Down Upon the Suwannee River

Even 152 years after it was made famous by Stephen Foster, the Suwannee fits the song. From the Okefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia (the continent's biggest swamp, and one of the few elevated ones), it winds down 235 miles to the Gulf of Mexico in northern Florida. Of all major American rivers it is the least polluted and least obstructed.

On other rivers, "flood control" projects such as dams and levees promote property damage by encouraging floodplain development, then failing. On the Suwannee there's only one kind of flood control, the only kind that ever worked—wetlands. Many of these wetlands are called "isolated," meaning that if bureaucrats and engineers dump dye into them, it doesn't show up anywhere they are looking. But there is no such thing as isolated wetlands; the very term connotes ignorance of the natural world. "Isolated" wetlands store and filter water for the aquifers they flow into, and animals that live elsewhere in forest, prairie, or even desert seek them out to feed and breed in.

There are deep, wild woods in Florida, none deeper or wilder than the vast, spongy floodplains of the Suwannee. On the clear, cool afternoon of May 7, 2003, the air is fragrant with wildflowers, and the chanting of mockingbirds rises and falls against an electric buzz of cicadas. The river, still carrying debris from recent rains, has dropped eight feet; I can see the old waterline on the trees. A brown water snake sashays across the surface. Near the bank a large basking turtle—possibly a Suwannee cooter—splashes from a snag, giving me only a glimpse of its carapace as it sinks into the tannin-stained flow. Here, 60 miles from the sea, endangered manatees feed on succulent plants; and, day and night, threatened gulf sturgeon, the size of people and shaped like sharks, shoot high into the air, smashing the surface with their armored sides. There are bowfins, longnose and Florida gars, 15 species of sunfish, seven species of catfish, largemouth bass, and Suwannee bass. Sometimes alligators haul themselves out on the floating dock I'm standing on.

The dock belongs to Svenn and Joy Lindskold. The Lindskolds don't worry about floods. Forested wetlands on and around the property slow the water and soak it up. And their house rests on 14-foot-high stilts. During the mild flood of 1998 their "first floor" (below the stilts) was five feet underwater. Scarcely inconvenienced, they canoed to and from the stairs.

The Lindskolds live in no town—just Gilchrist County. Their upstream neighbor to the north is a phosphate strip-mining company called Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan (PCS). Wrapped tightly around the 100,580-acre project area on the east, south, and west is the Suwannee River. Wetlands and streams that feed the Suwannee have been polluted, degraded, or, in many cases, gouged out of the earth by PCS; and now the company plans an 18,166-acre expansion of the mine.

Until January 10, 2003, many of the streams and wetlands on 3,997 acres of the expansion area were protected by the Clean Water Act. But on that date the Bush administration, through its Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), issued a "guidance document" instructing field agents on how not to apply the Clean Water Act. No longer were they to bust parties who filled or fouled "isolated waters" that are non-navigable and "intrastate" (completely in one state) just because migratory birds are present. No definition of "isolated waters" was provided, but the agencies have since proclaimed them to be streams that flow intermittently or dip underground, and wetlands that don't have obvious connections to larger waters. The document also ordered agents to seek "headquarters approval" before issuing a citation, thereby dooming enforcement by initiating an endlessly ascending chain reaction of butt-covering permission requests.

With these directives came a proposed rule-making, suggesting that isolated waters don't count anymore and inviting comment on how to define the word "isolated" so as to make the Clean Water Act more palatable to those it inconveniences. If the rule goes through, it could degrade 60 to 80 percent of the stream miles in the United States.

The enforcement ban—which delighted DuPont, Dow Chemical, the American Forest and Paper Association, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, state farm bureaus, and other development interests that lobbied for it—was made possible by a broad and bizarre interpretation of a January 9, 2001, Supreme Court decision about some wetlands in Illinois. The only point the Supremes had made was that use by migratory birds is no longer grounds for federal protection of intrastate, non-navigable waters. There are plenty of other enforcement standards, such as public use for recreation or use by farmers for irrigation. The guidance and proposed rule-making that now jeopardize headwater streams and wetlands across America are payback for the polluters who contributed to the Bush campaign. Agribusiness, including the logging industry, gave Bush $2,687,275. (They tossed Al Gore $313,925.) The construction industry, including home builders, gave Bush $4,175,256, Gore $1,050,902. Coal-mining companies gave Bush $108,821, Gore $16,450.