Waters Protected Under The CWA
All waters with a "significant nexus" to "navigable waters" are covered under the CWA; however, the phrase "significant nexus" remains open to judicial interpretation and considerable controversy. The 1972 statute frequently uses the term "navigable waters," but also defines the term as "waters of the United States, including the territorial seas." Some regulations interpreting the 1972 law have included water features such as intermittent streams, playa lakes, prairie potholes, sloughs and wetlands as "waters of the United States." In the 2006 case Rapanos v. United States, a plurality of the Supreme Court held that the term "waters of the United States":
- ...includes only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water "forming geographic features" that are described in ordinary parlance as "streams ... oceans, rivers, lakes."
Read more about this topic: Clean Water Act
Famous quotes containing the words waters and/or protected:
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)