Wetlandia: September 2015

"The world's ecosystems are capital assets."
-- Daily et al. (2000), Science

In the nineteenth century the US government deeded millions of worthless acres of wetlands to the states, hoping that states could incentivize developers to profit from wastelands. The dreams of a generation of migrants, my great-grandfather among them, led to a vast economy in stories and designs and plans spun up over these wetlands, while they lay for the most part unchanged.

Today, wetland ecosystems are defined by federal law, and their preservation and restoration under that law was the first step toward the spinning of vast dreams of capital accumulation from the very idleness of nature's unaltered states and unvalued recesses.

Wetlandia is where we all live today.

Wetlandia

Monday, September 28, 2015

Classic Jurisdictional Overreach

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