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.

Peter Groffman

And yet, that is essentially where the Trump administration is taking us with newly implemented rules that dismantle decades of environmental protections. The rules, which went into effect Thursday, will allow all sorts of pollutants to be dumped into our wetlands, seasonal streams, waterways that temporarily flow underground and transient streams that result from rain and snowfall.

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.

And we were further shocked to learn that DDT accumulated in the bodies of bald eagles and thinned the shells of their eggs, leading to massive declines in eagles and other large (and charismatic) birds.

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