You forgot a "protection", your State. This is the business of your State, right or wrong. It's exactly how this country was set up. If we want an epa, ammend the Constitution. Oh wait, you can't, the votes aren't there. Because the votes are not there, we just circumvent the Constitution and do what we want. The founders would be so proud.
I think as the founding fathers wrote the constitution they couldn't fathom water pollution and equal rights for clean water in the 200 plus years in the future. Pristine water was all around them and plentiful and not a problem. Plentiful cheap food production will trump clean water most of the time. Power interest will win out most of the time. I was contacted a dozen years ago to take water samples in the streams around my area with a water kit I would be trained to use. They wanted to see how much pollution, what kind and where it was coming from. I said I would but I would also take sample from the tile running into the streams since I knew that was where most of the pollution was coming from. I was told I couldn't do that because it would make people mad, so I declined to be part of the fraud.
I'm afraid I can't quite agree that "pristine water was all around them". Pollution was everywhere there were people, even the indigenous. That is why we can discover so many camps along waterways...the pollution left behind. Granted, far fewer people were on the land, yet many rivers are less polluted now than they were in the 1500's. There were no landfills, no sewage treatment plants, no concern for what gets dumped in a stream after cutting timber, refining petroleum, firing bricks, etc. IMHO, the creation of the EPA, and setting the general standards as originally intended, definitely played a part in waters being cleaned, yet it was education, awareness and instilling a sense of responsibility for our surroundings by the general population that made the largest impact.
