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Wet, yes. Wetland? No.

Ornamental ponds and golf-course water hazards are nice, but they're no substitute for the valued wetlands that have been destroyed.

Dig a hole in your back yard and fill it with water. Outgoing Secretary of Interior Gale Norton might send you a letter of commendation for adding to the nation's wetlands. And that is no joke.

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.

"A significant amount of the increase has been in ponds," Norton said. "People like having ponds as an amenity. . . . Even ponds that are not a high quality of wetlands are better than not having wetlands."

It would be hard to find anyone with expertise in such environmental matters to agree with that statement. The wetlands report issued by Norton and Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns "diminishes the significance" of natural wetlands loss, which has led to "fewer waterfowl, diminished wildlife in general, less flood protection, less seafood and lower water quality," said Don Young. And he's no wild-eyed environmentalist but executive vice president of the prohunting group Ducks Unlimited.

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.

We shouldn't be surprised at hearing such hooey from Norton. When she looks at Florida's Gulf Coast, she dreams of offshore drilling rigs. To her, majestic purple mountains are to be mined and the fruited plain is so much grazing land for cattle. (Each cow, we suppose, creates a valued wetland hourly.)

So sorry, Secretary Norton, but the water hazard on the Eighth fairway that keeps eating golf balls doesn't count as a wetland.

[Last modified April 1, 2006, 00:55:17]