Logging pollution and Clean Water Act

The Supreme Court recently ruled in an 7-1 vote (Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself) that the EPA regulations about water pollution as mandated by the Clean Water Act did not apply to sediment and other pollution from logging operations. The timber industry is rejoicing over the ruling.  But citizens should be less sanguine than industry. All the ruling demonstrates is the inadequacy of the current regulations governing pollution.

Logging operations are among the biggest sources of water pollution in the country after agriculture. And both Ag and Big Timber have friends in high places that have continued to make regulation of these pollution sources unaccountable to the public and consumers.

In arguing against limitations on such pollution, Ag and Timber, both suggest that internalizing these costs would drive up the price of food and lumber. No doubt they are correct. However, shouldn’t those enjoying the benefit of these products be paying the “real” costs to produce them?

What is happening now is that these industries are externalizing their costs. They are making other people, and the land, suffer the negative impacts of their operations. They get to keep the profits, while the rest of us pick up the tab.

It is another example of privatize profits and socialize costs. Ultimately everyone pays for this pollution. We pay higher costs to filter and treat domestic water. We pay for the recovery of many species harmed by unlimited Ag and logging pollution such as salmon, trout, and other aquatic species. We even ultimately pay by the loss in productivity of the lands as top soil is eroded away reducing the ability of farmland and timberlands to produce valuable products.

The problem is that the Clean Water Act primarily deals with what is known as “point source” pollution. In other words, you can identify a direct point of pollution—a factory pipe dumping chemical wastes directly into a river. The pollution from logging and Ag is more dispersed, and often less concentrated. It is a “non-point” source of pollution. But due to its ubiquitous nature, it is actually a far greater cause of water pollution than the collective impact of “point sources”.

This is one of the problems facing any regulatory agency. It’s easy to identify if a factory is dumping chemicals into a river, but it’s a lot harder to measure, define the source, and regulate non-point pollution sources.

The Clean Water Act has done much to reduce pollution in our Nation’s waterways. Rivers that once were little more than open sewers for domestic and industrial waste have been cleaned up.  Fish have returned. People now swim in waters that were dangerous to enter in the past.  And despite the howls of protest from industry that enforcement of the Clean Water Act would run the country into the ground, we have seen that industry and communities have adjusted.

Given the current limits of the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court probably could come to no other conclusion than to deny the appellant’s case. But that doesn’t mean it was wrong to bring the case or to try to correct the injustice.  Just because something is legal does not make it right. Slavery was legal for a long time in our country, but almost no one (except perhaps the Ku Klux Klan) would argue that slavery was a good thing.

Subsidies distort the free market. If the real costs of water pollution are included in the price we pay for farm produce and wood products, it sends a price signal to consumers. Consumers might respond by choosing crops or wood products that are produced without significant contribution to water degradation. It would level the playing field. Right now those timber producers and farmers/ranchers who are interested in protecting the environment must internalize a cost that other producers can avoid—this discourages good conservation measures.

Given the terrible cost to everyone of the on-going non-point water pollution it’s time to amend the Clean Water Act to include non-point pollution.  We are paying the price of negligence every day.

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