September 4, 2023
Summer mornings are awash with bird songs. I am partial to my Carolina wren. He finds the highest perch, lifts his chest, and sings to the community of trees: oaks, pines, and dogwoods. Possibly his mate lingers on a branch. I don’t know their story but I love listening to their song.
Mountain afternoons in August are punctuated by rain, often accompanied by thunder and lightning. Rhododendrons and Mountain Laurels flourish in our average annual rainfall of 50 inches.
Some years ago, our community well produced clear, cool water for ten families. A few of us shouldered the volunteer responsibilities. Sometimes, troubleshooting a water interruption involved a long walk to the pump house during an ice storm, but that was worth the generous supply of mountain water. My job was to check the water tower every morning to ensure the one tiny light bulb was on. That indicated the water was flowing up from the pump house, a good mile away.
Old technology? Absolutely. Old, and fragile. As were our neighborhood relationships. They did not survive a change in property ownership and volunteer management.
One morning, no water flowed from my kitchen faucet. After two weeks, there was no consensus on how to repair the system. I needed the community of water from rivers to water tables without the politics of humans. I left the group. I applied for a permit and hired a company to dig down through ancient red clay soil.
To the human eye, looking over these mountains, you might wonder where the water comes from. The Catawba River flows miles from here, as does the Swannanoa River.
The well guys found a water source 560 feet down. So many things went right. We had a clean water table connected to wetlands connected to a clean river.
Clean water should be a right for all creatures. But pollution has plagued humans since the earliest well digging which began around 6000 BCE. The engineering looked like simple pits. As populations grew, technology became more sophisticated, but what remains unchanged is that pollution grows alongside reckless economic growth.
Wetlands are essential to clean environments. They are a support system of sponges for the land and water they protect. Their function is comparable to kidneys in the human body; they filter toxins. Why, then, would anyone impede or build on a wetland? That’s been the issue between developers and environmentalists for decades.
All that came to a head last May when the Supreme Court heard the case of Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Sacketts obtained local building permits to build a house on their half-acre property, just 500 feet from Priest Lake. However, a resident complained that they did not get EPA approval for building on wetlands.
The justices ruled that the Sacketts were entitled to build on their land. As Thomas Jorling, the co-architect of The Clean Water Act of 1972 remarked to a class of law students, the original Act was passed at a time when we had a better Supreme Court.
Three months later, as required, the EPA followed up on the Supreme Court ruling, saying that The Clean Water Act only protects streams, oceans, rivers, lakes, and wetlands with a continuous surface connection to those bodies. On August 29, 2023, NPR’s storyline ran as ”The EPA removes federal protection for most of the country’s wetlands on Tuesday to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.” As Justice Alito wrote, streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, and wetlands with a continuous surface connection to those bodies would be protected, leaving many previously regulated wetlands without federal protection.
The national implications are troubling. Take, for instance, the higher temperatures that threaten the future of trout in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and Alabama mountain streams. These rivers have diminished in size, many tributaries have dried up, wetlands have been disseminated, and brown, rainbow, and brook trout blink out in rising water temperatures.
Warmer water contains less oxygen than colder water. When oxygen decreases, fish stress out, and they are susceptible to waterborne bacteria. Forty-five percent of the Southeast’s trout stream habitat has already been lost. In the southern Appalachian range, a three-degree increase in temperatures will result in another 20 percent loss, and a six-degree increase would eliminate nearly 80 percent of the trout’s habitat, according to the American Fisheries Society, a nonprofit conservation group.
If, at this time when we know future generations face an uncertain future, we continue to support legislation that does not recognize nature as having a voice, a right to be protected, to be regarded not as a resource or a dumping ground, then we should be more anxious about the future than we are already.
What if, instead of issuing permits for allowable amounts of pollution, we acknowledged wetlands and all ecosystems as living entities with rights?
There’s a jar of water from the Swannanoa River on my desk. I am reminded to thank her for the water that supplies my business. I thank her for distributing water through the wetlands and water tables. The Swannanoa River hydrates the entire city of Asheville. Her headwaters begin at Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi. She runs twenty-two miles through Buncombe County, where she joins the French Broad River at the Biltmore Estate. The French Broad joins the Tennessee River, which joins the Mississippi, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. With their water tables and wetlands, the rivers form a community of water.
My colleague, Kevin Doyle Jones, and I have begun meeting with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are in conversation weekly to work on getting rights for the Swannanoa River. Our primary contact at CELDF is Ben G. Price, author of How Wealth Rules the World: Saving our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property. Ben dreams big, practical dreams. He and CELDF, along with communities in this country and internationally, have activated legal rights for ecosystems. Kevin and I dream that if we form a community group and if we talk to enough people: family, friends, politicians, citizens, lawyers…we will garner support for whatever it takes to protect and declare the Swannanoa River as a living entity.
This is the path I believe in. This is a work in progress and an ongoing story.
When we care enough, clean water will flow despite the Sacketts, the Supreme Court, those who would defund the EPA, the polluters, and those who don’t care. Enough of us will tend to the community of water. Enough of us will care for each other on this gorgeous, habitable planet.
I look forward to your comments and questions.
Katharine
Sources:
When Property Rights and Environmental Laws Collide: NPR, 07/01/2023
The Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley (Harper 2022)
Appalachian Trout Struggle To Survive Climate Change by Dan Chapman (Barnraiser)
River Network: The Clean Water Act Guide
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property by Ben G. Price (Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.)
photo credit: The Swannanoa River by Kevin Doyle Jones
Beautiful writing and thank you for the work, both writing and activist, you do!
Water is life. I continue to be baffled by the disregard that it receives. 💔