Wetlands? What Wetlands?

The Environmental Protection Agency has become, for some of libertarian or Tea Party convictions, something of an embodiment of government run amok. Environmentalists see the agency, at its best, as the defender of people’s health and the environment’s welfare. It is instructive to see what happens when these two worldviews are superimposed on the construction of one single-family home that is either in (from the E.P.A’s point of view) or near (from the property owners’ perspective) wetlands in the woods of the Idaho panhandle. If the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-leaning property-rights group, has its way, the Supreme Court will have a chance to decide the issue. It has failed to persuade two courts already, but underestimating the Sacramento-based group is dangerous. It was instrumental in bringing to the Supreme Court a case that achieved a confusing result but nonetheless constrained the E.P.A.’s ability to bring some wetlands under the protection of the Clean Water Act. To fully appreciate the ambiguous situation involving Michael Sackett, who lives near Priest Lake in Idaho’s panhandle, it is worth looking at his property through the lens of Google Earth. Your destination should be 250 Old Schneider Road, Priest River, Idaho; it is not the Sackett property address, but is across the street from the long rectangle of denuded forest that encompasses most of the two-thirds of an acre that Michael and his wife, Chantelle, own, and want to build a house on. The reason to use Google Earth in this exercise is the utility and pertinence of the zoom function. Zoom out, and it is clear that there is a large area of wetlands to the north, across Kalispell Bay Road. The wetlands’ contours suggest that the Sackett property was, indeed, part of it at some point. But if you zoom in, you see that other land that also could well have been part of these large wetlands — land that separates the Sackett property from the shores of Priest Lake — has sprouted houses, docks, streets and other amenities of a vacation community. If Mr. Sackett, who owns an excavation company, filled wetlands on his property with rock and dirt, he may not have been doing anything much different from what his neighbors had done in the past. But this time, the E.P.A. stepped in and in 2007 told him that he was out of compliance with the Clean Water Act...more