SURVIVING OUR ENVIRONMENT

The food chain begins in wetlands, key to biodiversity as well as flood control.

I have been pondering a recent article in The New York Times, by Adam Liptak and Coral Davenport, Supreme Court Limits E.P.A.’s Power to Address Water Pollution.

In this Supreme Court case, the right of some humans to introduce disruption and hazardous substances into the interconnected waters of this planet is the crux of the matter — the waters on which all living things depend, including humans. Through this ruling, many wetlands will be subject to damaging disruption and pollution that will threaten life on the planet.

The government finds itself tangled in its own shorts, debating when and where we can introduce disruption to water flows and add poisons into life-sustaining water systems. The effects of messing up water supplies are lethal regardless of the disrupting method, as the news cycle reflects. In over fifty pages of points and counterpoints, The Supreme Court pared back the EPA’s authority to keep our wetlands healthy.

We, The People, vastly more numerous than corporations and individual disruptors and polluters, instituted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to look after our life and safety by protecting the environment in which we all exist. How will we be affected by this Supreme Court decision that ties the EPA’s hands?

·      When and where is it possible to separate wetlands from their connectivity to the water cycle and the web of life?

·      Why do we allow an individual person (human or corporate) the Liberty to impede the right of each of the billions of humans on Earth to long Life, to the pursuit of their Happiness free from pollution-based deformities and disease?

·      What environmental education and training equip the Supreme Court to interfere with the protection of the commons entrusted to the EPA and negate the science and wisdom built into regulations instituted for our collective benefit?

·      Is it logical to conflate decisions on commerce and navigable waters with decisions over water quality and life on earth? Could the arguments in this case be the result of our development and commercialization of the commons?

What do you think?