RIP wetlands and streams, Trump to end environmental protections

The other big sticking point was that the rules expanded water protections from just rivers to the streams that feed the rivers. So you couldn’t dump fertilizer in a stream just because that stream fed a river which dumped into the Gulf of Mexico and caused massive algae blooms and fish die offs. Very inconvenient to the farmers.

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Perhaps the most infuriating bit is the inevitable boasting about how he alone made America’s waters pure and healthy like you’ve never seen before.

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I don’t think we’re talking about the conservation-minded outdoorsmen here. His supporters fall more along the lines of dudebros who would gladly relish the opportunity to shoot an endangered species.

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Will the next president unpave all the wetlands and remove all the heavy metals from the water supply, too? The damage done by Agent Orange will last far beyond his term of office.

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Make the Cuyahoga River burn again!

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I lived on a bluff above the Cuyahoga during the ‘flaming river’ heydays of the 60s and 70s. On windy days, large clots of detergent foam would come flying up out of the valley. Hells no do I ever want to see that again!

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JFC! The first term of our next reasonably sane president will be spent re-instating policies and programs that this jackhole has fucked.

It may sound like I’ve retained an iota of hope but no, it’s just the wine typing, as if anything will ever be ‘reasonable’ or ‘sane’ again.

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Good news everyone!
Donald Trump sells bottled water under the Trump brand.

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This. Point out that the reason there are shitty salmon returns is because of anti-environmentalism, they complain that F&W doesn’t plant more hatchery fish. Nevermind that those hatchery fish are planted in the same streams that are poisoned; and then have to grow in the same overheated ocean; then get through the same commercial over-fishing gauntlet; in order to reach the river that’s blown out an brown because of overdevelopment and farmers plowing fields through intermittent streams.

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If they were prone to flooding, they were losing those crops, anyway. Corn don’t grow in a puddle.

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These are areas that fill with water for just a couple days. The corn grows just fine. If it didn’t, no farmer would waste time and money tilling and planting that area. And they wouldn’t care about losing it.

The Midwest is obnoxiously flat. Just a few inches water can cover acres. Normally it would soak into the ground almost as fast as it rains. But in the spring, snowmelt sometimes saturates the ground. Meltwater and rain sit on the surface a few inches deep until there are a few sunny days.

These are wetlands as defined by law, but not as you would normally picture wetlands. Rightly or wrongly, farmers were nervous.

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I grew up in the midwest, in exactly the flat farmland you are describing. Another thing about the midwest: thunderstorms, often dropping several inches of rain at a time, on already saturated fields. I can clearly picture the kinds of areas you’ve described that “fill with water for just a couple of days.” They do that, then they do it again, then they do it again. And when the corn nears harvest you can still see them, even if there hasn’t been a storm in a while. They are where the corn is yellow and unusable, or stunted, assuming it isn’t bare ground.

Same thing is true for soybeans, though they are more tolerant than corn and wheat.

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Doesn’t the devil smell like sulphur? Hmmmmm…

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