Jon Devine's Blog: Living Sustainably

Fearing For Our Fuel-Feathered Friends

2010-05-06T17:22:10Z

I read a weird news item about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill today. Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is “considering partnering with the Department of Corrections to train prisoners to help clean birds that may be impacted by the oil.” Am I alone in thinking that this planning represents a fairly stark acknowledgement that the spill is going to be bad news for a lot of birds?

I like to brag that I am a published ornithologist, having been generously listed by a college professor of mine as a co-author on a paper he produced based on Savannah Sparrow data that some other students and I helped collect. But this is not a post by a scientist; for that, you should have a look at the pieces produced by many of my truly qualified colleagues writing on this disaster. Rather, this is a post by someone who, as a three year-old 37 years ago, insisted on being served dinner in a nest constructed of pillows under the table, and on being told that the evening’s meatloaf was in fact birdseed. I am a lifelong and unabashed bird guy, and I am terrified about what’s about to happen to them in the Gulf.

Apparently, one of the places that the spill is likely to hit first is the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, which was established by President Teddy Roosevelt and which today is teeming with all kinds of sea birds, from pelicans to terns to wading birds. (As an aside, can anyone name me something cooler in nature than seeing shorebirds, of many different species, flying at high rates of speed in a flock that blocks the sun, banking and diving together as though they’re physically joined to one another? Absolutely incredible.) NRDC’s team visited there yesterday, and you can immediately notice the incredible number and diversity of birds in just a brief video they posted online.

Wherever this spill goes, it is bad news for the bird species that come in contact with it. Oil-coated feathers are less useful for flying or swimming and are poor buffers against temperature extremes. The oil can be toxic to the critters that birds prey upon, and eating oil-contaminated prey can also cause long-term harm to birds. Also, as my colleague David Pettit recently wrote, the wetlands that serve as the home and breeding ground for numerous birds are particularly susceptible to oil damage and particularly hard to get clean.

And talk about a cleaning challenge – the International Bird Rescue Research Center has an informative, if incredibly dispiriting, summary of what is involved with cleaning a single bird. Speaking as someone who has wrestled with relatively small birds, I promise you it is extraordinarily difficult to take a bird (which – in a panic – will often poop or puke on you), and manipulate it. I can only imagine how hard it will be to adequately clean an oiled bird.

So, the important thing in the coming days and weeks will be to try to minimize the degree to which birds come in contact with the oil. I am sure this will be hard using containment structures like floating booms, especially since birds – you might have heard this – fly.

NRDC and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have a wonderful website – WeLoveBirds.org -- bringing together birders from all over. The site already has a couple of posts about the spill, and one can post photos and videos online there. For those of us who love birds and are concerned about the spill’s effects on them, I urge anyone with anything to share with the larger birding community to visit there and do so.

(Photo courtesy USFWS.)

Earth Day (plus 7) and Your Water

2010-04-29T15:00:03Z

This is my what’s-up-with-water-on-Earth-Day post. Alas, it is a few days late, but every day is Earth Day, right? Truthfully, every day is a day with too much on the to-do list, and this one slipped. Anyhoo, please forgive the delay.

On Earth Day each year, a bevy of media stories remind Americans that rivers used to catch on fire and raw sewage floated around major cities. I am just as happy as the next environmentalist to honor Earth Day, but what I really like to celebrate is the law that stopped the fires and got rid of the sewage: the Clean Water Act.

Both the law and Earth Day grew out of the same spirit 40 years ago: a realization that pollution was pummeling our environment and a belief that we could stop it.

Four decades later, I use the Clean Water Act every day in my work, and I am awed by what it has accomplished. Yet there are days where I want to pull my hair out because I see entire classes of pollution get a free pass under the law, or critical water bodies being denied its protection.

Like anyone or anything nearing 40, it’s worth asking whether the Clean Water Act has lived up to its potential. Not quite, but it’s done a lot. The Act has transformed the way Americans view water. We used to treat water bodies like big wet trashcans--free and convenient places to dump everything from oil to chemicals to sewage.

