That's not even a successful cherrypicked example. The 'safe to swim' caliber of self-congratulatory schtick government are fond of spreading are lipstick on a pig, sir.

It was just illustrative.

As I cited upthread, levels of industrial pollution across the United States have materially declined since the adoption of the CWA. Not just the rates of pollution - overall, the levels of ambient pollution present in the waters of the U.S. are significantly lower than prior to the adoption of the Clean Water Act. From the abstract of the study mentioned in that article:

"Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants, including 50 million pollution readings from 240,000 monitoring sites and a network model of all U.S. rivers, to study water pollution's trends, causes, and welfare consequences. We have three main findings. First, water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially. Between 1972 and 2001, for example, the share of waters safe for fishing grew by 12 percentage points."

nrdc.org - Fifty years after how far have we come
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/1/349/509...

Again, although the U.S. population is half again larger than it was, and the GDP is significantly larger than it was, prior to the adoption of the CWA our waters are cleaner and continuing to get cleaner.

Overpopulation is not the culprit. Pollution does not have to increase with rising population. Investment in pollution control measures (specifically wastewater treatment plants and controls on industrial discharges) and regulatory requirements can and do allow us to increase economic growth without increasing pollution.

Whether we choose to do that is another story - though generally speaking, the richer the country the more they're going to choose to "spend" some of that wealth on environmental quality. Regardless, it is entirely possible to grow one's economy and population without increasing pollution.

Albaby