Clean Water Act at 40: Is it failing to meet new pollution challenges?

...The Cuyahoga was then so polluted that the surface occasionally caught fire. Erie was considered a “dead” lake; in summer floating mats of stinking blue-green algae consumed so much oxygen in the water that large areas of the lake were rendered lifeless. But in 1972 Congress passed the Clean Water Act, one of the most far-reaching and ambitious environmental laws ever enacted in the United States. The act cut industrial pollution, set new goals for the health of the nation’s waters, and provided billions of dollars to help cities build and upgrade sewage treatment plants. Now, 40 years later, Lake Erie is once more in trouble. In recent summers large blooms of toxic algae have returned. In 2011, the worst year so far, there were days when the algae was so thick that Unger couldn’t take his customers fishing. He once drove his 27-foot Sportcraft boat 14 miles straight north from Cleveland before he gave up and turned back. “I never got out of the algae,” he says. The recovery and decline of the Lake Erie ecosystem offer a vivid illustration of both the successes and failures of the Clean Water Act in cleaning up and protecting the nation’s waters. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that in 1972 two-thirds of the waters in America were unfit for fishing or swimming. Today, it says, that amount has been cut in half, to one-third. At the same time, shortcomings in the Clean Water Act and its implementation have left the nation with problems that are being addressed too slowly or hardly at all, experts and environmental advocates say. Here's a synopsis of some of these problems...more

So what are these "problems" and "shortcomings" with the act?  Agriculture of course.

 The act left largely untouched the leading cause of pollution today, known as “nonpoint” pollution. The largest source of this is runoff from agriculture. Each year, for example, fertilizer from Midwestern cornfields washes down the Mississippi River and creates a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Farm runoff is an ongoing problem in many smaller bodies of water, including Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and many other lakes and rivers around the country. Under the Clean Water Act, states have been identifying thousands of bodies of water polluted by excess nutrients from agriculture. But the act gives the federal government little power to regulate agricultural pollution. “We keep talking about plans, but there’s very little execution,” says Mr. Hines. Environmental regulation in the United States dates to the 19th century. But the Clean Water Act was different in that it greatly expanded federal powers to curb pollution, a job previously left to the states. By allowing private citizens to bring lawsuits over pollution, the Clean Water Act also opened up new opportunities for citizen action.

If Obama is returned to office, we can expect a big push in this direction, through regulation instead of legislation.