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Sanders Moore and Mark Magaña: Senators must work to preserve Clean Water Rule
Clean water is essential to New Mexicans' health, our happiness, and our economic vitality.
From the San Juan to the Rio Grande, rivers provide us with drinking water. When that water is polluted, even at relatively low levels, we increase our risk of liver disease, kidney disease, and even cancer. All of us are affected by unhealthy water quality, but Latinos have been disproportionately so. For example, more than one-third of U.S. Latinos live in states supplied with water by the Colorado River basin — a major river system affected by toxic pollution.
Providing drinking water and ensuring our health isn't the only value of clean water. From the Pecos to Gila, New Mexicans also enjoy fishing, swimming, and just relaxing along the shore. In fact, 94 percent of Latinos say outdoor activities like fishing and going on picnics are important to them and their families, according to a poll by the Sierra Club and the National Council of La Raza.
Because clean water is so essential to our families' health, recreational opportunities, and our way of life, GreenLatinos, Environment New Mexico, and a host of allies celebrated the Obama administration's new Clean Water Rule, which was announced in May and will restore federal protection to more than 88 percent of New Mexico's streams — which supply drinking water to hundreds of thousands of the state's residents.
For the past decade, these New Mexico streams — along with streams that feed drinking water sources for one in three Americans — lacked clear protections under the nation's Clean Water Act because of Supreme Court decisions issued in 2001 and 2006.
These polluter-driven court rulings meant that, all too often, developers could build over our wetlands; oil companies could dump into our streams; and the federal government couldn't stop them. In fact, according to an analysis by the New York Times, over a four-year period following the court decisions, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had to drop 1,500 cases against polluters who were dumping into or otherwise harming these waters.
In addition to our two groups, a broad coalition of clean water advocates, farmers, mayors, health professionals and small businesses, such as brewers and outdoor outfitters, heralded the rule.
Americans across the country submitted more than 800,000 comments in support. And a recent poll showed that 80 percent of Americans favored it. Latino support for the Clean Water Rule is especially high. The 2012 Sierra Club and National Council of La Raza poll found that 92 percent of Latino voters agree that we have "a moral responsibility to take care of God's creations on this earth — the wilderness and forests, the oceans, lakes and rivers," while 72 percent of said "environmental regulations protect our health and our families by lowering toxic levels of mercury, arsenic, carbon dioxide and other life-threatening pollution in our air and water."
The only opponents to May's final rule: the same polluting interests that poked holes in the Clean Water Act in the first place. Agribusinesses, oil and gas companies, developers and other polluters have waged a bitter campaign to block restored protections to our streams and wetlands, and their allies in Congress are working hard to help them. The U.S. House has voted to block the Clean Water Rule multiple times, and Senate leaders have made clear their intent to attempt blocking restored protections for our streams and wetlands as well. Last month, a key Senate committee narrowly approved a bill to block the Clean Water Rule, despite a valiant amendment to protect it, introduced by Sen. Tom Udall.
For restored clean water protections to make it across the finish line, we'll need both of our senators, who've stood up against the polluters every single time, to continue to be such forceful champions for clean water. The quantity and the quality of the water that sustains us is simply too precious to squander.
Mark Magaña is the founding president and CEO of GreenLatinos, a national coalition of Latino environmental, natural resources, and conservation leaders. Sanders Moore is the state director of Environment New Mexico, which together with its national federation, Environment America, has been working to restore Clean Water Act protections for a decade.