significant nexus

Perspective for your consideration …What does it look like when it’s fixed…?

A county exploits a crippled Clean Water Act …Published on Friday, August 22, 2008 9:02 AM PDT …The federal Water Pollution Control Amendments of 1972 have gone from being a powerful tool created by the Nixon administration to prevent and enforce anti-pollution laws at the state and federal level to an excuse to avoid enforcement by cities and counties across the West-including Pima County. … Better known as the Clean Water Act, it boasts statutory authority to control pollution discharges regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, state and regional agencies, as well as to oversee the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' job of issuing permits to keep waters flowing. …The breakdown is a result of United States v. Rapanos, a Supreme Court decision in June 2006 that addressed the Clean Water Act's ability to protect wetlands that had uncertain connections to bodies of water. The court case addressed the corps' authority under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to regulate wetlands. …The Rapanos decision resulted in a strange split reflective of the politics of the court. Four members of the court wanted the old authority of the act to apply; four wanted a restrictive interpretation that said that the water had to be flowing for the act to regulate. Justice Anthony Kennedy insisted that there needed to be a "significant nexus" between a streambed and "a navigable water of the United States."

What it looks like when it’s fixed for me, is …. We will choose not to permit anyone exploiting “loopholes” in measures we all had an honest hand in promulgating and implementing. It is understandable the so-called … clean water act … has been reduced to a joke as we have summarily turned our head as its precepts are trampled every day.

In our never ending search for what some label – exactitude – we allow common sense to be rendered inapplicable. We blindly allow others to affix labels such as exactitude to situations, which in fact we are aware that label promotes only vagueness allowing for the inexactitude for which they were honestly searching.

We have fallen in love with “word-smithing” wherein those skilled in the art of manipulation of language skillfully ponder how to pose any situation so as to produce or generate the emotional result intended. Once simple statements such as … she wore a red dress, become in the hands of those we label articulate, multiple page manuscripts, which upon reading we are unable to decipher that she even wore a dress, let alone the color.

We choose to cloak everything in ponderous words because “they” say it must be so. Truly, it need not be. Humans are capable of comprehending the truth of any situation, we have for eons and without the requirement things be reduced to – exactitude – as determined by others. We are truly capable of determining for ourselves what is true. True for us that is, which is, in reality, all we can expect…? Truth is determined accordance to the truth as we know it and believe it to be. The truth, then, is at best subjective.

This is what the "significant nexus” in this instance looks like for me when it’s fixed.