WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is on the verge of exempting more than one-third of the nation’s waterways from federal rules that protect them from pollution, according to environmental and business activists.
Isolated wetlands and smaller streams that occasionally go dry would no longer get protection under the 30-year-old Clean Water Act because the administration is planning to change the definition of protected waterways, many activists say. The Environmental Protection Agency would not comment.
The waters to be left unprotected “are crucial to the quality of larger waterways,” said Bob Perciasepe, a former water-regulatory chief in the Clinton administration and current senior vice president of the National Audubon Society, a conservation group.
Environmentalists say the administration’s expected proposals would allow between 35 percent and 60 percent of the nation’s waterways to be polluted, or even filled in, without federal intervention. Agriculture and real estate interests say that state governments would continue to regulate these waterways, but they concede that state rules are generally less burdensome for them than federal standards.
Some say that the Bush administration is right in limiting definitions of waterways. Jerry Taylor, natural resources director of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, said: “The assertion that every little wet spot in the ground is some ecological crown jewel is simply nonsense.”
Even as EPA weighs its rules changes, expected any day, a separate federal science study issued Monday found that the small waterways are more important to the health of the nation’s water system than previously understood.
The issue turns on the definition of what the Clean Water Act protects. It regulates pollution in “navigable waters,” “other waters” and waterways that affect migrating birds. For more than a decade, federal regulators said that the Act applied not only to major bodies of water, but also to smaller tributaries that flow into them, and to small patches of “isolated wetlands” distant from large rivers as well.
Two years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that so-called “isolated wetlands” were not covered under the migratory birds provisions of the Clean Water Act. About 20 to 30 percent of the nation’s wetlands fall into this category, Perciasepe said.
One change the EPA is weighing would conclude that the so-called “intermittent waterways” — streams and creeks that dry up in summer — would no longer get federal protection. About 60 percent of the nation’s waterways would be affected, according to EPA data.
In a related development, the U.S. Geological Survey released its massive study Monday showing that the nation’s waters flow faster than in the 1970s and that these smaller waters connect more to larger waterways than formerly understood, said David Wolock, a USGS hydrologist who did the study. Allow pollution into the smaller streams, he said, and it will flow into larger rivers.