Here's a good Frontline documentary about the gutted Clean Water Act that aired last night: how Nixon was forced to create the EPA, how Regan de-boned it, how aquatic dead zones -the massive, life-free, oxygen-starved areas in the oceans- are spreading world-wide, why agricultural runoff (see industrial farming of livestock) is such a terrific problem, and how the peeps don't seem to mind. Seems that massive amounts of raw chicken manure added to the waterways is a really bad thing.
"I think the '70s was the high-water mark for idealism and for optimism and belief that anything was possible, and this decade has been much more realistic. The easy stuff, to the extent there was ever easy stuff, that got done in the '70s. We got the big factories with their big pipes discharging into Puget Sound under control, treating their wastewater so that it wasn't harmful. ...
But in this decade, we are into an era of diffuse sources, where the sources aren't a few big pipes, but they are every car on the highway, every farm field, every person's lawn. They contribute very little individually, but taken together, they are the big, uncontrolled sources.
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It's about the way we all live. And unfortunately we are all polluters. I am; you are; all of us are, because we live in an industrialized society that puts us there. And all of us have to strive every day to make those differences. And our job now, in a lot of cases, is giving people the information and the options to change the way they impact … the world around them."
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