Once again the assault on the environment and the common good is underway. The Rumpt administration keeps setting its sights on the Clean Water Act, among other environmental regulations, in an attempt to roll back significant water quality protections for the benefit of industrial farming, mining, the fossil fuel industry and developers. As proven in the Trump years, profits trump the common good, profits trump the will of the people.

The current administration represents the will of the minority in this Brave New World. Most citizens are in favor of less pollution, not more.
Did I also mention that the Rumpt administration told the EPA last summer to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities and that the EPA will also look into the legal question of its own authority to regulate methane as a pollutant?

And just last week the EPA announced that it would remove many standards that regulate the emissions of air, water and groundwater for mining, fossil fuels and power generation! Pollution means progress!  
The Environmental Protection Agency has been steered into new territory in the past three years, undoing decades of work in favor of the environment and the common good, replacing it with handouts to corporate and private interests who have little, if any, concern about the natural world we live in.
I believe the new name for the agency should be the Environmental Pollution Agency. 
First you have a president whose closest interaction with the natural environment comes when he plays golf on a manicured and wholly artificial landscape called Mar a Lago.
Then you had an EPA director named Scott Pruitt, a climate science denier and shill for the fossil fuel industry who spent his time as Oklahoma Attorney General starting lawsuits against the agency and the federal government to fight air and water pollution standards that were created for the health of the people and the planet.

The new acting EPA head is Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist and aide to Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, one of the most strident climate deniers you could find anywhere. So there you are in terms of upholding the mission of the agency to protect the environment and the health of the people. 

Now, folks may believe that we’ve turned the corner on pollution and in the words of a tweeting Trump “We’re at world class clean.” The only problem with that belief is that it’s 100 percent wrong. Over the years we have managed to slow the growth of pollution by many methods including clean air and water emission standards that forced reductions on the energy sector and auto industry, to name two. But we have not reversed pollution. We are emitting more pollution today simply because there are more of us—326 million of us at last count—which means more homes, more cars, more planes, more acres in agricultural production. We are much more aware of what we pump into the air water and land than ever before but the simple math of a larger population reveals that we are using more fossil fuels and creating more toxic chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and greenhouse gases than at any time in our history.

We are nowhere near “world class clean” and we are moving farther from it with the most recent actions of the EPA.
In the words of the late photographer Ansel Adams, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”