In a perceptive look at this trend the other day, Mireya Navarro and Sindya Bhandoo of the New York Times reported that there are now more than two hundred “green” public and private schools around the country-- with at least 11 traditional and charter schools having been established in the last six years just in New York City.
The first such school in Big Apple was the High School for Environmental Studies, which opened its doors on Manhattan’s west side in 1992. It was hoped that this school would become a model for urban environmental education and, in many ways, that wish is being fulfilled.
With the support of the non-profit Friends of the High School for Environmental Studies and a dedicated staff of faculty and teachers, the number of applicants to the school has increased ten-fold. And if today was any indication, the HSES students are certainly getting a hands-on educational experience.
A few of my colleagues and I headed up to the High School for Environmental Studies this morning to see New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo treat the students to a quick lesson in environmental problem-solving.
We entered the beautiful art deco auditorium on the 6th floor. It was filled with students who were buzzing with excitement. (The students, I bet, were both genuinely excited about the prospect of hearing from the Attorney General Cuomo and thrilled by the change in their daily classroom schedule occasioned by the high level visit.)
I was ushered into a side room to meet their proud Principal, Shirley Matthews, who moments later got the assembly underway.
The primary purpose of the gathering was for Attorney General Cuomo to announce that he and his staff had reached groundbreaking settlements with five upstate health care facilities to curb their disposal of pharmaceuticals into local waterways.
This was a newsworthy and welcome announcement because the improper disposal of pharmaceuticals – both prescription and non-prescription drugs – has emerged in recent years as one of the most worrisome long-term threats to the nation’s drinking water supply. And the five facilities in question here were all located in within the Catskill/Delaware watershed, which provides unfiltered drinking water to nine million downstate New Yorkers.
The settlements require the five healthcare facilities to immediately end their discharges of pharmaceutical wastes into waterways within the Catskill/Delaware watershed and to make arrangements with waste management facilities for the safe disposal of their unused pharmaceuticals.
In another innovative aspect of the settlement, the facilities all agreed to create “take back programs” so that people living in the area of these health care facilities could drop off their unused pharmaceuticals at the facilities and be assured that such wastes would be disposed of properly.
Attorney General Cuomo -- who had the students laughing and cheering when he described his initial “fear” of meeting Principal Matthews -- painted a broad theme that connected the day’s news with New York State’s history of progressivism on issues like occupational safety and environmental protection.
The Attorney General’s first-rate staff, who helped make today’s precedent-setting settlement possible, stayed out of the limelight, but deserve our thanks. They include attorneys Mylan Dinerstein, Katherine Kennedy, Phil Bein and scientists Charlie Silver and Peter Washburn.
I was given a few moments to address the assembly. I talked about the growing evidence from around the country that pharmaceuticals -- antibiotics, anti-depressants, chemotherapy drugs, steroids, stimulants, hormones and so forth – were now being detected in very small amounts in many of the nation’s waterways. And I warned of the risk that even low levels of these drugs could pose over long periods of time to public health and natural resources.
Still, I noted that New York City’s drinking water today remained high in quality and in full compliance with state and federal health standards. Attorney General Cuomo hit the right note in his press release: “Today’s announcement is a preventative step toward stemming an emerging threat to New York’s safe and high quality drinking water supply.”
To be sure, there is much to do to fully resolve the threat posed by improper pharmaceuticals in waterways. For more info on the nationwide problems posed by pharmaceuticals, take a look at this excellent article by Bottlemania author Elizabeth Royte and at the well-documented U.S. Senate testimony of my colleague, NRDC Senior Scientist Jennifer Sass.
The Obama Administration has recently taken a series of steps to ratchet up the federal role in safeguarding human health and the environment from this threat.
Here’s hoping that in New York, today’s settlements will prove to be a model that can be followed by other health care facilities around the state and that today’s settlements will lend further momentum to the nationwide effort to curtail this worrisome threat to our rivers, streams, reservoirs and other ecological resources.
David Carpenter, Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany, was the final speaker. He capped off the official presentation in fine style.
When the presentations were concluded and the assembly dismissed, members of the press swarmed forward from the rear of the auditorium to surround the Attorney General. They shot questions at him in rapid fire.
Here we were at the High School for Environmental Studies. But all the tough questions were being directed, not at the students, but at State’s Attorney General. Now that’s what I call educational reform.
]]>But no -- the big crowd outside of Stuyvesant High School Tuesday night was there for less glamorous but more weighty reasons.
They came to a 5:00 pm rally, to listen to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stinger, New York City Council Environmental Chair Jim Gennaro and others warn of the risks of proposed industrial gas drilling on lands within the city's Catskill and Delaware water supply watersheds.
