The lower part of Seattle’s Duwamish River was declared a
Superfund site in 2001. That means the polluters have to work
with the Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up. More
than ten years later, the EPA and the polluters are close to
proposing a clean up plan. But there’s still some debate about
how clean this river should be. A significant source of water
pollution, muddy runoff from logging roads, is stirring up
controversy in the Northwest. A lawsuit that began in Oregon
will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Its ruling will
determine exactly how the Clean Water Act applies to the
hundreds of thousands of miles of logging and forest roads. When
Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, its foremost goal
was to halt the widespread toxic industrial dumping that left
urban rivers in flames in the 1960s. Those problems have been
largely solved. Now, agricultural water pollution is getting
more scrutiny. The water that goes down the drains and toilets
of millions of homes ends up funneling in