Blan Holman, Southern Environmental Law Center

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Zack Williams

Outdoors, Wilderness, Sports, Fishing, Outdoor, Hunting, Sports & Recreation

4.6 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2019

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Epic floods due to the filling and draining of wetlands, duck numbers falling, fisheries collapsing, federal flood insurance $25 billion in debt, water pollution at levels not seen since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 – and all this before the recent floods in the Midwest. The common denominator is our failure to protect U.S. wetlands and rivers and streams. Yet the administration is considering a revised rule eliminating wetlands and stream protections under the Clean Water Act. Hal talks to Blan Holman, a lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center who specializes in water law, to try and make sense of it all.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome back. This is Hal Herring with Backcountry Hunters and Anglers podcast and blast.
0:06.9	If you hear for the first time, well thanks for coming. So I'm introducing this podcast today.
0:12.4	I'm recording this on just gotten back from South Dakota
0:17.2	where we're snow geese hunting a little bit in a in the spring season and
0:21.9	driving back through the epic flood season of 2019 and it was really born home
0:31.6	to everybody on this hunt,
0:34.4	just how many wetlands and how much losses we had had
0:40.3	in filling wetlands and channelizing creeks through that agricultural country there,
0:45.0	which had led, in large part, was responsible for the floods that we're seeing now.
0:51.0	These floods come in on 2019, they came in on 2018, they were the flood
0:56.1	season in 2016. I'd all way back, as far as I can remember, into the 90s. 2012 was a big year. We've managed to bankrupt or completely
1:09.2	empty the federal flood insurance years after years the economic effects of this are
1:14.6	insane not to mention the hardships that people are dealing with with six feet of
1:19.6	mud and water in their houses. This podcast is going to be about water and water issues.
1:29.6	And I'd like to go ahead and preface this by during the Obama administration they wrote
1:37.8	the waters of the US rule which in the wake of two Supreme Court cases you could look these up if you're interested
1:45.9	at Swank, SWANCC and Rapanos, or the two decisions made by the Supreme Court that kind of gave a haircut or a trim to the Clean
1:56.7	Water Act as it was being implemented across the country.
2:01.6	D'Art Swank and Ragnan's cases threw into limbo or into an uncertainty whether ephemeral streams,
2:10.7	those are streams that run after snow melt or during rainy seasons, or isolated
2:16.2	wetlands such as prairie potholes where 50% of all of our ducks are bred in the United States. The Prairie Pot Hole region being Minnesota,
2:25.3	North Dakota, South Dakota, Eastern Montana. It was so much confusion over the implementation and the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act that during the Obama administration they came up with what was called the waters of the U rule which pretty much re-established some of the protections
	...

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