ABSTRACT
With regard to water pollution, remediation means providing a remedy. When humans contaminate water, eventually when the contamination gets our attention, when the contamination irritates the hell out of us, when the contamination totally offends us, or when the contamination makes us ill or worse, we sometimes provide
a remedy. There are, of course, various types of remedies, and many of them are discussed in this chapter, but they are not yet our concern in this brief introduction. On the contrary, at this moment it is our intent to make the point that we simply do not seem to get it when we contaminate water and then repeat our actions-over and over again. When it comes to preventing pollution, our intentions and actions seem somewhat topsy-turvy. This trend is not new to human nature or to environmental problems. Maybe we can sum up environmental remediation and learning from our mistakes by turning to the wisdom provided to us by the Mad Hatter and Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865):
The public, environmentalists, and legislators came to the realization in the early 1970s that our water resources were in critical condition and needed the protection offered by regulation. Specically, our traditional freshwater supplies are at risk: our lakes, streams, and rivers. While environmentalists were aware of how serious our water resource problems were several years before legislation was enacted in the 1950s and 1960s, their voiced environmental concerns were ignored or overridden by the loud, nancially driven declarations of polluters, who simply played their standard trump card and declared “greenies” and other environmentalists to be weirdos, communists, ower children, pot heads, and ultra, ultra bleeding heart liberals. For many years, most people ignored the environmentalists, and their concerns were sidelined. Eventually, though, we woke up and put pressure on Congress to enact two important regulations designed to protect our water resources: the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) of 1974.
