The purpose of this research is to examine types of nonpoint water-pollution sources that are now regulated as well as legal tools that are currently applied to control such sources. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which nonpoint water pollution has emerged as an issue and then to discuss ways in which regulation of that form of pollution has evolved at various levels of government.
What must be understood first of all about nonpoint water pollution sources is that an unambiguous definition of the phenomena is difficult to pin down, and ambiguity is embedded in the term itself. To see why, begin with the concept of water pollution that comes from specific sources--say, an oil spill from a tanker. The tanker is the definite point from which the water is contaminated, and there is a relatively substantial history of regulatory and legal response to such pollution, notably with the Clean Water Act of 1972 (Silverstein, 1994).
Nonpoint sources of pollution, on the other hand, may generally be identified only in a relatively indeterminate way. Typically, pollution sources of this type are linked to farming practices, whereby chemically treated water may drain into rivers and other natural water sites; run-off from storms; disposal of sewage; methods of building construction; and oil-change and other waste from citizen vehicles, including boats. While some or all of these sources of pollution may affect water purity, identifying the reach of any single point or combination of points of origin is difficult (Helfand & House, 1995; Ribaudo, 1998; FitzHugh & Mackay, 2001). That is because pollutants appear not only in surface water and sediments but also in subsurface aquatic environments, where leaching and buildup of nitrogen may occur (Poiani & Bedford, 1995; Ribaudo, 1998). Nonpoint source water pollution has grown relative to water pollution that can be traced to a specific cause; moreover, an e...