The Supreme Court is continuing its trend of making environmental policy decisions with a recent ruling on the Clean Water Act of 1972. Here is the summary of the act from epa.gov:
“The Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters. The basis of the CWA was enacted in 1948 and was called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, but the Act was significantly reorganized and expanded in 1972. “Clean Water Act” became the Act’s common name with amendments in 1972.”
This law tends to enter the courts because real estate developers like to buy up cheap land, build on it, and then sell it for mega profits. Wetlands tend to be great picks given their waterlogged nature; not many people are willing to invest the money and effort into draining, filling, and building upon a swamp. Folks also tend to see swamps as valueless. So, sometimes a developer will try to convert a piece of worthless watery land and then somebody brings the Environmental Protection Agency down upon them. When these cases get to the Supreme Court, the court has to make policy decisions about questions like “what’s a body of water?” and “should people be allowed to pump sewage drainage into a vernal pool?”
One of the issues at play in this particular case is the issue of seasonality. Some bodies of water are not always visible from the surface all year. Sometimes a piece of land can go years without showing any sign that it is actually a wetland. Sometimes land that is converted long ago suddenly erupts into a swamp given the right conditions. This phenomenon is annoying for farmers and home owners… but could it also serve a larger environmental purpose? I’ll let Robert Leo Heilman make a case of his own:
“The Willamette Valley was a vast wetland, with beaver ponds, marshes, and islands between the main channels. Flooding was an annual event. The river channels were choked with debris, which slowed down the river current and spread it out, allowing the soil washing down the mountains to settle out and build up. The marshes were home to huge flocks of geese and ducks. Thousands of herons and cranes and swans, osprey and eagles lived there. Fish and amphibians and insects provided food.
The Missouri Bottoms below my house must have been a smaller version of the same sort of marsh. For years I’d looked out over that land, but it never occurred to me that the river used to run all year round through several shallow channels.
Several things suddenly made sense to me. Old Highway 99 runs along the hillside on the opposite side of the valley. I knew that it followed the old Applegate Trail and that the pioneer trailed followed the Indian trade route, but why did it go up on the hillside instead of through the flatter bottoms where the freeway runs? Because the bottom was a swamp–you couldn’t walk through there, let alone drive a wagon through it.
I understood how thirty feed of topsoil had built up. A single channel would never had slowed down enough to leave that silt behind, but a marsh, one that became a seasonal lake every spring, would.
I recalled passages from settlers’ diaries that mentioned the huge flocks of waterfowl, so thick that to hunt them, they simply startled the birds into flight and fired randomly into the air, bringing down ducks and geese with every shotgun blast. Where had these uncountable thousands of birds lived and why weren’t they around anymore?
The South Umpqua, as we see it now, a single channel with banks twenty to thirty feed high, is a modern creation. The marsh was drained for farmland, forcing the water into a single channel, which flowed faster and cut its way down through the soil to bedrock.
What’s the effect of that? For one thing, the soil eroded from the mountains no longer settles in the valley, it washes downriver to Reedsport, where the Army Corps of Engineers dredges it to keep a navigable channel open.
The wetlands used to store water and did it much more efficiently than any dam because the water was stored in the soil, keeping the groundwater table higher. Along with storage the marsh provided filtration and cooling, so not only is there less water now, but what we have isn’t as cool and clean as it used to be.
Of course, we’ve lost the wildlife habitat too. Wetlands are tremendously productive. In order to make wheat fields and hay ground and pasture, we’ve drained our wetlands, but in terms of sheer protein per acre, the “dismal swamps” were much more productive than the farmland that replaced them.
Someday we may decide to restore the marsh. We may decide that the benefits of erosion control, flood control, water storage and filtration, and wildlife enhancement outweighs the value of the crops that the land produces.”
Where developers see useless, waterlogged land, it is possible to find something of incredible human utility. The current Supreme Court, a conservative one, have taken a short sighted view. Surely, they see the capital to be gained from building and dumping on wetlands to be higher than leaving the swamps alone. However, in the long term, areas where groundwater accumulates protect us from flooding, keep our water supply clean, and nurture soil.
It happens again and again; Americans fail to comprehend their relationship with the land and break cycles that have kept the environment stable for a thousand centuries. In the early twentieth century, farmers in America’s bread basket reduced some of the richest soil on the planet into a dust bowl. In timber country, where Robert Heilman lived and worked, industrious people undermined the systems that kept the mountains and the lowlands productive and self-cleaning. Can you imagine that? A natural swamp can produce more protein than an industrial farm? Hard to imagine in 2023–the birds are gone.
The Supreme Court is selling America the Beautiful on the cheap. We won’t know what we have lost until the flooded McMansions are all we have left.
“The San Fernando Valley, down in Los Angeles, is also an alluvial plain. Though they’ve built a city on it, the essential nature of the place hasn’t changed. It’s still a catch basin for the runoff from the surrounding mountains, and every once in a while nature reminds them of that fact with a flood.
Back around the turn of the century, Los Angeles County was the top farming county in California. I can still remember driving through the San Fernando Valley as a child and seeing the farmers working their fields while housing projects were springing up all around them. My father once told me about coming to Los Angeles in the 1930s. He used to hunt ducks and geese in the marshes of the San Fernando Valley. The old nickname for the valley was “The Frog Pond,” and people still call it that sometimes.
To see the place now, it’s hard to imagine how it was when waterfowl wintered there and condors still soared above the hills. But the change came in a single generation, in the thirty years between my father’s early manhood and my own.
My father came to a place of beauty to start a family because his birthplace couldn’t provide a decent living. I had to do the same thing because my birthplace had become a wasteland of concrete and asphalt and smog and crime. I’m hoping that my son won’t have to do it all over again, that maybe this time we’ve found a place that will stay beautiful and safe.
It’s hard to say whether that will happen or not. Dangerous changes come, sometimes unexpectedly and sometimes slowly. But if this place is to survive, the Umpqua River, the living heart of these valleys, needs to be watched over and cared for so it can continue to take care of us, its people.”
(For more, read Overstory: Zero by Robert Leo Heilman)
