Half the nation's wetlands just lost federal protection. Their fate is up to states

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Last month, a U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down federal protections for wetlands covering tens of millions of acres across the country, leaving no regulation of those areas in nearly half the states.

The court's narrowing of the Clean Water Act has left some states scrambling to enact their own safeguards and others questioning whether their regulators can handle the workload without their federal partners.

Other states, though, see the loss of federal oversight as an opportunity to roll back corresponding state laws at the behest of developers and farmers, who argue such regulations are overly burdensome.

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The court's ruling found that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency improperly claimed authority over an Idaho couple's effort to build a house on their property. The decision limits the scope of wetlands covered by the Clean Water Act to those with a continuous surface connection to a larger body of water. It also cut protections for "ephemeral" streams that only flow seasonally.

More than half of the country's 118 million acres of wetlands could be stripped from federal oversight, estimates Earthjustice, an environmental legal group. Advocates say the ruling ignores the fact that water often flows below ground, meaning unregulated wetlands could spread contamination to nearby lakes and rivers that the law does safeguard.

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