And they came to testify at State Department of Environmental Conservation's only New York City hearing on an ill-advised gas drilling proposal that represents the #1 threat to the downstate drinking water supply -- and indeed to other public water supplies around the state.
Councilman Gennaro -- the City's Paul Revere of drinking water protection -- was the first public official to speak out, more than a year ago, against the state's plan to allow hundreds if not thousands of new gas drilling wells on upstate lands, including those near streams and rivers that feed New York City's Catskill and Delaware system reservoirs.
This year, Borough President Stringer picked up the bugle and has been assembling a growing band of elected officials and citizen allies to call upon Albany to reverse course. It was Stringer and his staff who organized the successful rally on Tuesday and secured permission to host the event directly in front of the high school itself.
The political reinforcements were on display -- both at the outdoor rally and at the public hearing, which began in Stuyvesant's beautiful auditorium at 6:30PM.
Among the elected officials (or their representatives) who spoke up on behalf protecting the downstate water supply - with most calling for an outright prohibition on gas drilling in the New York City watershed and many suggesting that additional protections were needed for upstate water supplies as well - were the following:
Borough President Scott Stinger
Councilmember Jim Gennaro
Congresssman Jerry Nadler
Councilmember Jessica Lappin
Councilmember Dan Garodnick
Councilmember-elect Margaret Chin
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney
State Senator Tom Duane
State Senator Liz Krueger
Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal
State Senator Dan Squadron
Assemblyman Micah Kellner
Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick
Assemblyman James Brennan
City Comptroller Bill Thompson
The crowd at the rally and the public hearing was both loud and overwhelmingly opposed to the State's gas drilling proposal.
The lead-off speaker at the hearing was New York City Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler. His encouraging statement suggested that the Bloomberg Administration could soon be joining the call for a prohibition on gas drilling within city watershed boundaries. (Before taking such action, however, the Administration is awaiting the results of a consultants' study - due back in December.)
The Deputy Mayor was interrupted by a man who made his way onto the stage and shouted his support for a "statewide ban" on gas drilling - a view that was shared by others in audience.
Stringer and Gennaro were up next. Their strong statements warning of dangers to the city's water supply from the state gas drilling proposal received rousing cheers.
The environmental community was out in force as well.
Kate Sinding, NRDC's lead attorney on the New York gas drilling campaign, was one of several speakers who pooh-poohed the recently announced pledge by the President of Chesapeake Energy Corporation that the company would not press ahead with drilling now on city watershed lands. In Kate's testimony, she said that the Chesapeake promise "does nothing to reduce the need for the state to impose a permanent, legally-binding ban that applies to all companies seeking to operate in the New York City watershed and similarly vulnerable areas."
Representatives of Riverkeeper, Catskill Mountainkeeper, Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, NYPIRG, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, NYH2O, Citizen's Campaign for the Environment, Theodore Gordon Flyfishers and other environmental groups also testified and presented a host of reasons for concern/alarm with the draft environmental impact statement prepared by the State DEC.
It was encouraging to see the large number of city (and upstate) residents who turned out to register their dismay with the state's proposal. The Stuyvesant auditorium reportedly holds 850 people and when the hearing got underway, the vast majority of the seats were filled.
A sizeable number of speakers and attendees voiced their opinion that the state should implement an outright statewide ban on industrial gas drilling.
The hearing stretched long into the night. Well over 100 speakers took the mike (we'll report the exact figure in our next post.) All but a handful opposed the state's gas drilling plan.
Like previous hearings held upstate by DEC, the vast majority of those who testified were making their voices heard in opposition to the Paterson Administration's current policy direction. (See reports from the other hearings on the website of Catskill Mountainkeeper.)
Many speakers and audience members requested that, in view of the more than 800 pages in the draft environmental statement and the complex and technical nature of the proposal, DEC should extend the public comment period from December 30, 2009 to February 28, 2010.
(Each speaker who testified at the hearing was limited to 5 minutes. A giant hour-glass was projected onto a screen on stage. It kept track of time to the hundredth of a second. When five minutes were up, the screen turned red and the next speaker was called.)
The guy who had the toughest job of the night was Stu Gruskin, the State DEC Executive Deputy Commissioner, who served as the agency's official representative at the hearing. Stu, a genuinely nice guy and dedicated public servant, listened dutifully to the testimony, while taking notes on his computer.
But whether the State DEC and the Paterson Administration will respond to the overwhelming public sentiment and change its approach - at least without considerable additional pressure -- is still very much an open question.
Similar to the New York-Philadelphia World Series, it was a night filled with cheering, catcalls and controversy. But unlike the recently concluded baseball contest, residents of both cities could lose if their watersheds are not protected from the multiple threats posed by industrial gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.
]]>