The Clean Water Act changed that. By creating a legal obligation to control pollution, it put a value on the preservation of water bodies. And as water bodies got cleaner--even the famously burning Cuyahoga--Americans started to appreciate them more. People actually use the Cuyahoga, the Potomac (to which the small stream pictured below drains), the Hudson, and the Chesapeake for something other than dumping now.

The Clean Water Act accomplished this remarkable feat in two central ways. First, it prevented factories and other major sources from polluting without prior authorization--such as a permit. This requirement gives pollution control experts a chance to look at a discharging facility and insist on operating conditions that minimize pollution and consider how much pollution the receiving water body can withstand.

Second, it created technology standards--standards which ensured that as part of the cost of doing business, companies had to plan to minimize their discharges as much as possible. These standards apply no matter where you go in the country, and this “floor” of minimum control levels means that there is a consistent set of basic expectations. In other words, polluting waters in Colorado typically will mean the same thing for an industry as polluting waters in Rhode Island. This helps avoid state-shopping by companies seeking to minimize their regulatory obligations.

These mechanisms helped the Clean Water Act change the nature of how most companies interact with water resources. Yet there are still pollution problems that remain beyond the reach of the law, either because of the law’s basic structure, or because of problems that did not arise from the Act, but from misapplication of it.

In the first camp, the Clean Water Act doesn’t control diffuse sources of pollution like runoff from agricultural fields nearly as well as it deals with typical industrial and municipal facilities. This means that in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, some of the most troublesome pollutants-- phosphorous, nitrogen, sediment--go largely unregulated.

Similarly, the Act is limited in its ability to drive restoration. The law protects what we have against harm, but a whole lot of harm was inflicted before it was passed. Wetlands and floodplains--natural systems that filter and replenish water supplies--were decimated or disconnected from other parts of their watersheds, and yet the Clean Water Act doesn’t guide us in how we can revive wetlands, reconnect rivers with their floodplains, and make waterways more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

Adequately addressing these kinds of water quality stressors under the Act would improve the law greatly. For example, Congress is currently considering a Clean Water Act amendment focused on a watershed that is burdened by polluted runoff as well as conventional sources – the Chesapeake Bay – and the bill would hold states accountable for achieving necessary reductions from all sectors. This would be a welcome improvement. Congress is also weighing measures to incentivize efforts to enhance watershed resiliency; for instance, we have supported legislation to promote green infrastructure to reduce stormwater pollution from urban and suburban landscapes as well as legislation to promote planning by communities to adapt to the expected effects of climate change on water resources.

In addition to constructing these additions, policymakers who care about water should focus on the fact that the Act’s foundation also needs a big repair. As I’ve written a number of times before, the law desperately needs to be fixed to address the problems caused by two misguided Supreme Court decisions. There are now bills in both houses of Congress to do so, both of which represent compromises from prior legislative efforts in this regard, but which still retain the core aspect of restoring protections to a host of waters that have been cut out of the Act in the last decade or that are in legal limbo today. Expeditious movement on these efforts is critical.

So, there you have it – the Clean Water Act on Earth Day (well, a week after). It’s still an amazing law, even as it prepares to enter middle age, but we shouldn’t shy away from improvements that will make it effective into its golden years.

Blind Justices

2010-03-01T18:02:12Z

When I was applying to law schools, I remember writing that I wanted to become a lawyer, rather than a scientist, because that’s where the action was – lawyers would actually make environmental policy. This was ridiculously small-minded of me, and over the course of my career I have come to learn that the worlds of science and policy are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, not everyone learned this lesson -- today’s New York Times has a compelling story of what happens when a bunch of lawyers (in this case, five members of the United States Supreme Court) ignore science.

As I have written here, here, here, here, here, and here, the Clean Water Act – our country’s chief safeguard against water pollution – has been broken by a pair of Supreme Court decisions that suggest the law as it is currently written cannot protect certain kinds of water bodies. The decisions upset the longstanding rule that protected water bodies broadly, including wetlands and other “non-navigable” water bodies that are not connected to other surface waters, as well as a host of small streams (such as ones that do not flow year-round).

