Peter M. Groffman, Ph.D.

, is a professor with the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the

Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center of The City University of New
York and Brooklyn College Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He is also a
senior research fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. He has authored more
than 300 publications on water quality, greenhouse gases and climate change. The
opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more ​opinion​ articles on CNN.

(CNN)​No one should want the United States to return to the days of free-flowing industrial

pollution, of dead waterways and poisoned birds, when science and society didn't fully

understand how large-scale environmental destruction happens and how to stop it.
These waterways ultimately feed into the larger bodies that provide much of our drinking
water. Removing their protection creates a real and urgent danger to our health and
environment.

One of the most important things that we have learned in environmental science over
the past 50 years is that things are connected. In the 1960s, we were shocked to learn
that if we applied DDT to kill mosquitoes on farms and in neighborhoods, it would move
from soil and water into little insects and then into little fish and then into bigger fish and
then into bald eagles.
The science of recent decades also taught us that small, sometimes dry streams and
wetlands are connected to small permanent streams, which are connected to and ​affect
the quality​ of larger streams, rivers, estuaries and the oceans.

The intermittent water bodies targeted by the new rules function like alveoli -- the tiny air
sacs that make our lungs work. Draining, filling and fertilizing them is analogous to how
smoking clogs the alveoli in our lungs leading to emphysema and other respiratory
problems.

In fact, the past has already shown that when we destroy or mismanage small
intermittent streams and wetlands, the larger streams, rivers and estuaries that they are
connected to decline, leading to dead zones in places like the ​Gulf of Mexico​ and the
Chesapeake Bay​.

But there have been many hard-won, crucial ​victories​, and our air and water are cleaner
because of them. Species are recovering. And environmental waste is handled more
safely than it was 50 years ago.
The Trump administration's decision to revisit a dark past of environmental ignorance
and mismanagement is more than troubling; it's dangerous.

His ongoing efforts to disable existing Waters of the United States (WOTUS) protections
are an example of how we can undo progress and cause damage to the environment
and ourselves if we ignore science.

And just as surely as a reformed smoker's lungs would be damaged and at risk for
cancer if they took up smoking again, our ecosystems and the people who depend on
them are being put at grave risk through the rollback of the WOTUS rules.