Jon Devine's Blog: Reviving the World's Oceans

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.)

Internal Watchdog Says EPA Must Get Busy Protecting Waterways from Nutrient Pollution

2009-09-01T15:19:18Z

I recently attended a conference about the health of the Mississippi River, and I was struck by a compelling analogy my colleague Matt Rota of the Gulf Restoration Network used to describe the giant Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The Dead Zone is a massive area in the Gulf where nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus, primarily) from the Mississippi fuel biological processes that suck much of the oxygen out of the bottom layer of water. These nutrients come from agricultural runoff, lawn fertilizers, sewage treatment plants, industrial livestock operations, and other sources.

Matt's analogy went something like this: imagine if there were a gas cloud that covered an area of the U.S. as big as the state of New Jersey that would cause all of the critters that lived there to flee or die of asphyxiation. People would see it as an obvious environmental crisis and demand action, and the government would surely step in, right?

Right, but apparently not so much when the problem is offshore.

This week brought news that the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to treat the Dead Zone, which in some summers is in fact as big as the Garden State, and which forces fish and other aquatic animals to run or swim for their lives, is not being treated like the critical problem it is.

This declaration came from the EPA's own internal (but independent) investigator, the Office of Inspector General. The IG issued a report that sharply criticized the agency's failures to take the lead in establishing numeric limits for nutrient pollution into critical waterways.

Under the Clean Water Act, States ordinarily take the lead in setting standards for their water bodies, a process that involves figuring out what kinds of uses each waterway should support (like fishing, water contact recreation, and drinking water supply), and then setting limits on the amount of pollution that can be in the water in order to ensure that those uses can be accommodated.

In turn, those standards are the foundation for clean-up plans when the standards aren't met, and they help State water officials determine how much pollution a given industrial or municipal discharger must remove from its waste stream. Given these functions, one can easily see the benefit of a numeric standard, as opposed to the alternative -- a narrative standard. While water quality officials can take a numeric standard (X milligrams per liter, for instance) and establish regulatory requirements aimed at achieving that number, it's far harder to write a cleanup plan or a discharge limit to address narrative prohibitions. For example, some States prohibit unnatural levels of algae, but figuring out how much is natural and how much is unnatural is very subjective, and that kind of ambiguity often leads State regulators to throw up their hands and do nothing.

With nutrient pollution, the State-led process of developing numeric standards has broken down. The IG report finds that fully half of the States had no numeric standards for nutrients by the end of 2008, even after years of EPA imploring States to put them in place.

In the Mississippi basin, the news is worse. Of the ten States that contributed the most nitrogen to the Gulf of Mexico, only one -- Tennessee -- had any kind of numeric standard, and seven of the ten States responsible for the most phosphorus delivery to the Gulf had no numeric standards. The IG report indicates that one reason for this failure is that cleaning up nutrient pollution might lead to tougher restrictions on certain businesses, which could be politically unpopular. In the same vein, the report found that States essentially disregarded downstream impacts (like the Dead Zone) in the standard-setting process; one can imagine that it is hard to convince decisionmakers in Iowa, Indiana, or Illinois that they need to strictly control in-state sources of pollution that cause harm off the Louisiana coast.

The IG's solution is basic -- EPA must lead where the States have fallen behind. The agency has the authority to establish necessary standards when States do not, and EPA can better withstand parochial political pressures. The IG recommends that EPA identify "significant waters of national value" that need numeric standards, and establish the standards, taking into account the needs of downstream waters.

This is welcome advice, and it is consistent with the recommendations of the National Research Council a couple years back (a user's guide to that report is available here), and a petition that several conservation groups, including NRDC, filed last summer, asking EPA to strengthen its efforts on nutrient pollution.

Whether EPA will step up, however, remains to be seen; its reaction thus far to the National Research Council report and our groups' petition has been to consider the subject a whole lot, but not take real action. Worse, its reaction to the IG report's push for EPA to set standards was a model of bureaucratic double-speak: "we believe a greater benefit will be derived by developing a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities to get more numeric nutrient water quality standards in place."

That approach won't cut it. EPA Administrator Jackson is fond of saying that, in the Obama administration, EPA is "back on the job," and in many ways that is obviously true. However, with regard to dealing with the Dead Zone, and taking a leadership role where States have proven unwilling or unable to set nutrient standards, the agency simply needs to do the job. The Administrator came to EPA from New Jersey -- she must know that a problem that is literally the size of that state has to be dealt with now, even if it's happening out in the Gulf of Mexico.

Beating A Dead Zone

2008-10-22T17:47:59Z

A new report released today by NRDC brings together recent information about a widespread pollution problem in the Mississippi River Basin and Gulf of Mexico and calls attention to a legal controversy that has made it more difficult to protect resources in the basin that help reduce this pollution. The report also provides a roadmap for safeguarding these resources under the law.

Each year, enormous quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds from a variety of sources (but largely due to agricultural sources) flow down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

In the summer, this nutrient pollution fuels the growth of algae blooms in the Gulf. When the algae die and decompose, an area of the Gulf's bottom layer of water becomes so oxygen-deprived (or "hypoxic") that fish and many other aquatic organisms either flee or die. In recent decades, the average size of the "Dead Zone" has reached state-sized proportions. For instance, in 2007, the "Dead Zone" was approximately the size of New Jersey.

Scientists have found that wetlands and small streams are capable of removing nutrient pollution before it pollutes major waterways. As the Bush White House - which could hardly be described as an environmental zealot -- recently explained, wetlands in the Mississippi River Basin "retain nitrates and phosphates that would otherwise drain from adjacent farmlands." The administration also noted that ensuring that nutrients pass through such features "will help reduce the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico and provide habitat, flood protection, and clean drinking water." The obvious upshot of that conclusion is that these resources ought to be protected from harm as much as possible.

For many years, the federal Clean Water Act had protected small streams and wetlands from unregulated pollution or destruction. However, since the Supreme Court handed down a pair of messy decisions in 2001 and 2006, the federal agencies charged with implementing the Act have given unclear guidance about what kinds of water bodies remain protected, and have effectively written off roughly 20 percent of the wetlands in the continental U.S. Courts also have struggled to figure out what kinds of resources are still covered.

As a result, many of our country's smaller streams and wetlands are at risk of being polluted or even buried by mining companies, developers, industrial wastewater sources and others without so much as a Clean Water Act permit to limit the effect that the activity will have on aquatic resources. And some of that pollution could contribute to the Dead Zone.

In light of these facts, NRDC's report proposes a simple solution - restoring the Clean Water Act's protections to as many of those water bodies that it covered before the Supreme Court's interventions, as fast as possible. It shows (I've got to use my darn law degree once in a while) how the existing Act and agency rules can be interpreted today to protect a great deal of the nation's remaining small wetlands and streams, even considering the Supreme Court decisions, but it also highlights the need to bring a permanent solution to the problem the Court created. Only Congress can fully and certainly restore the law's safeguards to our water bodies; fortunately, leaders in both houses of Congress have been fighting for a bill that will do that - the Clean Water Restoration Act.

Will this action alone eliminate the Dead Zone? No. It was here before the Supreme Court screwed up the law, and fixing the law will not bring back lost pollution sinks or make direct cuts in the amount of pollution occurring in the Mississippi River basin. It is, however, critical that we stop the bleeding, not dig ourselves deeper into a hole....use whatever metaphor you like. Much more needs to be done, as I discussed in a previous post, but starting with the obvious solution of reinvigorating the Clean Water Act is seriously overdue.