Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf
Page Number: 63.0

2 

SACKETT v. EPA 

KAGAN, J., concurring in judgment 

‘adjacent.’ ”  Post, at 9.  The majority thus alters—more pre-
cisely, narrows the scope of—the statute Congress drafted.
And  make  no  mistake:  Congress  wrote  the  statute  it 
meant to.  The Clean Water Act  was a landmark piece  of 
environmental legislation, designed to address a problem of
“crisis proportions.”  R. Adler, J. Landman, & D. Cameron, 
The  Clean Water  Act:  20  Years  Later  5  (1993).    How  bad 
was water pollution in 1972, when the Act passed?  Just a 
few  years  earlier,  Ohio’s  Cuyahoga  River  had  “burst  into
flames,  fueled  by  oil  and  other  industrial  wastes.”    Ibid. 
And  that  was  merely  one  of  many  alarms.  Rivers,  lakes, 
and  creeks  across  the  country  were  unfit  for  swimming.
Drinking water was full of hazardous chemicals.  Fish were 
dying in record numbers (over 40 million in 1969); and those 
caught  were  often  too  contaminated  to  eat  (with  mercury 
and DDT far above safe levels).  See id., at 5–6.  So Congress 
embarked on what this Court once understood as a “total 
restructuring and complete rewriting” of existing water pol-
lution law.  Milwaukee v. Illinois, 451 U. S. 304, 317 (1981) 
(internal  quotation  marks  omitted).    The  new  Act  estab-
“all-
“a  self-consciously  comprehensive”  and 
lished 
encompassing program of water pollution regulation.”  Id., 
at 318–319.  Or said a bit differently, the Act created a pro-
gram broad enough to achieve the codified objective of “res-
tor[ing] and maintain[ing] the chemical, physical, and bio-
logical integrity of the Nation’s waters.”  §1251(a).  If you’ve
lately  swum  in  a  lake,  happily  drunk  a  glass  of  water 
straight from the tap, or sat down to a good fish dinner, you
can appreciate what the law has accomplished. 

Vital to the Clean Water Act’s project is the protection of
wetlands—both  those  contiguous  to  covered  waters  and 
others nearby.  As this Court (again, formerly) recognized, 
wetlands “serve to filter and purify water draining into ad-
jacent bodies of water, and to slow the flow of surface runoff 
into lakes, rivers, and streams.”  United States v. Riverside 
Bayview  Homes,  Inc.,  474  U. S.  121,  134  (1985)  (citation