Chesapeake Bay Pollution

Groundwater is affected by as many different laws as there are sources of contamination. The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, gave the federal government primary responsibility for setting, implementing, and enforcing water pollution controls. There is, however, no single federal statute designed to protect groundwater. Instead, several different laws combine to provide a patchwork of protection: "The result is a confusing and incomplete federal system for safeguarding groundwater quality that in some circumstances creates powerful tools for citizens and in others leaves a vacuum to be filled in by state and local laws."1 Among the state and local programs which address groundwater pollution caused by commercial and industrial facilities are: the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-know Act (EPCRA); the State Environmental Policy Acts (SEPA); and grants from the Environmen

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ntamination, no single regulatory program controls the wide array of activities at industrial and commercial sources (although the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 requires federal agencies to study environmental impacts of their proposed activities and publish their findings) that may cause such contamination. The modern history of the failure to stem the bay's environmental decline has been not so much a case of ignoring the adverse impacts of population as it has been the underestimating the rate at which changes were occurring. The population in the five state watershed, which took 350 years of European settlement to reach eight million people, required only 35 years more to increase to 12 million, and is expected to double in the next 50 years. Moreover, the use of the watershed for agriculture is now recognized as the source of the rain-washed silt and chemical that pollute the bay, and even more than sewage. Farming's impact, however, seems to have decreased, as acreage in farms dropped a whopping 40 percent in Maryland in the last 50 years, and despite the soil remaining in tillage being pushed harder to extract greater yields. Consequently, use of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers, both major pollutants in t
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Approximate Word count = 2639
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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