The Story Continues For The Most Detrimental Environmental Bill In Decades
This week, by legislative mandate, the NC Environmental Management Commission (EMC) will likely discuss ending protections for most North Carolina wetlands.
It’s a horrifying prospect, now becoming fact. North Carolina’s principal board charged with crafting rules to protect clean water is instead adopting a mandated rule from the extreme, GOP-controlled legislature. Last year, the GOP created this rule, seeking to strip state legal protections away from most of our remaining wetlands.
The EMC staff’s review for the commission’s Water Quality Committee lays out the protections to be stripped away in detail. As we face the loss of these vital natural resources, we must review how the current situation came about.
Ending Wetland Protections In 2023
Firstly, recall Donald Trump–the worst environmental president in American history–appointed the new Supreme Court judges, flipping the majority of the Court.
After gaining power, the Donald Trump appointees ripped up decades of legal precedent to shred one of the federal Clean Water Act’s most important protections. Protections which for decades have defended environmentally critical wetlands from wholesale destruction.
The pro-polluter supermajority of the NC General Assembly followed suit, by passing over Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of “Farm Bill.” The bill included provisions eliminating all North Carolina state protections for wetlands which don’t meet the Supreme Court’s twisted revision of federal law.
Recall that this pro-polluter supermajority was elected in the 2022 cycle, and those seats are once again on North Carolinians’ ballots this year. NCLCV will make and announce its endorsements in those contests.
Our Work
As Dan Crawford, Director of Governmental Relations for NCLCV, said before the “Farm Bill” override, “This bill shouldn’t have passed in the first place. It allows for mass destruction of our wetlands – millions of acres representing half of those currently protected. The real beneficiaries of this legislation are builders and developers. Nobody who calls themselves a friend of the environment, clean air, or clean water can consider this anything other than a catastrophic rollback of protections fought for over the past 50 years. When you consider that a single acre of wetlands can store a million gallons of water, at a time when we are in the midst of hurricane season and facing increasingly severe storms, there is no justification for supporting this bill.
“If we allow our wetlands to become parking lots, developments and high-rises, this destruction will create irrevocable harm to our state. We will ultimately pay billions to repair the storm damage from which our current wetlands would protect us. This bill is bad for clean water, bad for flood and storm mitigation, bad for the environment, bad for taxpayers, and bad for North Carolina.”
The threatened loss of so much of North Carolina’s critical wetlands harshly reminds us how much elections matter to our environment. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of elections to the protection of our communities, especially the 2024 election. Through our work, we can restore and strengthen protections for clean water and wetlands.
