Among environmental milestones, you likely remember Earth Day, first observed on April 22 when I was a senior in high school. It was the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from my state of Wisconsin.
But a much more consequential day is less well known. That’s Oct. 18, 1972, when President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law. Its goal was to make America’s waters fishable and swimmable, and 50 years ago only one third of the nations’ waterways met that definition. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created two years earlier, took responsibility for the act’s enforcement.
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