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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

If he owned the property where this was done (or at least as close as you can own to the water mark) would it have made a difference?

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Water gets really complicated, legally, going back to the Romans. Water being on your property doesn’t really mean much. Imagine if you were allowed to buy 100 feet next to a river and damn it, for example.

> damn it

Curses and hexes are not prohibited by the law. If you want to damn a river, damn it. You don't even need to buy the land first.

lol, touché

This has become my favorite comment on hn

But it may open you to excommunication from the religious power in your area. Using hexes and curses might get you burned at the stake

Yeah! curse the water and the locals show up with torches and pitchforks, dont ask how I know...

On a related note:

to those who say "it's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness" I say "Damn the darkness!"

Legally, probably. I don't know the laws around environmental protection in that area so there may still have been a violation but it appears he was convicted here for violation of property rights as this is public land. But this whole situation is more about the property rights and how the lake here will be used for recreation rather than ecological concerns if I'm reading correctly.

Boils down to: if they want to make an example out of you, they will find some way to do so.

What do you mean by this? If they just wanted to make an example out of him then he gave them a very easy way to "find" to do so, considering we are observing it via satellite maps.

Oh you know, the big bad government just going after The Small Guy (oddly the one who openly flaunted laws)

I’m no lawyer, but I bet it would at least require a permit. The county would review it, make you do studies to see if it would be bad. It’d take years, and nobody would be able to prove that it would hurt the ecology of the river, or inconvenience any downstream users, so it would be a judgement call. The county would deny your permit application for no good reason, and you’d have to go to court over it. After years of motions, rulings, and appeals, it would end up in the Supreme Court where they would rule that the EPA can’t veto this particular project because the river doesn’t cross state lines and the EPA was only given permission by Congress to regulate those waterways which are shared between states. It would take another year before the permit was actually approved. After all, what is a government for except to get in a man’s way?

Or it'd go the same way it does for just about every person doing something on own their land. It might involve a permit but would most likely would not involve the supreme court and everybody would be just fine as evidenced by the huge number of people who have already built things on their land/water and the vast majority of people would be better off for it and grateful that there's some kind of oversight to make sure that people aren't doing something that will fuck up the things we all use/depend on.

Even if someone is lucky enough to own land with a river running through it I'm pretty glad that somebody will "get in a man's way" if that man decides to do something like dump heavy metals into the river with abandon or dam it up without any consideration for those further downstream. I'm also glad that the somebody doing the job is ultimately working for the public and that voters who can decide to increase/decrease the amount of oversight as needed. The majority of the US population feels that the government isn't doing enough to protect the environment.

> I’m no lawyer, but I bet it would at least require a permit

In May last year, SCOTUS significantly narrowed the definition of “waters of the United States” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackett_v._Environmental_Pro... - so some of these cases which would have required a federal permit (EPA or Army Corps of Engineers) may no longer require one.

Whether a state/county/municipal permit is required is a completely separate question - it is a matter of state and local law, which varies from state to state and locality to locality

I was being facetious, of course. Most permit applications do not end up in court cases, let alone in the Supreme Court. But that is the very case I was referring to.

However, that case did not narrow the definition of the phrase “waters of the United States” at all. No, it merely prevented the EPA from widening it over time. Keep in mind that the Sackett’s property does not actually contain a wetland or navigable waterway; it just has a ditch that occasionally channels rainwater away from their lawn. This returns us to the definition that the EPA decided on in the 1970s and 1980s.

> However, that case did not narrow the definition of the phrase “waters of the United States” at all. No, it merely prevented the EPA from widening it over time.

SpaceX had requested a wetland reclamation permit from USACE for expansion of their launch site in Texas; in 2022 (a year before SCOTUS decided this case) they withdrew the application [0], exactly why is unclear, but it seems they concluded that bureaucratic process was unlikely to produce the result they wanted. Possibly, under this decision, the wetland (tidal flats actually) they wanted to reclaim is no longer “waters of the United States”, in which case they might be able to go ahead without the permit. If that’s the case, then in practice the definition really has been narrowed

[0] https://www.tpr.org/environment/2022-04-07/army-corps-of-eng...

That’s a sound pragmatic decision, considering that the Sackett case was filed in 2008 and only got through the Supreme Court in 2023.

Nope. Just because you own land doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. Especially with wetlands. Ecologically, they are extremely important and usually fragile.

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