That principle was based on basic science -- so basic, in fact, that when I told my then 7- or 8-year-old son what I was working on, he was dumbstruck by the idea that it would be okay to pollute smaller headwaters, given their obvious relationship to the rest of the watershed. Scientists tell us that wetlands, even so-called “isolated” ones, curtail flooding, filter polluted runoff, provide critical habitat for a host of critters, and recharge underground drinking water sources. The smaller streams in the upper reaches of watersheds perform similar functions, and their destruction or pollution has predictable results for downstream waters.

The Supreme Court’s contrary approach was wrong on the law – the decisions overturned previously settled understandings that were faithful to the Act and to how Congress intended it to operate, and that prior interpretation had served the nation well for most of three decades. But the decisions were even worse on the facts; when the Court ignored elementary school science in favor of a legalistic reading, it forced pollution control officials to go through a time- and resource-intensive process to prove that a given water body has a significant enough relationship to a “navigable” one before protecting it. The practical result has been that thousands of water bodies have been cast aside as unprotected, as NRDC and a number of other conservation groups described in a pair of reports, available here and here.

Thankfully, as the Times describes today, there is a ready solution. The Supreme Court said that its decisions were based on the language of the Clean Water Act -- language that Congress can change. A bill called the Clean Water Restoration Act is pending in Congress right now; it would restore protections to the kinds of water bodies that the law previously protected and that today are in limbo. A compromise version of the bill has already passed a key Senate committee thanks to the leadership of Chairman Boxer and Senators Baucus and Klobuchar. The House of Representatives needs to act next, and the Chairman of the relevant House committee, Representative James Oberstar of Minnesota, has vowed to move companion legislation to fix the problem. You can help, by telling Chairman Oberstar that you support moving now to finally fix the law, and by getting in touch with your own representative to urge him or her to support a fix. Please do.

We need to make ourselves heard on this because there are powerful political forces working against it. Several industries that historically have been regulated by the Clean Water Act have lined up to oppose the bill, and have orchestrated a scheme to try to convince Congress to ignore the scientific need to correct the legal problem. As the Times reports:

“The game plan is to emphasize the scary possibilities,” said one member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, which has fought the legislation and is supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Home Builders and other groups representing industries affected by the Clean Water Act.

“If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards,” said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.

Let’s hope that our leaders in Congress can see through the scare tactics to the scary scientific fact that failing to protect our critical water bodies will hurt public health and the environment.

Money Talks, But Does It Swim?

2010-02-02T20:01:00Z

President Obama put forward his proposed budget yesterday, which provides a rare opportunity to look at how the whole federal government is organized and what priorities our leaders see for investments. On the whole, I think those of us who care about safe and sufficient water should be generally pleased with the administration’s direction, especially in the current economic context, but we also should call out a couple of missteps that the budget contains. For present purposes, I’ve focused on EPA’s clean water initiatives; a summary of the agency’s budget priorities can be found here.

First things first – EPA’s budget has to be viewed against the backdrop of the country’s fiscal troubles and the recent history of environmental funding. Even in the best economic times, crafting the budget involves hard choices. But today, when so many people are hurting, it is certainly understandable that the administration will want to make some cuts to programs, even ones that many of us support. Moreover, even when the reductions contained in this budget proposal are taken into account, many programs will receive funding vastly above the amounts allotted to the same programs in the Bush administration.

That said, I’m concerned by the reductions proposed for the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water state revolving funds (each would take a $100 million hit, so that the overall amount would be reduced from $3.5 billion (FY 2010 enacted) to $3.3 billion). Investments in infrastructure not only help ensure cleaner, more useable streams and other waters, and help utilities provide essential drinking water; they also create jobs, which we sorely need. Cutting these funds is disappointing, as the unmet infrastructure need is enormous. That’s why the Green Budget, which is compiled by a number of conservation groups, recommends funding these programs at a level of $4.5 billion.

We do, however, appreciate the administration's proposal to provide that 20 percent of the funding provided under the revolving funds should be directed to projects such as green infrastructure and water efficiency. This recognizes that such investments have multiple benefits and can actually reduce infrastructure costs.

