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Page Number: 14

10 

COUNTY OF MAUI v. HAWAII WILDLIFE FUND 

Opinion of the Court 

necessarily draws its meaning from context.  The apparent
breadth of the Ninth Circuit’s “fairly traceable” approach is 
inconsistent with the context we have just described. 

IV 
A 
Maui and the Solicitor General argue that the statute’s
permitting requirement does not apply if a pollutant, hav-
ing emerged from a “point source,” must travel through any
amount of groundwater before reaching navigable waters.
That interpretation is too narrow, for it would risk serious 
interference  with  EPA’s  ability  to  regulate  ordinary  point 
source discharges.

Consider a pipe that spews pollution directly into coastal 
waters.  There is an “addition of ” a “pollutant to navigable 
waters from [a] point source.”  Hence, a permit is required.
But Maui and the Government read the permitting require-
ment  not  to  apply  if  there  is  any  amount  of  groundwater 
between the end of the pipe and the edge of the navigable 
water.  See Tr. of Oral Arg. 5–6, 24–25.  If that is the correct 
interpretation of the statute, then why could not the pipe’s 
owner,  seeking  to  avoid  the  permit  requirement,  simply 
move the pipe back, perhaps only a few yards, so that the 
pollution  must  travel  through  at  least  some  groundwater 
before reaching the sea?  Cf. Brief for State of Maryland et 
al.  as  Amici  Curiae  9,  n. 4.    We  do  not  see  how  Congress
could have intended to create such a large and obvious loop-
hole in one of the key regulatory innovations of the Clean 
Water Act.  Cf. California ex rel. State Water Resources Con-
trol Bd., 426 U. S., at 202–204 (basic purpose of Clean Wa-
ter Act is to regulate pollution at its source); The Emily, 9 
Wheat.  381,  390  (1824)  (rejecting  an  interpretation  that 
would facilitate “evasion of the law”). 

B 
Maui  argues  that  the  statute’s  language  requires  its