You may recall the signature line from the movie “Cool Hand Luke”: “What we have here is failure to communicate.”
What we have up in Wisconsin is “some cognitive dissension about what we think and what they think.”
That, at least, is how an enforcement officer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency frames a dispute between the EPA and the state’s cranberry growers–and wouldn’t you sort of expect an agent of the federal government to talk that way?
What the EPA thinks–as reported recently by the Tribune’s Peter Kendall–is that the growers have been violating the Clean Water Act by expanding their bogs without permission into wetlands that shouldn’t be used for growing cranberries.
What the growers think is that the EPA is being a little too fussy about tiny incursions on private land used for generations to produce a historic Thanksgiving treat–as well as satisfy a new American craving for cranberries in all imaginable forms.
Score one for the growers.
One of the missions of the EPA, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is to regulate the use of America’s wetlands, so vital in controlling stormwater, purifying runoff and providing wildlife habitat. It is a worthy mission, and the agencies should be stringent in defining the best of wetlands and guarding them–especially where they are most beneficial.
Yet in bringing the federal government down on a handful of cranberry farmers in the netherlands of Wisconsin, the agency is feeding the perception of a bureaucracy overzealous in its fixation on the letter of the law, without a dose of common sense.
At issue are expansions of a few acres in swampy areas of the state with no shortage of wetlands and that once sustained wild cranberries. Bog heaven. And though–as an EPA official pointed out–converted cranberry bogs are not exactly true wetlands, they are wetlands of a sort, and the reservoirs that sustain them also are habitats for wildlife.
If it is true that the growers skipped the Corps permit process in their expansions, shame on them for defying the rules. Yet the rules shouldn’t be so rigid in the first place that they don’t make a distinction between these wetlands and those in a region like Chicago that regularly are destroyed or hemmed in by shopping strips, homes and parking lots.
The best course would be for both sides to sit down over, say, a nice turkey dinner and work out a truce. And pass the cranberries, please.
