Important Joint Congressional Hearing on February 4th about Clean Water Protection Rule and Attend River Rally 2015 from May 1st to 4th at Tamaya Resort
CCNS NEWS UPDATE
Runs 1/30/15 through 2/6/15
(THEME UP AND UNDER) This is the CCNS News Update, an overview of the latest nuclear safety issues, brought to you every week by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. Here is this week’s top headline:
- Important Joint Congressional Hearing on February 4th about Clean Water Protection Rule and
- Attend River Rally 2015 from May 1st to 4th at Tamaya Resort
About 60 percent of streams and millions of acres of wetlands are not protected from pollution and destruction under the federal Clean Water Act. One in three Americans, or about 117 million people, obtains their drinking water from vulnerable streams. Hundreds of studies show that small streams and wetlands play an essential role in the health of larger downstream waterways, such as rivers and lakes, and need to be protected.
The definitions of what waters are protected has been challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with a focus on small streams and wetlands. In the court’s decisions, the protections were removed. In response, and after years of work, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now propose to clarify the waters that need protection through a draft Clean Water Protection Rule. It needs your support.
Clean Water Act activists are concerned about the joint congressional hearing of the Senate and House Environmental Committees on Wednesday, February 4th about the proposed rule. It is rare for congress to hold a joint hearing and it is viewed as an opportunity to attack the proposed rule. Please contact your congressional members and ask them to attend. To learn more, visit http://www.rivernetwork.org/
In support of the rule, the EPA conducted a thorough review of more than 1,200 peer-reviewed, published scientific studies to learn how small streams and wetlands connect to larger, downstream water bodies. The state-of-the-science report is called, “Connectivity of Streams and Wetlands to Downstream Waters: A Review and Synthesis of the Scientific Evidence.”
The researchers found, among other things, that “the scientific literature clearly demonstrates that streams, regardless of their size or frequency of flow, are connected to downstream waters in ways that strongly influence their function” and “there is ample evidence illustrating that many wetlands and open waters located outside of riparian areas and floodplains provide functions that could benefit rivers, lakes, and other downstream waters, even where they lack surface water connections. Some potential benefits of these wetlands, in fact, are due to their isolation, rather than their connectivity” and “the incremental contributions of individual streams and wetlands are cumulative across entire watersheds.”
To learn more about how to protect precious water, please attend the 2015 River Rally, which will be held from Friday, May 1st through Monday, May 4th at the beautiful Tamaya Resort at Santa Ana Pueblo, south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Registration is open now at http://www.rivernetwork.org/events/river-rally-2015
Joni Arends, of CCNS, said, “The River Rally is one of the best conferences I have attended. It is genuinely fascinating, informative, and fun.”
This has been the CCNS News Update. To learn more, please visit our website at http://www.nuclearactive.org
Update: The Clean Water Protection Act was finalized. To learn more, visit http://www.rivernetwork.org/clean-water-rule-finalized
Tags: Clean Water Act Protection Rule, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, open water, River Network, River Rally, streams, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, wetlands
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