Apart from the big-ticket item of infrastructure investments, there are a number of other programs worth considering:

The President’s proposal would increase EPA’s funding for activities and regulatory improvements to help restore the Chesapeake Bay (specifically, it would increase the level by $13 million to $63 million). This is welcome; the Chesapeake is a critical resource and it desperately needs federal leadership and action to ensure that nutrient and sediment pollution are brought under control.
Funding to improve the Great Lakes would be cut substantially (from $475 million last year to $300 million), which is unfortunate; the administration has supported a 10-year, $5 billion plan to restore the Great Lakes. More troublingly, even though the administration indicates that they will steer enhanced resources to “fighting incursion of Asian Carp,” a clear plan is need to ensure that this money is spent on establishing a permanent, long-term solution that will prevent the Asian carp from establishing itself in the Great Lakes. For more detail, please check out the blog post my colleague Thom Cmar recently wrote about the need for real and immediate action.
The proposal to direct $17 million in new funding to an EPA program focused on reducing nutrient pollution from runoff in the Mississippi River basin is intriguing. If done well, it could dovetail with the Department of Agriculture’s Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative. Although these efforts are only just a beginning, it is critical that we start to rigorously implement and evaluate landscape management practices that could help address a long-neglected problem -- nutrient pollution and the resulting Gulf of Mexico "Dead Zone," an issue I have discussed previously.
EPA also addresses the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in its budget materials, but its discussion is dispiriting. The agency essentially promises continued permit-by-permit negotiations with the Army Corps of Engineers and mine operators over the scope and impact of proposed mines and waste dumps. What we need, however, is fundamental policy change – we need EPA and its sister agencies to act now to revise their regulations and get out of the business of authorizing the destruction of America’s waterways with mining waste.

New EPA Report Highlights Threats to America's Lakes

2009-12-18T22:15:42Z

Most summers, my family rents a house near Little Sebago Lake in Maine for a week. It’s a fantastic escape from the daily grind – we kayak, we swim, we go tubing, we fish, and I get out and go birding. (This area is home to lots of cool birds, including the common loon. IMHO, it is absolutely impossible to get bored no matter how long you stare at such a bird, and no matter how little it does during that time.)

But most of all, we decompress. Lakes are good for that – they’re often calm and quiet, and they let you be the same.

Unfortunately, there’s some disquieting news about the nation’s lakes. Today, EPA released its draft National Lakes Assessment, an attempt to document the physical, chemical, and biological state of our lake resources, by conducting in-depth sampling at roughly 900 lakes. While I will try to resist lake-based puns about EPA’s conclusions (“not every pond is golden,” “not every lake is great,” you get the idea), my read of the report leads me to conclude that the mental image I have when someone mentions the word “lake” – a clear, pristine water body – might often be wrong.

The agency and its partners (a host of state and tribal resource agencies) deserve our thanks for completing this survey. After all, knowing what our problems are will help us identify solutions. And the report does this well – a couple of important stressors to lakes emerge from the information presented, and fortunately there are ready solutions to these problems.

Too Much of a Good Thing – Nutrient Pollution

First, the data show a serious problem with nutrient pollution into lakes, with important implications for public health and for wildlife. Across the country, 42 percent of lakes are in “fair” or “poor” condition based on phosphorus concentrations, and 46 percent are “fair” or “poor” for nitrogen. Although it may sound like the diet you wish your kids would follow, too many nutrients are no good for aquatic ecosystems As EPA says, “[l]akes with excess nutrients are two-and-a-half-times more likely to have poor biological health.”

Nutrient pollution causes algal blooms which are ugly, can produce harmful toxins, and can rob the water body of oxygen when they die and decompose. So, it should be a bad sign that nearly half the lakes sampled have less than “good” nutrient conditions, and an even worse sign that certain regions have much more serious problems. For example, in the temperate plains region (including parts of IA, ND, SD, MN, MO, KS, NE, OH, IN, IL, and WI), 62 percent of the lakes were rated “fair” or “poor” for phosphorus, and 73 percent for nitrogen. In the northern plains (including parts of ND, SD, MT, WY, and NE), 78 and 91 percent of lakes were “fair” or “poor” for phosphorus and nitrogen, respectively. Not surprisingly, lakes in these areas also posed higher-than-national exposure risks for cyanobacteria, a particular kind of algae that can produce toxins; in the temperate plains, 52 percent of lakes posed a moderate or high exposure risk, while 59 percent of lakes in the northern plains had such risks.

