Extracting Ourselves from the Wetlands Quagmire
The severe winter snows and spring
flooding in much of the country in 2003 yielded that summer's bumper crop of
mosquitoes that carried the disease de jour: West Nile virus. In 2002, 4,156
individuals suffered from known cases of the virus and 284 died, with flocks of
birds succumbing as well. There were even reports of cases of malaria in
Florida. Even if you're lucky enough not to contract a pest-borne plague, no
doubt you'll suffer from multiple bug bites.
Because mosquitoes breed in standing
water, governments warn citizens not to allow water to stand in trashcans,
gutters, and the like. Sometimes we're told we might want to drain our birdbaths.
This is ironic because the number one mosquito breeder is the federal
government itself through its so-called "wetlands" policies, which
are the darlings of environmental extremists and reflect a moral muddle that
plagues this country.
First a few facts: There is no
wetlands law on the books. In 1972 Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act. Section 404 of the act prohibited the discharge of dredged or fill
material into "navigable waters" without a federal permit. But in
1975 the Natural Resources Defense Council, in NRDC v. Calloway,
challenged the common-sense definition of "navigable" as something
you can float a boat down, and federal judges rejected both common sense and
the Constitutional by ruling that Section 404 covered all "waters,"
including what are now called "wetlands."
In subsequent years the Army Corps
of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, and assorted judges expanded the
definition of "wetlands" to mean almost any piece of land. Even a
parcel that's dry for all but one week of the year but that has growing on it
plants that are associated with wetlands can fall under federal control.
Don't think that these policies only
restrict the freedom of rich owners from making 1000-acre tracts into shopping
malls. Citizens with small lots have been told they couldn't build tennis
courts or decks on their homes. John Poszguy, a Hungarian immigrant, purchased
land, cleaned up twenty years' worth of illegally dumped tires and debris, and
began to put down fill dirt on dry land as the base for a garage. But because
bureaucrats and political hacks decided his property was a "wetland,"
he went to jail. So did environmentalist Bill Ellen, who actually created duck
ponds without proper permission.
For decades farmers have been
plagued by this policy. Angelo Tsakopoulos found this out recently when a
federal court in California declared his deep plowing a form of pollution. You
see, a plow dredges up soil and redeposits it in the ground. But if that ground
has been declared a "wetland," then plowing is literally the
equivalent of dumping truckloads of oil-laden sludge into a stream. It's not
surprising that the second Bush administration backed the court since it was
the first Bush administration that promulgated a "no net loss of
wetlands" policy, which applies only to private parties, not to America's
largest landholder: the federal government. Of course, it was the U.S.
Department of Agriculture in the 19th century that subsidized the draining of
swamps by farmers. And there's no credible science behind the claim of some
that wetlands will soon disappear and that individual Americans will face
disaster.
Such policies go against the moral
process of civilization — that is, protecting human life and making productive
activities possible, which sometimes meant draining swamps. The first Romans
drained a pond in the forum to make it a fit place for commerce and meetings of
the Senate and assembly. Romans of the classical era drained the Pontine
Marshes outside of the city in order to arrest the spread of malaria and create
more farmland. The decline of Rome meant the return of marshes, mosquitoes,
disease, death, and depopulation. In the New World, two millennia later, a
young George Washington helped drain part of the Great Dismal Swamp (the name
says it!) to make farming and the harvesting of cypress trees possible.
Washington, D.C., was built in part on filled-in swampland, though it is
clearly a philosophical swamp today.
America's disgraceful wetlands
policies must be challenged on ethical grounds. Only moral confusion or worse —
a deep hatred for all things human — would cause anyone to put the welfare of
bugs and bogs over people. Let's get this straight. Individual humans, not
insects or mud, are of supreme value. Individual men and women, not pests and
damp dirt, have property rights. If you own a lake and want to keep it for
boating, recreation, or a habitat for cute critters, great! If you want to
drain it and it does not directly, materially, and measurably harm someone
else's property, that's your business, not the government's.
It is time to truly put people -
their lives, liberty, and property - first. It is time to extract ourselves
from the quagmire of wetlands policy and bulldoze its philosophical premises
under the fresh soil of freedom.
___________
Dr. Edward Hudgins directs advocacy and is a senior scholar at The Atlas Society.
Click here to return to TRA's Issue CXCIII Index.
Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.Read Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.