at least a billion pounds of toxins aren't being dumped in the water that would have been dumped if it weren't for these programs.

The coasts: The coasts are in many ways the most threatened areas because they are the fastest-growing and the place where more than 50% of the country lives. They are also ecologically the most important and sensitive.

The hazards of living downstream: When you first go to law school, you learn about the problem that happens when people live too close together. The classic example in English law, from hundreds of years ago, is hog farms, which nobody wants to live near because they stink. Now, hog farms are becoming a huge issue again, not only because they stink, but because the people downstream are finding very significant water pollution.

The hazards of living downstream, take 2: Say you have a river coming through a city and the city just spent a lot of money to make sure the runoff from its streets is clean. Unfortunately, the farmers upstream don't do diddly, so there's still manure running off into the river, and there's a lot of sedimentation every time the farmers till. So the city has just spent all this money and it doesn't even get a clean stream running through the town.

New York City's drinking water: The New York City water supply is truly one of the great engineering wonders of the world. A billion and a half gallons of clean water comes into the city every day. That's gravity-fed, naturally clean water, with virtually no treatment, virtually no pumping. And it comes in day in and day out -- a billion and a half gallons of water.

The power of the law: It sounds corny to say it, but it is remarkable -- the power of the law to effect social change.

What remains to be done: The world is divided for legal purposes into point sources, which is stuff coming out of a pipe, and non-point sources, which is stuff that runs off the ground. Way back in 1972 (when the Clean Water Act was passed), it was decided to require an enforceable permit for point sources that says exactly what you can and cannot do, but to require virtually nothing for non-point sources. And this has been the battle that has raged since 1972 -- how to get non-point sources addressed in a more serious way."

  Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council -- contact us at nrdcinfo@nrdc.org