Clean Water Action is an environmental activist website.
“For 36 years Clean Water Action has succeeded in winning some of the nation’s most important environmental protections through grassroots organizing, expert policy research and political advocacy focused on holding elected officials accountable to the public.”
50 years ago, our founder (the late) David Zwick helped write and pass the Clean Water Act which recognizes that access to clean, safe water is a critical human right. That same year, Clean Water Action was founded. Join us in celebrating 50 years of #PeopleActionJustice!
The Clean Water Act ended the culture of dumping raw sewage and untreated industrial waste into our waters and led to a dramatic improvement in the health and safety of waterways across the country. 2022 marks a monument year in which we can celebrate the power and promise of this revolutionary law to protect communities around the country and in our region and demand equal justice and access to clean water. We have a lot of work to do to ensure our goal of swimmable, fishable, and drinkable water for all.
In 1971 he was co-author, with Marcy Benstock, of “Water Wasteland,” a lengthy report by Mr. Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law that found that the nation’s water pollution control efforts had failed miserably. Mr. Zwick then became involved in drafting the Clean Water Act of 1972, landmark environmental legislation that was subject to all sorts of pressures — from industries whose polluting practices it sought to curb, from local officials worried about federal intrusion, and more.
“Dave had to figure all this out,” Mr. Nader said. “It was a big, multi-hundred-page bill.” Mr. Nader said Mr. Zwick had been vital to keeping the bill free of loopholes that would have allowed industry to continue polluting.
“They couldn’t mess that much with the water act,” he said. “It was very tightly drafted.”
The results, years later, were cleaner waterways and water supplies.
“By any measure, this landmark legislation has been hugely successful,” Carol M. Browner, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time, said at a 1987 commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the act. “Once-dead rivers, lakes and estuaries are now pulsating with life. People are returning to them — to swim, to fish, to ply the waters in their boats and to relax on their shores.”
Mr. Zwick was also instrumental in securing passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. But he was not content merely to push his causes in Congress. Even as he was helping to shape the 1972 legislation, he and several others founded what became Clean Water Action. (It was originally called the Fishermen’s Clean Water Action Project because of the involvement of fishing groups.)
Mr. Zwick in the early 1970s. He was a second-year law student at Harvard in 1969 when Ralph Nader recruited him to join his citizen-advocacy “raiders.”Credit…Clean Water Action
The organization developed a grass-roots lobbying style to counter big-business interests, an approach that includes sending canvassers door to door.
Clean Water Action is an environmental activist website. 
