BY BRADFORD MCKEE, EDITOR

FROM THE MARCH 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

The National Association of Home Builders, among others, is giddy about a new Trump administration rule that allows widespread water pollution and wetland destruction. In late January, the federal government put out its final fixes to the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, known also as the Waters of the United States rule, under the Clean Water Act. The changes remove safeguards for most wetlands and more than 18 percent of streams. You are now free to fill these wetlands and foul these waters unburdened by law or by the unforgiving science that tells us which things turn water toxic and that water still runs downhill. The administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, even showed up at the home builders’ annual gathering in Las Vegas to announce the changes the group has wanted so badly. Their website headlined the announcement as “a big splash.”

There has been regulatory and judicial whiplash over protecting wetlands and streams since the federal Clean Water Act first became law in 1972. The law governs pollution of “navigable waters” or what it calls “waters of the United States,” terms that have formed the crux of disputes ever since. Home builders, developers, manufacturers, utilities, and people in the oil and gas business want a narrow definition of those waters. People who compute that all the earth’s water is more connected than not would like to protect as much surface and groundwater as possible, including isolated lakes, ponds, bogs, marshes, and the like, as well as ephemeral streams—the ones that move only after it rains or snows but can carry pollution just the same. In arid states such as Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, around 90 percent of streams are ephemeral. The federal government is now declining to protect them.

The Obama administration moved broadly to protect wetlands and ephemeral streams with a 2015 rule known as the Clean Water Rule. Industry groups hated it. Wheeler, a coal guy, has called it a “power grab,” and the Trump administration repealed it last year before writing its own far less stringent rule. Last fall, when the administration released its draft version of the latest rule, the EPA’s Science Advisory Board protested that it made a “substantial departure” from earlier definitions of the kinds of water bodies to be protected. The advisory board pointed to a 2015 agency report on the connectivity of waters in streams and wetlands to those downstream, which stated that they are, indeed, connected, and that poison in one is poison in the other. And where an isolated wetland has no obvious surface connection to a larger water body, wetlands are, nonetheless, basically kidneys in the water cycle. (Not to mention, homebuyers are best off avoiding any builder who would fill a wetland, because the water will likely be back in unwelcome ways.)

Litigation is almost certain to dog the Trump water rule, and a court may stay the rule’s enforcement, or rather lack of it, before this page prints. Then you can look for a few more years of legal battles over its legitimacy. Landscape architects know the stakes and the soundest practices toward water. You can help by continuing to protect and improve water quality in your work, and by informing communities and public officials of causes and effects around this most fragile of resources. And given that this is an election year, you can judge candidates by whether they support or oppose the current regime’s mindless assault on the environment, which also includes a campaign to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act, the bedrock law that requires a hard look at the consequences of new federal development. In this, as in so many arenas of public policy—and water policy is public health policy—the administration has drawn clear pictures for the country of what it will allow. The case to make against them is simple, that what is allowable may be harmful, even deadly.