The high court unanimously ruled that Florida didn’t prove Georgia’s overconsumption of water caused the collapse of the Sunshine State’s oyster fisheries.
Oyster harvesters set out early in the Florida Panhandle’s Apalachicola Bay in 2016. (Taimy Alvarez/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, File)
(CN) In a unanimous decision Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant Florida’s request for a decree limiting Georgia’s use of water from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin, putting an end to a decades-long fight between the states over water centered on their respective fishing and agricultural industries.
In a 9-page opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied Florida’s request for a decree that would have capped Georgia’s water consumption and rejected arguments that the Peach State uses more than its fair share of water.
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Before it was pumped, leveed, and paved, south Florida looked like a network of spongy wetlands. Over the course of about a century, those damp lowlands were transformed into a paradise for more than 9 million people, complete with a bustling tourism industry and trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Now, the flattest state in the union is uniquely threatened by sea-level rise: the lower third of the state could be submerged in just a few generations. The ocean is threatening to turn paved paradise back into a sponge.