The Clean Water Rule repeal has nothing to do with protecting farmers
Americans are being duped out of clean drinking water by the Trump administration’s repetitive farmer-centric rhetoric. A year ago last December, Andrew Wheeler, the soon-to-be confirmed Acting EPA Administrator, stood on a small stage in the Wilson County Exposition Center in Lebanon, Tennessee and addressed a gathered crowd of four hundred farmers and ranchers. Flanked by two John Deere tractors and an American flag, Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, in his dressed down slacks and top-button-undone man-of-the-people look, announced the proposal of a redefinition. The Waters of the United States, as defined by the Obama Administration’s Clean Water Rule in 2015, is “particularly egregious”, Wheeler explained, “as landowners have told me it impedes the use of their own land and stifles productivity.” Although Wheeler failed to announce just what the new definition would be, he nonetheless was met with applause from an audience made up of not only seasoned farmers but also many insignia-donning Future Farmers of America youth, for whom he later posed for group photos, currently displayed on the EPA’s website.
Andrew Wheeler with FFA youth in Lebanon, Tennessee
It’s no mistake that Wheeler made his announcement at a small Tennessee farming community expo center, just as it was no mistake when Trump, 10 months earlier, signed an executive order, surrounded by farmers, to begin the rollback of the Clean Water Rule after making a televised statement that bemoaned the rule on behalf of “farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land,” claiming, without evidence, that the EPA was “putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands” and “regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter.” He went on to feign disbelief that the Clean Water Rule was intent on going after homebuilders who dared to fill in a puddle, “just a puddle” on their lot.
It’s good optics for the Trump administration to surround themselves with farmers considering the long-standing regard Americans have for farming, a wholesome symbol of hard and honest work. Were Trump to surround himself with the true beneficiaries of the rollback - oil and gas executives and land developers, or if Wheeler had substituted his tractor props for oil derricks - perhaps stripping away protections of clean drinking water for one-third of the nation’s population would be less popular. Especially considering the Clean Water Rule not only preserved but broadened exemptions for agriculture, including a specific exemption for those pesky puddles.
The 2015 Clean Water Rule was a response to concerns over lack of clarity as to which water bodies fell under the 1972 Clean Water Act. It took four years of scientific analysis and over a million public comments to conclude that streams and wetlands have a significant hydrological and ecological connection to navigable and interstate waters. According to the analysis, 117 million people rely on drinking water from sources protected under the implementation of the rule, or about 1 in 3 Americans.
When the Trump administration formalized the rollback of the Clean Water Rule, they also released a far-less publicized 300-page financial analysis whose contents flagrantly conflict with the insistence that their motivation is the poor, overregulated, underappreciated farmer. Of the 248,688 permits granted between 2011 and 2015 to applicants whose work would deposit dirt or other fill into protected wetlands and streams, only 8 of those per year were from farmers. The majority of the applicants were from developers and extractive industries like oil, gas and mining.
One such wetland that has been stripped of its federal protection is in Bristol Bay, Alaska. In 2014, the EPA vetoed a permit placed by Pebble Partnership, a mining company, to extract deposits of gold and copper in the headwaters of Bristol Bay at a site known as Pebble Mine. Bristol Bay is the largest salmon fishery in the world. The proposed mine would destroy 94 salmon streams and 5,350 acres of wetlands, leaving an open pit larger than the island of Manhattan. It does not take much digging to discover that Mr. Wheeler, Trump’s pick to lead the agency that is supposed to protect our environment, is a lawyer whose former law firm represented Pebble Partnership.
It’s projects like Pebble Mine that are the real reason the current administration announced the repeal of the Clean Water Rule within six weeks of taking office. The average American farmer, who Trump claimed “wept in gratitude” when he forced the rollback, will in fact suffer alongside the rest of the country when our drinking water is tainted with pollutants, flooding increases, and critical wildlife habitats disappear because our streams and wetlands are irreplaceably destroyed for temporary, unsustainable gain.