Controlling nutrient pollution would reduce these risks to lakes and also clean up other aquatic ecosystems that are suffering the ill effects of nutrient-induced algal growth and oxygen depletion, such as the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. There are lots of technologies in use by responsible wastewater treatment plants, stormwater managers, and farmers across the country that effectively reduce nutrient pollution, but those approaches are not being applied consistently enough to protect our waterways. Examples are biological nutrient removal by wastewater treatment plants, use of native plants and other landscaping that needs less fertilization by municipalities, and use of cover crops and stream buffers by farmers.

Maybe Clear-cutting the Lakefront Lot for that Cottage Isn’t the Best Idea – Shoreline Disturbance

Nutrients are actually only the second-worst problem for lakes, according to the EPA draft report. The thing that adversely affects the greatest percentage of lakes nationwide, it says, is degraded lakeshore habitat. When EPA looked at the amount and type of vegetation on the shoreline of the country’s lakes, it found that 54 percent of lakes had “fair” or “poor” lakeshore habitat condition. Relatedly, the agency reported that 65 percent of lakes were moderately or highly disturbed by human activity.

Disturbing natural vegetation and landscapes has well-known harmful effects. The EPA report, for instance, references a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources estimate that “unbuffered developed sites contribute five times more runoff, seven times more phosphorus and 18 times more sediment to a lake than the naturally forested sites.”

Again, however, there are solutions at hand. The key strategy to dealing with the harms that development can cause to water resources is green infrastructure – the use of techniques like rain gardens, porous pavement, water reuse, green roofs, and more to mimic the natural hydrology of developed sites. EPA’s report even makes specific mention of this idea, saying that green infrastructure, or low impact development, “will contribute to groundwater recharge, improve water quality, reduce flooding, preserve habitat, and protect lake quality.”

Today’s report shows that the health of our lakes depends on taking smart action when we use the land around them and when we allow pollution to be discharged into them. It also shows that we’re not yet doing a good enough job.

New Bill Gives Americans Good Jobs and Clean Water at the Same Time

2009-12-17T20:05:57Z

On Wednesday the House of Representatives passed a jobs bill that will dedicate $2 billion for “ready-to-go” drinking water and wastewater projects -- projects that will employ engineers, construction workers, plumbers, architects, maintenance workers, and more. The House also targeted at least 20 percent of these funds for greener projects.

The clean water provisions will bring immediate relief to American workers now when they need it most AND create long-term benefits in the form of cleaner water for drinking and safer beaches for swimming.

America’s water infrastructure desperately needs these long-range investments. In cities across the nation, aging urban pipes and over-taxed sewage plants dump raw sewage and polluted stormwater right into our beaches after heavy rains.

In 2008, there were more than 20,000 days of closings and advisories at America’s vacation beaches because beachwater exceeded public health standards. Even with the closings, swimmers routinely contract rashes, diarrhea, and other GI illnesses.

The good news is that solving these problems will require the work of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Putting people to work in green jobs for water protection and conservation is just plain smart.

Green infrastructure is an excellent example. Green infrastructure – things like urban forestry, street-edge gardens, and green roofs – prevents polluted rainwater from entering drainage pipes, overflowing sewage systems, and releasing untreated sewage and toxic contaminants into our waterways.

But that’s not all. Green infrastructure also creates jobs. A $10 billion nationwide initiative to install green roofs alone would result in almost 200,000 jobs, according to an analysis by American Rivers and the Alliance for Water Efficiency.

Likewise, water efficiency is good for the environment and for employment. Using less water to accomplish the same goals decreases the stress on already burdened infrastructure. But saving water also saves energy. Collecting, distributing, and treating drinking water and wastewater nationwide consume tremendous amounts of energy and release approximately 116 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year – as much global warming pollution each year as 10 million cars.

