The last Clean Water Act in the US was passed in 1972, and environmentalists have, intermittently, over time, disputed the use of the term ‘navigable waters’ in its definition of which water areas in the US should be subject to federal regulation. Now, in a vote that won by 12 to 7, parts of the US senate has voted to change the phrase to ‘waters of the United States’.

This change, easily seen as academic, should in fact ensure that the quality of water in the US, including a reduction on water pollution, will be greatly improved. Many environmental thinkers, then, have praised the moves of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee which, as part of the wider political movements of Congress and the Obama Administration, is making several environmental reforms.

The vote will now go to the full Senate, in the hope that the Clean Water Act, now outmoded, can match the endeavours of the current paradigm of environmental thinking.

Jan Goldman-Carter, of the Wetlands and Water Resources Counsel, stated that the bill “is a careful balance of restoring and only restoring critical protections for the nations’ waters that were in place prior to the Supreme Court intervention in 2001″, whilst respecting “private property rights and long-standing Clean Water Act exemptions, particularly for agriculture and forestry.”

Some critics, though, have argued that the Clean Water Bill affecting “all waters of the United States” might take the regulation too far, with private waterways being subject to the same rules as those which have an obvious direct relationship with government. It would be too much, goes the argument, to expect private property to submit to the same regulations as those under more direct state control.

There is a further counter argument, though, that points at the division of state control and private property as precisely one of the core problems with environmental reform. If it is only in the public domain that changes can be affected, then pollution, of which a notable proportion is private, could continue.

That said, the government must lead by example, and the US Climate change Bill, one of Obama’s first major legislation, is set to change the relationship between the law and the environment in the US, in years to come.