Trump majority wants to open the floodgates to polluters
.webp)
One key system is water.
According to the study by
more than 40 researchers for
the Earth Commission, less than half the world’s population now benefits from
easy access to free flowing rivers that sustain biodiversity and nourish
healthy fisheries, which in turn support local economies. That is because too
many rivers are altered by dams and development. Only 23 percent of the world’s
large rivers (more than 620 miles in length) flow uninterrupted into the
ocean.
Under the Earth’s surface, groundwater levels
in nearly half the world’s basins are in decline from overuse. Invisible from
above, groundwater is a critical source of drinking water, providing the base
flow for rivers and, as the study said,
“directly sustain[ing] wetlands and terrestrial vegetation.”
Compounding that are unsustainable levels of nitrogen and
phosphorous runoff into rivers, lakes, and coastline estuaries from
fertilizers. The runoff can trigger a tragic process known as “eutrophication,”
leading to major fish kills and aquatic dead zones.
While much of the concern about climate change is understandably
centered on staying beneath a threshold of temperatures that will unleash
catastrophic climate impacts, the study is
a reminder that there is much more to the preservation of the planet. A lead
author, Joyeeta Gupta, told the
media that if Earth was undergoing a medical exam, “Our doctor would say the
Earth is really quite sick right now, in many areas.”
Earth Commission co-chair Johan Rockström added in a press
release, “Unless a timely transformation occurs, it is most likely that
irreversible tipping points and widespread impacts on human well-being will be
unavoidable.”
Earth’s sickness lost on the Supreme Court
None of that appeared to be on the mind of the Supreme Court
in Sackett v. EPA. The case involved
an Idaho couple who wanted to develop over a wetland on their property near a
lake; all nine justices on the high court concurred that the EPA went too
far in regulating the particular wetland on the couple’s
property.
But a razor-thin 5-4
majority, led by
Justice Samuel Alito, seized on
the case to gut a key portion of the 1972 Clean
Water Act itself, ruling that
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can enforce environmental laws under
the Clean Water Act only if a wetland is “indistinguishable” from larger bodies
of water, with a “continuous surface connection” that has “no clear
demarcation.”
The ruling by Alito and fellow Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett willfully ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence showing the connections between wetlands and downstream waters, and the fact that wetlands play an outsized role in biodiversity, despite covering only 5.5 percent of land in the contiguous 48 states.
The ruling ignored findings by the EPA that our own waters mirror the
state of those around the world: they are quite sick right now. According to
the EPA’s 2017 National Water Quality Inventory Report issued to
Congress, nearly a third of wetlands and nearly half of the nation’s river and
streams are in “poor biological condition.” More than 30 years ago, the US Fish
and Wildlife Service reported to Congress that the nation has
lost more than half of the wetlands that existed in colonial
times in the contiguous 48 states.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was sadly predictable given that
Alito wrote long ago that, as far as he was concerned, the EPA can step in to
protect water only “when a pollutant is discharged directly from a point source
to navigable waters.”
Also ridiculously predictable was who applauded the ruling most loudly and lined up to drive over the bridge to troubled waters: fossil fuel, mining, road building and agricultural polluters and commercial and residential developers who desire minimal regulation when plowing over the landscape.
In its friend of the court brief in
the Idaho case, the American Petroleum Association, the American Gas
Association, and the Association for Oil Pipelines complained that the Clean
Water Act led to a permitting system so “onerous” that the failure to obtain a
permit after years of waiting “can be ruinous.”
Wetland connectivity proven long ago
Actually, polluters want to leave science-based permitting in
ruins. The EPA under both the
George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations determined that wetlands are critically
connected to the quality of drinking water and to the quality
of larger bodies of water, even when one cannot see the connections on the
surface. In a 2015 report based on 1,200 peer-reviewed publications, the EPA cited “ample
evidence” that many wetlands that lacked surface water connections still
“provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the
integrity of downstream waters.”
The functions, such
as filtering pollutants, absorbing storm surges, slowing floods, preventing
erosion and being protective nurseries for fish, add up to being almost priceless. Wetlands
saved the 12 states ravaged by Hurricane Sandy from an additional $625 million
in damage, according to a study by
researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz and the Nature
Conservancy. More
than half of the nation’s $5.6 billion commercial seafood bounty in
2018 came from fish (such as salmon) and shellfish (such as crabs and shrimp)
which spend part of their lifecycle in wetlands, according to NOAA.
Most people understand this. Two-thirds of respondents told
the Pew Research Center in 2020 that the federal government is
doing too little to protect the water quality of lakes, rivers and streams.
Accelerating wetland losses
In making its ruling in Sackett v EPA, the Supreme
Court was oblivious to the fact that the world has lost a
third of its wetlands since 1970. Wetlands are disappearing
faster than forests, according to
the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. The high court has set the stage for the
United States to lose tens of millions of acres more. Environmental groups say
the ruling in Sackett v EPA is so sweeping, that the result
may be even worse than when the Trump administration tried to
gut the Clean Water Act in 2019.
At that time, nearly four dozen current and former federal
scientists filed a complaint with
the EPA’s inspector general, warning that 40 million acres of wetlands, equivalent to
the size of Wisconsin, would be removed from protection—a massive chunk of the
nation’s 110
million acres of wetlands in the contiguous 48 states.
It appears that this slim Supreme Court majority wants to open the floodgates to polluters even as we continue to learn more about just how connected wetlands are to bigger bodies of water and also to our entire way of life. A Canadian study two decades ago found that degraded water from human land use could be detected in wetlands up to two and a half miles away.
That study concluded: “Effective
wetland conservation will not be achieved merely through the creation of narrow
buffer zones between wetlands and more intensive land-uses. Rather, sustaining
high wetland water quality will require maintaining a heterogeneous regional
landscape containing relatively large areas of natural forest and wetlands.”
In this latest case, the high court didn’t even bother with
narrow buffer zones. Paired with last year’s ruling curtailing the EPA’s powers
to curb the carbon emissions fueling global warming, Alito and his majority are
further disconnecting our nation from the science that could help us heal the
planet.
The evidence could not be clearer that the Earth really is quite
sick. Rather than aiding its recovery, this US Supreme Court seems intent on
scurrying around the hospital, ward by ward, bed by bed, unplugging every
life-support system and vital-signs monitor it can.
is a 2018 winner from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, a 10-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Pulitzer Prize finalist and co-author of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock (2015).
