Now, 50 years later, we can be proud of these results, but we cannot rest on our laurels. Access to clean and safe water is a fundamental right, yet today, the Clean Water Act faces renewed legal challenges, and communities across our country face new water crises. Too often, it’s easy to ignore crumbling infrastructure until it reaches a point of shocking collapse — we need to look no further than Flint or Jackson in recent years. But that doesn’t even capture the breadth and depth of the challenge, from big cities to rural communities. In many cases, communities left behind by the environmental laws of the 1970s remain behind today. I recently visited Lowndes County, Alabama, where residents left with no septic or sewer system use “straight pipes” to dump raw sewage into backyards. These crises are unacceptable in the largest and most advanced economy on the planet.