Provides a clearly presented overview of the law's provisions and pertient regulation and enforcement issues.

Evaluating Water Quality to Prevent Future Disasters, volume 11 in the Separation Science and Technology series, covers various separation methods that can be used to avoid water catastrophes arising from climate change, arsenic, lead, algal bloom, fracking, microplastics, flooding, glyphosphates, triazines, GenX, and oil contamination. This book provides a valuable resource that will help the reader solve their potential water contamination problems and help them develop their own new approaches to monitor water contamination. - Highlights reasons for potential water catastrophes - Provides separation methods for monitoring water contamination - Encourages development of new methods for monitoring water contamination

The Mississippi River is, in many ways, the nation's best known and most important river system. Mississippi River water quality is of paramount importance for sustaining the many uses of the river including drinking water, recreational and commercial activities, and support for the river's ecosystems and the environmental goods and services they provide. The Clean Water Act, passed by Congress in 1972, is the cornerstone of surface water quality protection in the United States, employing regulatory and nonregulatory measures designed to reduce direct pollutant discharges into waterways. The Clean Water Act has reduced much pollution in the Mississippi River from "point sources" such as industries and water treatment plants, but problems stemming from urban runoff, agriculture, and other "non-point sources" have proven more difficult to address. This book concludes that too little coordination among the 10 states along the river has left the Mississippi River an "orphan" from a water quality monitoring and assessment perspective. Stronger leadership from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is needed to address these problems. Specifically, the EPA should establish a water quality data-sharing system for the length of the river, and work with the states to establish and achieve water quality standards. The Mississippi River corridor states also should be more proactive and cooperative in their water quality programs. For this effort, the EPA and the Mississippi River states should draw upon the lengthy experience of federal-interstate cooperation in managing water quality in the Chesapeake Bay.

Long taken for granted, water resources are rapidly becoming a contentious issue within American politics. Continuing population growth and rapid development, coupled with environmental events such as droughts, have led to increasing water shortages in sections of the nation. In Interstate Water Compacts author Joseph F. Zimmerman highlights the growing importance of water issues within the United States and a device that has been instrumental in facilitating interstate cooperation to solve water-related problems: the interstate compact. This groundbreaking work is the first to devote itself exclusively to interstate and federal-interstate compacts pertaining to controversies including the abatement of water pollution, apportionment of river waters, economic development, flood control, inland fisheries, marine fisheries, and restoration to rivers of anadromous fish, such as salmon and shad. The process for entering into interstate and federal-interstate compacts is explained in detail, as is the exercise of original jurisdiction by the US Supreme Court to resolve intractable interstate controversies involving interpretation of provisions of compacts, water apportionment, and water pollution abatement. Zimmerman concludes by calling for the President, Congress, governors, state legislatures, and local governments to devote more attention and resources to finding solutions for water-related problems.

The past twenty-five years have seen a significant evolution in environmental policy, with new environmental legislation and substantive amendments to earlier laws, significant advances in environmental science, and changes in the treatment of science (and scientific uncertainty) by the courts. This book offers a detailed discussion of the important issues in environmental law, policy, and economics, tracing their development over the past few decades through an examination of environmental law cases and commentaries by leading scholars. The authors focus on pollution, addressing both pollution control and prevention, but also emphasize the evaluation, design, and use of the law to stimulate technical change and industrial transformation, arguing that there is a need to address broader issues of sustainable development. Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics,which grew out of courses taught by the authors at MIT, treats the traditional topics covered in most classes in environmental law and policy, including common law and administrative law concepts and the primary federal legislation. But it goes beyond these to address topics not often found in a single volume: the information-based obligations of industry, enforcement of environmental law, market-based and voluntary alternatives to traditional regulation, risk assessment, environmental economics, and technological innovation and diffusion. Countering arguments found in other texts that government should play a reduced role in environmental protection, this book argues that clear, stringent legal requirements--coupled with flexible means for meeting them--and meaningful stakeholder participation are necessary for bringing about environmental improvements and technologicial transformations.