WATER POLLUTION

WATER POLLUTION PROBLEM

Without healthy water for drinking, cooking, fishing, and farming, the human race would perish. Clean water is also necessary for recreational interests such as swimming, boating, and water skiing. Yet, when Congress began assessing national water quality during the early 1970s, it found that much of the country's groundwater and surface water was contaminated or severely compromised. Studies revealed that the nation's three primary sources of water pollution—industry, agriculture, and municipalities—had been regularly discharging harmful materials into water supplies throughout the country over a number of years.

These harmful materials included organic wastes, sediments, minerals, nutrients, thermal pollutants, toxic chemicals, and other hazardous substances. Organic wastes are produced by animals and humans, and include such things as fecal matter, crop debris, yard clippings, food wastes, rubber, plastic, wood, and disposable diapers. Such wastes require oxygen to decompose. When they are dumped into streams and lakes and begin to break down, they can deprive aquatic life of the oxygen it needs to survive.

Air Pollution

AIR POLLUTION PROBLEM

A growing body of research is shedding light on the ways that air pollutants impinge on the health of the American public. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted this concern in December when, after reviewing the evidence, it ruled that greenhouse gases are detrimental to human health, particularly because they can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses and can produce longer, more intense heat waves that endanger the poor, sick, and elderly. But it's not just lungs that suffer.

To be sure, clean-air advocates have worked to improve the nation's air quality, and the health risks that a particular individual might face directly from breathing polluted air are low. But research consistently is finding that, when spread out over a given population—be it residents of a certain city or those with a particular disease—the quality of the air has a very significant impact on public health. When vehicles, factories, power plants, and other machines burn fuel, the chemicals they release into the atmosphere react with one another (and other compounds in the air) in ways that can amplify health hazards. "Greenhouse gases actually increase air pollution and therefore [raise the] potential for more adverse events for people with pre-existing respiratory conditions or heart conditions," says Kent Pinkerton, chair of the environmental health policy committee at the American Thoracic Society.