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:
“‘Tis probable Religion after this
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How could the Dutch but be converted, when
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Besides the waters of themselves did rise,
And, as their land, so them did re-baptize.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)