The Amazing EPA and Gail Norton

One of Norton's last acts in office (she recently announced her resignation) was to brag that for the first time in more than 50 years, the nation had an overall gain of wetlands. Although a half-million acres of natural wetlands have been destroyed, 700,000 acres of artificial wetlands have been added.

And what replaced those swamps, marshes and salt flats that are the incubators of life and natural water filters? Norton counts golf course water hazards, ornamental ponds and wastewater treatment lagoons among the legitimate substitutes for nature.

Even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has destroyed more than its share of wetlands, doesn't think such ponds should count. "They may have wetland attributes but they're not, generally speaking, what we like to see as wetland mitigation," John Hall, who once ran the corps' Florida regulatory division, told the St. Petersburg Times.

St. Pete Times article

Palm Beach Post article that includes some sad info on the lowering of the arsenic standards of our water supply