WATER

The Garden Club of America recognizes that all life is dependent upon the availability of clean, uncontaminated water. We support the objective of the 1972 Clean Water Act: “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters” and the goal of the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act: “to protect public drinking water throughout our country”.

Trees, plants, and grasses play a critical role in improving water quality. They have an inherent capacity to clean and conserve water efficiently and to cool the atmosphere. On land and in coastal areas, our forests, wetlands, riparian buffers, living shorelines, seagrasses, salt marshes, and coastal vegetation all contribute to the health of the water cycle. In aquatic systems, plants produce critical oxygen, absorb nutrients, and filter or process bacteria, metals, and chemical pollutants.

As the Earth continues to warm, the nation is seeing crisis-level disruptions of the water cycle and systemic water-related damage from extraordinary heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and storms. Water scarcity, flooding, stormwater runoff, erosion, sediment load, toxic algae growth, and water contamination (including lead, forever chemicals and plastics) are some of the major water problems for which emergency funding is often inadequate. Many surface and groundwater systems in the United States are critically impaired from overuse and pollution. According to the EPA’s 2017 National Water Quality Inventory, Report to Congress, about half of lakes, reservoirs, ponds, bays, and estuaries and almost half of rivers and streams assessed in the United States are impaired by pollution and do not meet minimum water quality standards. Agriculture, timbering, extractive industries, impervious surfaces, poor road design, overdevelopment of the nation’s shorelines, and failing water infrastructure systems are significant causes of impairment.

The Garden Club of America supports federal, state, and local legislation, policy, and individual action that address the following:

WATER POLLUTION REDUCTION

• Ensure an effective Clean Water Act that protects streams, rivers, and wetlands.
• Promote the use of low-impact development practices including planting of trees and native plants to act as buffers that will improve water quality, prevent erosion, and facilitate stormwater management.
• Reduce and remove point-source pollution from industry and sewage treatment, including lead, forever chemicals and plastics.
• Reduce and remove nonpoint-source pollution from urban, suburban, highway, and agricultural runoff.
• Reduce and remove airborne pollutants that degrade water quality.
• Enforce strict water quality standards and pollution permits.
• Provide adequate funding for clean water programs, including infrastructure modernization.

ECOSYSTEM PROTECTION

• Restore and preserve the nation's surface water and related habitat, in part through increasing native vegetative cover to remove excessive nutrients, sediments, pesticides, pathogens, and other contaminants.
• Protect watersheds to filter harmful pollutants and allow for recharge, preserve and plant more trees and native flora to absorb precipitation, and discourage excessive water use.
• Preserve and protect existing wetlands and provide incentives to create additional wetlands to improve water quality.
• Provide incentives to create and preserve effective riparian buffers.
• Develop national policies to protect coastal waters and oceans.
• Ensure sufficient instream flows and natural flow patterns to sustain the integrity of river systems.

HUMAN HEALTH

• Support infrastructure improvements that ensure access to safe drinking water.
• Support action that removes lead, forever chemicals, and plastics from the nation’s drinking water supply.
• Monitor and protect America’s drinking water and educate the public regarding its quality.