Yet the waterways in the USA have never been cleaner in the last hundred years. There are regulations and they are enforced, imperfectly like everything.
I live in Canada where we take the environment more seriously still.
Hardly anything is cleaner post industrial revolution. Not only are there more people but we use more resources per person and produce more waste products. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
There are exceptions though, sewers and sewage treatment have been a great invention. And big cities aren't drowning in horse shit which was a major issue in London and New York at the turn of the twentieth century.
Because wretched nigh on universal poverty, above 50% infant mortality, famine every 20 years killing perhaps a quarter of the pain, endless toil, all these things are bad. Given the choice between living like the average peasant in 1800 and maintaining something like our current first world standard of living and health while so destroying the environment that the first planet we need to terraform is Earth people will choose the latter. Most of the world’s population was peasants in 1900. No one had antibiotics. Air conditioning was practically unknown.
The state of nature is hellish and people will absolutely pave everything while breathing air that tastes like an ashtray to avoid it.
And the water quality is not far behind, as it seems like every month has some new repeal of protections in order to benefit a few cronies of the current regime at the expense of national interests. For example:
I have no doubt that the Clean Water Act has been super effective at cleaning up water. I do think that environmental protections have been significantly damaged, and that if we do not yet see those effects on water, like we currently do for air, then it's likely that water quality will soon decline.
There was a huge change in the 70s, but those changes are currently being rolled back.
Not a competition, really; we've both got to do better.