Reducing hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico: Reimagining a more resilient agricultural landscape in the Mississippi River Watershed

Abstract

In 1972 President Nixon signed the Clean Water Act (CWA) into law, making clean water a public right and establishing a goal that the nation's waters should be both “fishable and swimmable.” It is considered by many to be the most important and effective environmental law ever passed. Before the CWA, two-thirds of US waterways were considered unsafe for fishing and swimming, and waste from households, municipalities, factories and power plants, including sewage, livestock processing, waste oil, and chemicals, flowed untreated into rivers, streams, and lakes. The law reduced the discharge of sewage and other industrial point source pollution into waterways, but most agricultural nonpoint source pollution, the greatest source of water pollution today, was exempted. The agriculture exemption, called “one of the last, great intractable problems of environmental law,” results in an inconsistent system for addressing water pollution, with regulation for the majority of urban sources and a voluntary, incentive-based system for much of agriculture (Laitos and Ruckriegle 2013).