doing its job.

girl drinking waterMore good news for the second day of Earth Week 2010. There is evidence that the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) is, at long last, doing its job (rather than trying to undo its job).

Three recent events give us hope that the US EPA is taking clean water seriously. 

1. According to our partners in Tennessee, EPA recently brought enforcement actions against two Clean Water Act violators demanding penalties of $68,000 and $335,000 respectively! Read more here.

2. The US EPA issued rules that will seriously curtail the devastating mountain-top removal form of coal mining. According to the NY Times, “The goal of the new rules, Ms. Jackson said, is to prevent ‘significant and irreversible damage’ to Appalachian watersheds.”

3. The US EPA has admited that drinking water regulations are outdated. According to the NY Times, “‘There are a range of chemicals that have become more prevalent in our products, our water and our bodies in the last 50 years,’ the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said in a speech on Monday. Regulations have not kept pace with scientific discoveries, and so the agency is issuing ‘a new vision for providing clean, safe drinking water.’”

The key to achieving strong laws that work for our collective well-being is for individual citizens to prove that we care as much about clean water as the polluters do about their ability to maintain business as usual.

Sign up for RiverWeb emails (once or twice a month) and look for Action Alerts from Prairie Rivers Network that help bring citizen voices to the ears of the EPA.