As federal protections for wetlands shrink, Miami restores reverence for water

Prism explored the grassroots fight to protect South Florida’s wetlands after the Supreme Court’s Sackett v. EPA decision stripped federal protections — a loss compounded in Florida, where the state took over wetland permitting in 2021 and applications promptly spiked from 1,126 to 3,556 a year. Miami Waterkeeper policy director Audrey Siu explained the stakes: “Wetlands function in the landscape like kidneys… when we take the kidneys out of the landscape, adjacent water bodies like lakes and Biscayne Bay are going to receive the impacts of that pollution.”