I'm not so hot on local solutions. With 3000 counties in the US that leads to an awful lot of reinvented wheels and administrative waste, and local corruption is arguably harder to deal with because it's hard to get a big enough constituency together to force the issue in many jurisdictions.
River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth.
For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.
River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth.
For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.