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
