Kagan, J., concurring in judgement
‘adjacent.’ ” Post, at 9. The majority thus alters—more precisely, narrows the scope of—the statute Congress drafted.
And make no mistake: Congress wrote the statute it meant to. The Clean Water Act was a landmark piece of environmental legislation, designed to address a problem of “crisis proportions.” R. Adler, J. Landman, & D. Cameron, The Clean Water Act: 20 Years Later 5 (1993). How bad was water pollution in 1972, when the Act passed? Just a few years earlier, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River had “burst into flames, fueled by oil and other industrial wastes.” Ibid. And that was merely one of many alarms. Rivers, lakes, and creeks across the country were unfit for swimming. Drinking water was full of hazardous chemicals. Fish were dying in record numbers (over 40 million in 1969); and those caught were often too contaminated to eat (with mercury and DDT far above safe levels). See id., at 5–6. So Congress embarked on what this Court once understood as a “total restructuring and complete rewriting” of existing water pollution law. Milwaukee v. Illinois, 451 U. S. 304, 317 (1981) (internal quotation marks omitted). The new Act established “a self-consciously comprehensive” and “all-encompassing program of water pollution regulation.” Id., at 318–319. Or said a bit differently, the Act created a program broad enough to achieve the codified objective of “restor[ing] and maintain[ing] the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” §1251(a). If you’ve lately swum in a lake, happily drunk a glass of water straight from the tap, or sat down to a good fish dinner, you can appreciate what the law has accomplished.
Vital to the Clean Water Act’s project is the protection of wetlands—both those contiguous to covered waters and others nearby. As this Court (again, formerly) recognized, wetlands “serve to filter and purify water draining into adjacent bodies of water, and to slow the flow of surface runoff into lakes, rivers, and streams.” United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, Inc., 474 U. S. 121, 134 (1985) (citation
