Improving Water Quality Antidegradation Policies

摘要

The four reforms suggested in Part Ⅳ would promote the primary goals of the antidegradation policy, especially providing a margin of safety, protecting high-value natural resources, preventing the development of pollution havens, and balancing environmental goals and economic growth opportunities. These reforms would also do much to move the nation's water bodies beyond the "least common denominator" of fishable/swimmable waters and toward the CWA's overarching goal of maintaining, as well as restoring, the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of aquatic environments. Efforts to prevent degradation of high-quality water bodies are analogous to efforts to prevent impairment of clean airsheds and ecologically important natural resources found on the federal lands. The public land management statutes, in particular, provide a host of widely divergent models for use and protection of natural resources. Statutory provisions that prevent impairment of the national parks and wildlife refuges could serve as models for strengthening the CWA's antidegradation program.