A federal grant program designed to protect and restore U.S. watersheds has doled out $50.7 million over the past five years to projects that range from cleanup of acidic streams polluted by abandoned mine waste to wetlands treatment of a watershed to preserve a fisheries habitat.
In the last 20 years, water quality managers have come to more fully appreciate that the old categories of both management and regulation are breaking down and collapsing in upon themselves. Quantity versus quality, surface versus groundwater, point versus nonpoint sources, chemical versus physical and biological integrity—these are the traditional cookie jars in which we separated management of what is really an integrated resource characterized by the connectivity of all its component parts.