The Distant Strollers, 6th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The Autumn avatar, the ROM, is styled after my own face, or at least an AI interpretation of my face. I once thought that ROM stood for Retired Old Man, but on further reflection I now realize it actually stands for Reclusive Old Monster.

Speaking of monsters, the Stable Genius took another step toward stripping federal protections away from amerika's wetlands. A proposed rule from the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers would significantly narrow the definition of “waters of the United Stakes” in the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The new version is even more extreme than an initial proposal released last November. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the new proposed rule could strip federal protections from 94% of all U.S. wetlands. The November proposal could have removed protections from 81% of wetlands. 

The corrupt and partisan Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the Clean Water Act allowed the EPA to only regulate “relatively permanent” bodies of water and the wetlands connected to them. But they didn't define “relatively permanent,” causing confusion for both landowners and developers as well as regulators. To address the confusion, November's proposal defined “relatively permanent” as flowing either every day or during the “wet season.” The new proposal would define it flowing every day except for temporary interruptions like droughts lasting less than 30 days.

Other than a handful of coastal marshes influenced by tides, very few wetlands border bodies of water that flow every day. Therefore, the EPA's proposed rule would effectively declare open warfare against the nation’s waterways. 

The Stable Genius, the Supreme Court, and the EPA are the reason we can't have nice things.

It's recognized that the old system of defining wetlands and "waters of the United Snakes" was vague and confusing, and that some (but not all) regulators sometimes (but not always) took it too far. For example, I once had a project at a construction site, and a contractor's truck got stuck in the mud. We had to dig the ties out with shovels, and when New York State regulators visited the site after a rainfall and saw the ruts from the tire filled with water, they declared it a "wetland." Tire ruts. Fortunately, it was too small to warrant further action, but it illustrates the kind of overreach that sometimes occurred. 

But stripping all, or at least 94%, of wetlands from federal protection is not a common sense way of correcting the overreach. It's ecological suicide. It's the equivalent of amputating your leg rather than clipping a toenail. It's giving up a precious ecological resource, not to mention a freshwater reservoir and a buffer against floods and storms, for the cost-reduction benefit of developers and industry.

The ROM wasn't made for these times, and actions like this only further alienate him from this insane society.