Hint Impending Wonders, 29th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb):   The Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed to protect the water of the United States and gave the U.S . Corps of Engineers permitting authority for discharges into the country's "navigable waters." But to protect the quality of the navigable waters one has to protect the quality of the waters that feed into them, and many parties were surprised to find themselves required to get permits for projects that impacted wetlands, swamps, and even small streams and drainage ditches that no one could navigate even the tinies of kayaks through.

Case in point and true story: Way back in the 1980s, I was hired to investigate the hydrologic properties of a piece of land in upstate New York that a major paper company wanted to use for a landfill. We advanced several text borings to measure the depth to groundwater using a truck-mounted drilling rig, which got stuck in the mud after a rainy day. It took quite an effort to get the truck free and the more the wheels spun the deeper the tires sank into the soft earth. We finally used some chains and another vehicle to pull it out. leaving some deep ruts behind. 

A few months later, the Corps came by to inspect the property for potential wetlands, and although they found no natural wetlands on the property, they declared the deep ruts our truck tires left behind to be a man-made wetland (they would fill with water after a rain). The paper company would have to apply for a wetland permit pursuant to the Clean Water Act to build over the tire mark, even though no person (or any ecological receptor for that matter) would consider it a viable habitat and it wasn't connected to any other water body in any reasonably imaginable way - rainwater would just sit in the ruts until it evaporated away.

The lawyers eventually figured out some legal loophole to avoid permitting, something to do with de minimis size or something, but the paper company was still furious and complained about the "death of common sense." I understood and respected the Clean Water Act and agreed with the concept of the Corps' permitting authority, but even I thought it was ridiculous to call some wheel ruts deep in the woods a wetland and couldn't conceive of any way that building over them would impact "the navigable waters of the United States."

That paper company among others probably rejoiced in 2023 when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito limited the Corps' permitting authority under the Clean Water Act to only wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to a “relatively permanent” body of water. Today, the EPA took it further, proposing new rules that would exclude wetlands that abut or touch intermittent streams (which do not flow during dry periods) or ephemeral streams (which sit dry for much of the year and fill up only after rainfall or snowmelt). According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the changes could strip federal protections from up to 55 million acres of wetlands, or about 85 percent of all wetlands nationwide.

I oppose this decision. By nature's design, wetlands temporarily store rain and floodwater to let organic and suspended matter settle out before the water discharges to larger streams and lakes, even if the connection between them is intermittent or ephemeral. Those designations don't mean the streams aren't working as well or as efficiently as continuous-discharge water bodies. Oftentimes they work precisely because they're intermittent or ephemeral. Your bladder isn't any less efficient or work less well because you don't emit a constant flow of urine (you don't, right? I hope you don't). 

My experience with the truck-tire ruts getting classified as wetlands probably says more about over-zealous or inexperienced regulators than it does about the value, or lack thereof, of the the Clean Water Act. Poor guy or gal was probably under some pressure, self imposed or not, to find "something," and our truck-tire ruts were the best they could find. 

Lee Zeldin, the under-qualified and inexperienced administrator appointed to the EPA by the Stable Genius, crowed that “across the country, news of today’s proposal is going to be met with a lot of relief from farmers, ranchers, other landowners and governments.” Maybe. Still doesn't mean it's a good idea, though, and some day in the future, when we have fewer wetlands but more frequent and more severe floods and more polluted streams, rivers, and lakes, we'll regret this short-sighted decision.