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April 20, 2006
Wetland: Land That Gets Watered?
It's all fair enough. Some of these environmental terms sound like we should all know what they are, but in fact have precise technical definitions: watershed, wetland, sediment to name just three. So Interior Secretary Norton is just making things simpler by making a wetland something we can all understand. Apparently, manmade things, such as manmade ponds and golf course water hazards are now wetlands. When we open up the category to include land that receives water that didn't occur naturally, well, we find that we have more wetlands now than we did in 1997.
Read the Field & Stream piece, or watch Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" on the good news (the clip is called "Birdie"). Or watch the same clip at Youtube.
So does this mean the Department of Interior is going to water my lawn for me?
Comments
Amen to this. Talk about spin. Relatively sterile manmade ponds are nothing like true wetlands in biodiversity or function
Posted by: ecovoice | April 23, 2006 3:24 PM
Norton and company's reframing of wetland has had at least one salutary effect: it enabled the Hadly, MA conservation committee to put Walmart's expansion plans on hold for a year. Walmart wanted to abandon its "smaller" store for a bigger, super store in a nearby parcel, however, plans were put on hold when human-made detention basions in that parcel were delcared wetlands. See: http://www.sprawl-busters.com/search.php?readstory=2255
Posted by: Paul Newlin | May 8, 2006 11:52 AM