TO STAND on a pontoon besides the Anacostia River, which runs for 8.5 miles through Maryland and the southern part of Washington, DC, is to gauge the progress America has made in cleaning up its waterways. The Anacostia, which empties into the Potomac close to the Capitol, was once a slow-flowing garbage dump; on a recent sunny afternoon, hardly a soda can or plastic bag ruffled its sluggish brown surface, over which cormorants fizzed like arrows, rigid with intent. They are a sign that the river’s ravaged fish stocks are beginning to recover. But you still wouldn’t want to eat them.
Forty-five years after the federal government became obliged, under the Clean Water Act (CWA), to try to make America’s main waterways “fishable and swimmable”, the Anacostia is, despite the recent progress, in a disgusting state. Each year, two billion gallons of sewage and stormwater flow into it, making the water so cloudy with faeces that light cannot penetrate it. The weeds and mussels that once carpeted the river-bed are long gone. It is coated with black ooze, over ten feet deep in places, saturated with polychlorinated biphenyls, heavy metals and other...Continue reading
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