The Ground and the Slurry

Robert Kennedy Junior ginned up his rhetoric on HuffPo over the Supreme Court's take on wetlands and how to properly assess environmental regulations on pollution: read it here. The language is mostly boilerplate punctuated by ten-dollar words and grafted metaphors, like how a right-wing Court would "throw the Clean Water Act out with the dirty bathwater." Still, I've been hating the Court for this, too, and it's historically smart to align with a Kennedy. My guess was, even a totally blinkered, lived-in-a-hole judge would see that dumping industrial waste into an offshoot of a major river or lake would just poison the hydrological daisy chain at a thinner stem; the wreath entire would still rot through. But I misled myself! Dahlia Lithwick of Slate notes that John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (italics mine, for vitriol), asks "what words like "tributary" and "navigable" and "hydrological connection" even mean." What do they mean? Plenty, to those of us who took junior high science! A tributary, John, is a river that doesn't reach the sea and instead feeds another river. (Here I reveal my ignorance: it could also apply to rivers that meet lakes, though I think there's another term I've forgotten) Navigable, John, is straightforward - able to be navigated! Here I don the mantel of concerned citizen and say most rivers, streams, etc. are navigable, whether by foot, kayak, barge or aircraft carrier. Mm, let's not forget "hydrological connection," which even outside the context of environmental regulation is a term Americans can parse. It's the place where rivers, lakes, wetlands and other moist topo features come to rub elbows and hobnob, John! Most of the uproar over this case surrounds (rightly) the Supreme Court's ability to let polluters dump into minor streams that impact other river ecosystems in small and hard-to-quantify ways. If my treatment of the arguments is ham-handed, well, correct me; I like when I become better informed. So, here goes: pro-dumping-upstream: there's no obvious connection between a wetland and nearby streams right now, so we might as well forge ahead. Anti-dumping argument: wetlands influence nearby streams by myriad factors, including transfer of wildlife and movement of groundwater; dumping in the former would be tantamount to dumping in the latter.Forget for a moment that the removal of a wetland and replacement with at least some industrial runoff would lead us inexorably to an Erin Brockovich sequel (no one wants to see that, right?); at greater issue to me right now is the fact that John Roberts equivocated over the meaning of the word "tributary!" I don't expect him to know the precise cause of Mad Cow disease or the the various methods of stem-cell growth off the cuff. When he's hearing a case involving technical language, though, I expect him to familiarize himself with the field on which he's rendering judgement. This speaks to a pet peeve of mine - namely, the Supreme Court has too many lawyers on it! Where are the engineers, nurses, ambassadors and police officers? I know they need to be aware of legal precedent, but if we expect a lawyer to turn in an informed decision on, say, whether women should have the right to terminate pregnancies (something rabbits can do spontaneously, by the by; take that, right-to-life creationists!) then why couldn't we expect a thirty-year civil engineer to figure out legal rudiments?Bah, now I've worked myself into a lather. It'd be nice if I (or, ideally, my kids) could just jump into the clean, safe Chicago River to cool down. I guess I'm just not ready to make that hydrological connection.