By Jeff Glasser

The image of Cleveland's oil-slicked Cuyahoga River burning is seared into the minds of many Americans of a certain generation. The message is reinforced by popular movies like Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, where the villains are industrial polluters who foul the nation's water supply. But the Environmental Protection Agency has fingered two other sources as the primary contaminators: farms and sprawl. In a biennial water quality report to Congress released June 30, the agency said that runoff from farms and urban development were the top factors contributing to the pollution of 40 percent of the nation's lakes, rivers, and watersheds.

At the same time, the EPA was completing new rules that would have effectively forced states to set pollution limits in the country's 20,000 dirty waterways–and finally put in place the most sweeping section of the Clean Water Act 28 years after its passage. But farmers and timber interests, worried the regs could cost them megabucks, banded together to persuade Congress to quash the move. They succeeded, getting sympathetic lawmakers to quietly tack a provision onto a popular emergency spending bill for Kosovo peacekeeping that bars the Clinton administration from spending any money to implement the EPA rules.

Showdown. The president has until July 13 to sign or veto the measure. He has indicated he'll sign it, but also has signaled environmentalists that he's considering ordering the EPA to finalize the rules before he does. That maneuver would give Clinton–and Vice President Gore–a rhetorical victory that could be touted to voters whose No. 1 environmental concerns, polls say, are cleaner water and air. But congressional and White House aides say pulling such a political fast one could backfire. It would be mostly for show, which means the feds would still lack the teeth–and the money–to enforce the new rules. The strategy also could so inflame congressional Republicans, who prefer to leave the issue up to the states, that they might retaliate by abolishing water cleanup slots at the EPA and the Department of Agriculture, weakening federal enforcement efforts. Either way, "It's not going to change," admits Clean Water Network national coordinator Kathy Nemsick. "Who knows how long [Congress] will delay it?"

In the years following passage of the Clean Water Act, the EPA largely succeeded in stemming the "point source" discharges of big industrial and municipal offenders, whose pipes spewed chemicals directly into oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams. It has become clear, however, that "point source" pollution is only part of the problem. As farmers sprayed more herbicides and pesticides and spread more fertilizer on their crops in the late 1970s and early 1980s, increasing levels of "nonpoint source" contaminants spilled into the groundwater. The pesticides–and corn and soybean crops naturally–spawn nutrients such as nitrates, which move easily in water and deprive fish of much needed oxygen. The nitrates also corrupt rural drinking wells and can lead to blue baby syndrome, in which infants essentially suffocate.

The Midwest Corn Belt provides a perfect example of the perils of agricultural runoff. The nitrates from the farms leak into the Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri rivers, which empty into the Mississippi River and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. When the weather gets hot, the accumulation of nitrates triggers a "dead zone" the size of New Jersey in the gulf.

The agriculture lobby says that unlike industrial polluters, who control the amount of chemicals they produce, farmers cannot easily contain the problem. They can't do anything, for instance, about rain, which they view as the top reason nitrates dribble into the water supply. John Hall, who runs a Wisconsin agricultural institute that promotes ecofriendly farming, says the answer is for farmers to branch out. If the Corn Belt grew other crops such as winter grain and alfalfa, which suck up water during the rainy spring season, less water would run off and fewer nutrients would creep into it.

Farmers say they're being unfairly blamed for the nation's water woes. Says Orford, N.H., tree farmer Tom Thomson: "They should focus on soil runoff from the development shopping malls and housing, the gasoline dripping out of cars, and the other ills of urban sprawl instead of beating up on the best land stewards in the country."