In addition to these benefits, the Alliance for Water Efficiency reported that measures to increase water efficiency could generate between 15 and 22 jobs per million dollars invested.

Philadelphia is already beginning to reap the benefits of this kind of investment. As my colleague Nancy Stoner recently blogged about, the city is investing in green infrastructure to deal with its stormwater problem, and analysts of the city’s plan found that these green measures create more opportunities to hire local labor than conventional approaches to stormwater. Indeed, stormwater landscaping and restoration could generate more than 15,250 new entry-level green jobs, in addition to highly skilled construction positions.

Philadelphia’s investments in pocket parks, creek restoration, and green roofs will benefit all residents, not just the workers.

And the new House bill will bring these benefits of cleaner water and meaningful work to more communities around the nation. Now it’s time for the Senate to do the same. The Senate is expected to consider its own version of the bill in early 2010, and I hope our Senators remember that clean water investments will benefit all of us.

Taking Out the Trash

2009-02-12T14:39:07Z

Almost every day, I bike to work. On the bike path, I get a close-up view of the Potomac River, which makes up the boundary between Washington, D.C., and Virginia. Though it has improved dramatically since the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, the Potomac is by no means free of pollution. In addition to the contaminants you can't see so easily, below is a picture of the kind of stuff that can get carried into the Potomac when it rains.

But I don't have to travel far to realize how lucky I am to be able to see the Potomac every day. On the other side of D.C. is the Anacostia River - an 8-mile long river that flows from suburban Maryland through the District, where it joins the Potomac. The Anacostia is, according to District officials, "aesthetically and chemically polluted." I'll say -- the river does not meet applicable water quality standards for biochemical oxygen demand, bacteria, organic chemicals, metals, total suspended solids, and oil and grease. In recent years, thanks to efforts by a host of community groups including NRDC, officials in Maryland and the District officially designated the river as impaired by trash, a dubious distinction it shares with a select number of water bodies around the country.

Here are some pictures of what being impaired by trash means, courtesy of my colleague Jim Connolly at the Anacostia Watershed Society.

But today brings very good news for people sick of seeing trash floating in the Anacostia. D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells and a number of other Councilmembers are introducing the Anacostia River Cleanup and Protection Act of 2009, a bill that would do two basic things: first, it will place a nominal fee - five cents - on each single-use plastic or paper bag from a variety of stores; and second, it will take the revenue generated by the fee and put it in a fund to help pay for Anacostia cleanup, restoration, and education activities. This is a great idea - studies of trash in the Anacostia reveal that plastic bags are a major component of the trash load in the watershed, so creating an incentive to use fewer of them will help target a source of this pollution. In addition, the idea of using the money to directly address the Anacostia's problems makes perfect sense. One particular element of the program will be to help residents get reusable shopping bags, leading to a double-benefit: people don't have to pay for their bags, and throw-away bags aren't added to the waste stream. To learn more about the initiative, you can check out the website set up by the leaders of this effort.

But while this is a great step, the Anacostia won't be clean, or even trash-free, if it's adopted. The Council's bill must be part of a comprehensive solution that addresses trash pollution, along with improved recycling and street sweeping, litter law enforcement, and the use of trash traps and other equipment can be installed in storm drain inlets to catch debris. We've been working hard to make sure that the municipal sewer systems in the region will be required to undertake steps such as these as a condition of their permits to discharge into the River and its tributaries. Our friends at the Alice Ferguson Foundation also have spearheaded an effort to get local leaders to commit - in a "Trash Treaty," no less - to a trash-free Potomac watershed (including the Anacostia) by 2013, and that initiative has really advanced cooperation between jurisdictions on the trash issue.

Beyond trash pollution, the Anacostia needs our help in many ways, especially to deal with stormwater-related problems. My colleague Nancy Stoner lays out a prescription for solving the Anacostia's problems here. When we get serious about getting these important policies in place, I look forward to the experience of biking on the east side of the city as much as I already enjoy the west side.