The passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments¹ in 1972 marked a turning point in the approach taken toward the problem of water pollution control in this country. Whereas past legislation had endorsed the practice of allowing certain waters to remain severely degraded to permit industrial and other uses, the 1972 Amendments rejected this concept and adopted the view that "no one has the right to pollute—that pollution continues because of technological limits, not because of any inherent right to use the nation's waterways for the purpose of disposing wastes."² The new law rejected traditional reliance on the "assimilative capacity" of our waterways and made it clear, as Senator Muskie stated on the floor of the Senate, that our "streams and rivers are no longer to be considered part of the waste treatment process."³

In implementing these new principles, the 1972 Amendments recognized and came to grips with economic and technological constraints in such a way as to produce a regulatory program that is strong, but workable. Also, they recognized that if water quality is to be protected, there must be not only effective regulation of existing sources of water pollution, but also land use planning and controls to regulate the location of new sources. Before discussing in more detail the sections of the amendments which deal most directly with land use, a brief overview of this new act's most important provisions will be presented to outline the overall attack on water pollution, of which land use planning and control are an essential component part.