We Need a New Strategy for Wetland Protection

Image courtesy UnSplash: Joshua J. Cotten @jcotten

There is nothing more dream-like than an isolated Florida cypress bog early in the morning. I’ve spent hundreds of hours wading through wetlands in my adult life, and that’s not to mention the hundreds of hours I spent playing in creeks and wetlands as a child. I’d like to add my voice to those on this platform talking about the Supreme Court’s Sackett decision yesterday.

I’m heartbroken that the Supreme Court made the decision they did, but not shocked. This is because the rules used to protect and restore wetlands have always been tenuous. 

It’s time for a modern national environmental protection law or an overhaul of our existing environmental protection laws to address the issues of our time head-on. 

Reading through the decision and the opinions is not unlike wading through a wetland itself. There are unseen logs beneath the surface, surprise snake encounters, and a rare glimpse of a wildflower. The court sought to simplify how wetland protection works, but it set in motion a nationwide change based on a single half-acre lot in Idaho. 

Wetland protection is critical to protecting biodiversity and ecosystem integrity but also to maintaining what we call the “ecosystem services” that help protect us. Wetlands are complex places that serve complex functions, including protecting people (and our buildings, farms, infrastructure, and other things) from floods, sequestering carbon, and serving as fish hatcheries. 

As our climate continues to get weird, we need wetlands more than ever to help stabilize us against floods and droughts. Wetlands are already threatened worldwide, especially in the U.S. A recent conservative estimate of world wetland loss noted that since 1700, the world has lost 21 percent of wetlands (Fluet-Chouinard, et al. 2023), while the estimate of U.S. wetland loss is over 50 percent (USFWS). 

We need a new strategy for environmental protection.  

Even though lawmakers knew (vaguely) about climate science when the Clean Air Act was written, knew that environmental justice concerns drove much of the environmental movement, and knew (even more vaguely) about the value of wetlands when the Clean Water Act was conceived, these laws do not directly address these issues, among many. This is part of the problem the Supreme Court has been pointing out. In lieu of direct protections of everything not foreseen when the laws were passed, the executive branch of the federal government has worked tirelessly for 40 years to adapt, pivot, and interpret the laws they do have to affect the protection of critical ecosystems and the prevention pollution that harms people and ecosystems. 

We all know that developing and passing a new national environmental protection law is unlikely today when Congress can’t even agree to not default on our debt. But we need to try.

Suffice it to say that this court doesn’t like the executive branch using its authority to interpret laws so that they can meet the mission of protecting human health and the environment, so we need to take a different tack. If we do not, we stand to lose not only the magical ecosystems and rich diversity that makes Earth unique but also the bedrock functionality that makes human life on Earth sustainable.

Fluet-Chouinard, Etienne, Benjamin D. Stocker, Zhen Zhang, Avni Malhotra, Joe R. Melton, Benjamin Poulter, Jed O. Kaplan, et al. “Extensive Global Wetland Loss over the Past Three Centuries.” Nature 614, no. 7947 (February 2023): 281–86. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05572-6.

USFWS. Wetlands Loss Since the Revolution. National Wetlands Newsletter. November/December 1990. https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/Documents%5CWetlands-Loss-Since-the-Revolution.pdf