An op-ed piece published in the New York Times on April 6, 2014, is pretty sobering. Its title is “China’s Poisonous Waterways”, and in it the author describes the massive amount of industrial and agricultural pollution that has contaminated the river that runs through his childhood village since he left. There seems to be an undue amount of sickness and early death in the village, which he attributes to the poisonous river. His old village is one of more than 200 “cancer villages” in China with extraordinary cancer rates.
This is how many rivers in the United States were a hundred years ago, and some even less than 50 years ago. We like to complain about onerous regulations and how costly they can be, but the Clean Water Act has clearly been a great success, in my opinion. How many of us would like to return to the unregulated pollution of a few generations back? How can clean rivers not be good for our social and physical health, and our economy as well? Thank God for such regulations!
