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Tennessee’s wetlands deserve our protection • Tennessee Lookout [1]

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Date: 2025-04-14

Wetlands? Who needs ‘em? They aren’t soaring mountain peaks offering panoramic views. They aren’t ancient trees older than the nation we live in. Yet wetlands are important. Many would say they suffer from ugly duckling syndrome compared to other natural features, but as this former farm boy will tell you, the ugliest hogs always taste the best, and things that aren’t much to look at often have the most value.

Tennessee wetlands for sale? How we got here.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Sackett v. EPA stripped federal protection from so-called “isolated” wetlands, or wetlands that lack a surface connection to other bodies of water. In addition to removing federal protections for half of the 118 million wetland acres in the U.S., the ruling set the stage for state legislatures to drastically reshape environmental policy.

Around the same time SCOTUS announced their ruling, Collierville Republican Rep. Kevin Vaughan put forth a bill that would limit state oversight on 432,850 wetland acres. That’s more than half of Tennessee’s 787,000 acres of critical wetland ecosystems. The bill targets “isolated” wetlands as identified in the SCOTUS ruling, even though such wetlands are not truly isolated, as they often share groundwater connections with essential waterways and aquifers.

Though he didn’t disclose it in the bill, Vaughan is a real estate developer who stands to benefit from reduced wetland regulation. He’s butted heads before with the state’s wetland regulating agency — the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, and he was associated with a development project in 2019 that illegally drained and filled a wetland.

In addition to TDEC voicing concerns about the bill, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) cautioned the bill could lead to an increase in flooding and that the state has suffered its wettest years in history since 2019 with flood events that caused loss of life and billions of dollars in property damage.

Wetlands are essential to Tennessee communities

Wetlands provide a bulwark against droughts and flooding. They replenish aquifers, filter groundwater, and recharge streams, rivers, and lakes. Given their biological makeup, wetlands maintain critical biodiversity and provide essential habitat for organisms that higher orders of life depend on.

Vaughan’s bill received enough pushback in 2024 to send it to a legislative summer study session. But now the bill is back, edited with a few revisions that environmental advocates say don’t pass muster. The amended bill now proposes deregulating wetlands that are less than two acres in size, which would still mean putting most of the state’s wetlands at risk.

All of Tennessee’s wetlands are essential, regardless of their size. According to George Nolan, Director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Tennessee office, “An acre of wetlands can hold more than a million gallons of water. The proposed legislation favors the interests of developers over the safety of future flood victims and pocketbooks of Tennessee taxpayers. This is no time to repeal laws that have protected our wetlands for the last 50 years.”

Other opposition groups include the Memphis advocacy organization Protect Our Aquifers and the Maryville-based Tennessee Stormwater Association (TNSA).

“There is little debate in the stormwater community about the value of wetlands as key instruments of maintaining water quality and mitigating flooding,” said Aaron Rogge, TNSA president. “This will be a major change to how the state manages its water resources, and likely one that we’ll look back on as a product of our current political climate.”

Middle Tennessee’s Harpeth Conservancy also voiced opposition by drawing up an analysis of how wetlands benefit communities. Examining just one region, the Harpeth Conservancy outlined 16,000 at-risk wetlands along Middle Tennessee’s Duck River, the state’s longest river and the most biodiverse waterway in North America. The Duck River (which 250,000 Tennesseans depend on for drinking water) relies on nearby wetlands for drought and flood mitigation. If those wetlands were destroyed, the resulting droughts and floods could devastate communities throughout the Duck River watershed.

Republican legislators are willing to risk future prosperity for short-term gain

Under Tennessee’s current regulatory framework, a developer must pay hefty mitigation fees to obtain a permit to destroy wetlands in a projected build site. The fees are then used to restore wetlands in other parts of the state, thus balancing out what is lost by a single construction project.

Though imperfect, the current model works. Development corporations operate exclusively to maximize profits and return on investment to shareholders — concerns like the health of the environment and the safety of communities are invisible on a corporation’s balance sheet. However, being required to pay hefty mitigation fees does matter, as it reduces incentives for developers to build on wetlands.

If Vaughan’s amended bill passes, it will gut wetland regulations and remove those essential financial disincentives.

Protect wetlands today, elect new leaders tomorrow

Wetlands do something even the greatest engineers could never hope to accomplish with all the tools of mankind at their disposal. They absorb flood waters at a scale that’s difficult to fathom, something all Tennesseans should care about as the state continues to experience year after year of heavy rainfall. Destroying wetlands for development may make some individuals a lot of money in the short term, but the loss of these essential lands will be felt during the rainy seasons to come.

President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “To waste and destroy natural resources is to skin and exhaust the land and undermine the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to our children.” Vaughan and his co-sponsors may care more about short-term profits than long-term prosperity, but Tennesseans of all political stripes should stand in bipartisan opposition to the piecemeal commodification of wetlands that, though some may refer to them as the metaphorical “ugly hog in the barn,” nevertheless provide us with as much value as the most breathtaking Tennessee landscapes.













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[1] Url: https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/04/14/tennessees-wetlands-deserve-our-protection/

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