Free Republic

The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Thursday afternoon scaling back an Obama-era regulation farmers and energy producers claimed saddled them with unnecessary burdens. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the rule change in Las Vegas, effectively hemming in a regulation restricting the use of fertilizers and pesticides. President Donald Trump promised to repeal his predecessor’s “Waters of the United States” policy when he was running in 2016. Rolling back WOTUS saves landowners, farmers and businesses from being forced to hire “teams of attorneys to tell them how to use their own land,” Wheeler told reporters at a meeting of the...

On May 25, Rick Moran detailed the plight of California-located Duarte Nursery, being sued by the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) for ploughing a small portion of a recently-purchased 450-acre farm for the purpose of planting wheat. Mr. Duarte purchased the land in recognition that significant portions were to remain fallow because they were wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act (CWA). But, after planting wheat for harvest in 2013 on a portion determined by a paid consultant not to be such protected wetlands, Mr. Duarte was sued by the Corps for “…not obtaining a permit to discharge dredged or...

The rule defines eight categories of waters of the U.S. Six categories include traditional navigable waters, interstate waters, territorial seas (these three are called “jurisdictional waters”), impoundments of jurisdictional waters, “tributaries,” and “adjacent” waters. These are jurisdictional by rule in all cases, requiring no additional analysis in order to be regulated. To be adjacent, the rule uses the rubric of “neighboring,” which can be met by waters in the 100-year floodplain—meaning land which might be wet one out of every 100 days is a water of the U.S. and can be federally controlled. Texas coastal prairie wetlands are another type...

About 1.7 million acres of land across California, including 20,000 acres in San Joaquin County, are candidates for a special designation that would help protect 15 rare plants and animals that live in vernal pools(mud puddles), officials announced Tuesday. Critical habitat is designated to protect threatened or endangered species and could require restrictions on how the land is used. Roughly 76 percent of the land identified Tuesday as possible critical habitat is privately owned. To some (most intelligent) people, vernal pools are useless mud puddles that appear during the wet fall and winter months. To others, they are home to...