For probably a century or more, we used our rivers and other streams to dump industrial waste and raw or partially treated sewage and other waste we just wanted to get rid of. Examples of real problems were that Lake Erie was almost a dead body of water forty or fifty years ago; the river that runs through Cleveland caught on fire; a good sized lake near Syracuse, N.Y was a dead lake, now being brought back; and fish from the Potomac River (four blocks from the White House) was not safe to eat. DDT got into our rivers and our fish and killed most of our Bald Eagles, a species that was in the endangered list for many years.

I was taught is science class in sixth or seventh grade (maybe earlier) that our rivers were self cleaning. You could dump almost anything in them an the action of the water against the stone on the bottom would clean that stuff out. That was in the late 1940s or early 50s and was our guiding principle at the time. I worked for my Dad, who's shop was on the bank of the Rock River in Illinois, from 1954 to 1960. Every day at the end of the shift at 3:00 p.m., a big slick of oil and other waste was dumped from the nut and bolt factory a half-mile up river, apparently waste from the machines. That sort of thing happened all over the country.

Our rivers, streams and lakes are much cleaner now as a result of the Clean Water Act and bi-partisan enforcement of it under a series of administrations since Johnson.

It looks like this will all change again. We now put Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA. He sees no problem from industrial pollution and has permitted coal mines to dump their wastes in West Virginia and other coal producing states. He seems to be on a mission to gut the EPA and its enforcement efforts.