Down Upon the Suwannee River

Even Bush's own Justice Department finds the administration's guidance document illegal. Since the Supreme Court decision, 17 lower courts have ruled that isolated wetlands and intermittent and underground streams must be protected under the Clean Water Act, and in the five cases in which conservative courts have supported some or all of the administration's new, broader interpretation, the Justice Department is vigorously appealing three and holding off on a fourth until a similar case can be decided.

Before the administration’s imaginative interpretation of the Supreme Court decision, PCS couldn't destroy even an isolated wetland without a special permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) still has jurisdiction over most isolated wetlands, but its enforcement record is abysmal. Julie Sibbing, wetlands policy specialist for the National Wildlife Federation, describes the state's regulations for wetland mitigation as "a joke." The streamlining of mine expansion by federal abdication is "as ugly as it gets," she says.

I had arranged to tour the mine with Stan Posey, the PCS official who deals with state and federal wetlands regulations. Posey is proud of what his company does to patch up the earth after it has torn out the phosphate ore, and he was eager to show me some of the repair work. But the day before our appointment he phoned to tell me that the big bosses in Chicago and Saskatoon had decided the tour couldn't happen. There hadn't been enough advance notice, one of them explained when I called to complain. I'd caught them off guard. They were having this important conference....

So 40 miles north of the mine, at Valdosta, Georgia, I hired a Cessna 172, inviting as my guides Svenn Lindskold, who heads the 300-member Save Our Suwannee, and Frank Sedmera, chairman of the Four Rivers Audubon Society. Once we were over the mine, it became obvious that it was too vast for Posey to have shown me what it was like from the ground even if he'd wanted to. As far as we could see, the lush, green face of northern Florida—“overburden," as defined by PCS—had been disturbed or peeled away, revealing mud, dirt, pits, and waste piles. A dragline—one of four—bit into the earth with a bucket the size of a two-car garage.

The overburden, only 7 percent of which is phosphate rock, is mixed with water and piped as slurry to separation facilities. Eventually, the phosphate gets mixed with sulfuric acid at two on-site chemical plants, a process that produces phosphoric acid (used in fertilizer, animal feed, and other products) and gypsum. The gypsum is radioactive enough to be shunned for major commercial uses and acidic enough to kill most of the plants that try to grow on it. So PCS discards almost all of it, piling it into rectangular stacks thousands of feet on a side and at least 100 feet high. Eventually, says Stan Posey, the stacks will be reshaped and vegetated, but in two hours of flying we didn't see that kind. Other waste products—mostly clay and sand—ae piped into giant lagoons, called slime pits by most everyone but PCS, which calls them "clay settling areas." Plumes of gray water, fading in color as the waste settled, fanned out from the pipe outlets.

About a third of the project area's 100,580 acres are—or were—in wetlands. But for every wetland acre a company destroys, Florida DEP requires it to "create" another. So, according to the state, PCS, and a large element of the general public, there's no problem. For both isolated and nonisolated wetlands there is supposedly "no net loss." PCS gets "mitigation" credit from the state for real wetlands it destroys by reshaping its slime pits and planting trees around the edges. The projects I saw were certainly an aesthetic improvement; but few if any sustain wetland plants and wildlife, purify runoff, or recharge groundwater the way real wetlands do. Basically, they're water-retention basins. So are most of the other holes that state and federal agencies require extractive industries to dig as "wetland mitigation."

There are indeed such things as man-made wetlands that work. However, they are exceedingly rare and almost never designed by engineers and bureaucrats. Only God or a very smart soil scientist can make a real wetland. One study found that no more than 5 percent of the wetland-mitigation projects in Florida could be called successful, and the General Accounting Office reports that nationwide, 80 percent fail. Even if you assume that wetland replication works, the United States loses 58,500 acres of wetlands each year.

Back on the ground, we inspected as much of the PCS mine as we could gain legal access to. We got up-close looks at attractive, rehabilitated slime pits where willows were supposed to have been shaded out by planted cypress, except the cypress weren't cooperating. "Will these ever be forested wetlands?" I asked Sedmera.

"I don't know," he answered. "You and I won't live long enough to find out. Wetland rehabilitation [he and Lindskold refuse to call it restoration] is all one vast experiment." Forested wetlands, said by PCS to have been "restored," were shadeless tangles of parched deadwood. Near one of these I stopped the car to move a gopher tortoise off the asphalt. Time may be running out for this state-listed species of special concern. And from what I've seen of wetland "restoration" in Florida and elsewhere, I can't claim to have even a little faith that PCS will rebuild the wetlands (and uplands) around which gopher tortoises feed and dig their burrows to the species' liking.

The new guidelines and proposed rule-making are just part of a larger offensive on the Clean Water Act. The statute contains a provision--never implemented—that would have gone a long way toward controlling the "nonpoint pollution" from such sources as agriculture and city streets. The Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program, which deals with nonpoint pollution, is a commonsense approach requiring pollution to be limited so that a stream is no longer "impaired." At the behest of agribusiness and the timber industry a reasonably effective TMDL rule, promulgated by Clinton's EPA, was neutralized April 2, 2003, by the Bush administration. Bush's EPA proposes to redefine "impaired" waters as clean and to preserve the status quo by letting the states—which had ignored the TMDL program—worry about discharges.