The wetlands have always seemed to me like a kind of magical place. Life abounds in them. In California, you can often see the white herons standing in their mix of salt and fresh water, waiting for an unfortunate little fish to swim by.
They are zones of flux, open to the ocean, receiving salt water as the tide flows in and, when the tide goes out, receiving fresh water that flows from inland toward the sea. Neither land nor sea, the place where life began.
So it was with a gut sense of alarm that I woke up this morning and read a press release about a new executive order that is running stealthily below the glut of news on subjects like our nation breaking a century of brotherhood with Europe. Trump has ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite every pending permit to fill or destroy wetlands across the United States.
A chart showing the pending permits runs unbroken down the length of the western coast of the nation, from Seattle to Santa Barbara.
“Executive Order 14156 baselessly declares that the United States is facing an energy emergency when in fact that the United States produces more oil and gas than any other nation in the world and is quickly becoming a dominant, exporting petrostate,” said a letter sent by the Center for Biological Diversity to “Dear President Trump.”
“There is no factual support for declaring an energy emergency in the United States,” said the letter, declaring an intent to sue.
A state of emergency allows a president to short-circuit two basic laws, one that protects our water and the other that protects our wildlife. The letter from the center said it would ask a federal judge to take a look and see whether there really is an emergency or whether the executive order uses a bald — uncovered by any fact — pretext for breaking the law of the land.
“Based on publicly available data retrieved from the Army Corps’ permitting portal, during the first weeks of February the Army Corps accepted your solicitation and unlawfully invoked its emergency regulatory authority to reclassify roughly 700 pending permits under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act as emergency actions, thus setting them up for expedited review,” said the center’s letter.
“None of these permits, however, meet the criteria for emergency permitting.”
As is broadly true within the law as a whole, there are provisions for emergencies. But they do not constitute open doors through which to end-run the law.
Congress defined the type of emergency actions that can be exempted from the law protecting endangered species and they are “any project for the repair or replacement of a public facility substantially as it existed prior to the disaster” after a “major disaster area” has been declared by the president.
Similar restraints bind the government under the law protecting clean water.
So, will a federal judge find that Trump’s “emergency” meets the definition of the word as it is set out in the law and in the layman’s understanding? That depends on the spin of the great roulette wheel of judicial assignment, and the subsequent reading of the law.
But it seems unlikely, regardless of the place the ball drops on the wheel.
So where in this absurdist scenario of justification is the actual emergency.
The nation’s wetlands, and the critters that live in them and off them, have been losing a 200-year battle for survival and their long retreat has recently been accelerating.
I wanted to quickly find the rate of wetland loss so I went to my search engine, DuckDuckGo, which has only 2.5% of the search market but a billion in revenue. (I, like the DOJ, consider Google a monopolist.)
Up until now, I have not used AI. But I clicked on DuckDuckGo’s “Assist,” which combines results from four AI tools built by Anthropic, Meta, Mistral and Open AI.
I got my answer instantly and it was pretty good.
“Wetlands loss refers to the significant reduction of wetland areas, with the lower 48 states in the U.S. having lost about 50% of their wetlands since the 1780s, and the rate of loss has accelerated in recent years. This decline negatively impacts biodiversity, water quality, and natural disaster resilience.”
There is the emergency.