Yesterday was Earth Day, a good time to comment on things which,
unbeknownst to many, are actually going right with America’s
environment.
My own children are rather blase about the whole Earth Day
thing. It’s so 1970s. But I am still going with this shtick because
there is a lot of great stuff happening out there. Somebody needs
to speak up. Younger people, a rapidly expanding category from my
vantage point, do not have a clue how much our environment has
improved over the last century. Take water quality for
instance.
Upton Sinclair’s famous muckraking novel, The Jungle
(1906) excoriated conditions in the Chicago stockyards and packing
houses. There you will find this description of a body of water
surpassing even the much maligned Cuyahoga River in terms of past
environmental degradation:
“Bubbly Creek” is an arm of the Chicago River, and
forms the southern boundary of the yards; all the drainage of the
square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really
a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it
is blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day.
The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all
sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name;
it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or
great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of
carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make
rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth
have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens
walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has
started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers
used to leave the creek that way, till every now and then the
surface would catch fire and burn furiously, and the fire
department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an
ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows,
to make lard out of; then the packers took the cue, and got out an
injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it themselves. The
banks of “Bubbly Creek” are plastered thick with hairs, and this
also the packers gather and clean.
Conditions such as these are unimaginable today, even on
Bubbly Creek, where you can now catch an occasional
four-pound coho salmon or buy a million-dollar home.
Whether you consider pounds of pollution abated, stream segments
improved, fisheries restored, the nation has made outstanding
progress. Today, twice as many Americans are served by advanced or
secondary wastewater treatment compared to over three decades
ago.
This past August lake whitefish, the number-one commercial fish
in the Great Lakes, and a key indicator of water quality, returned to
the Detroit River, part of the connecting channels linking Lakes
Huron and Erie. They were found spawning there for the first time
since 1916.
The Detroit River lost this valuable fishery due to a witch’s
brew of oil, phosphorus, mercury and organochlorine pollution over
many years. Relative to 1972 levels, oil and phosphorus pollution
levels are down 98 percent and 95 percent respectively. Mercury
contamination in fish tissue is down 70 percent, and PCB
contamination is down 83 percent as measured in herring gulls from
a nearby island.
The Detroit River is no Garden of Eden, but it now has naturally
reproducing populations of peregrine falcons, lake sturgeon, and
bald eagles, not too mention a world-class walleye fishery for
which it shares honors with Lake Erie, once declared dead or
dying.
A former EPA Administrator is reported to have joked that even
if all our waters are not fishable or swimmable, at least they’re
not flammable! The Detroit River case shows that we have done much
better than that.
CELEBRATING SUCCESS DOES NOT justify complacency as to remaining
challenges. Nutrient levels are going back up in Lake Erie,
although the causes — Zebra Mussels, climate change, agricultural
runoff — are not yet understood.
And just last May, the EPA released its first systematic
evaluation of
streams that feed rivers, lakes, and coastal areas. This study, the
Wadeable Streams Assessment (WSA), was based on sampling at almost
1,400 sites representing similar ecological characteristics in
various regions taken by more than 150 field biologists. The
results of the WSA reveal that only 28 percent of the streams were
in good condition. 25 percent were in fair condition, and 42
percent were in poor condition.
The EPA’s assessment of U.S. coastal waters also points to
the need for improvement. Estuaries are in fair condition, varying
from poor in the Northeast and Puerto Rico to fair in the
Southeast, Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes and West Coast. They are in
good condition in Alaska and Hawaii.
Current water pollution problems are more diffuse and harder to
tackle because they implicate human activities across the landscape
including farming, urbanization, construction, and even air
deposition which can deposit, say, nitrogen or mercury into water
bodies such as Chesapeake Bay or inland lakes in Michigan. But
these are issues we are just beginning to tackle, given our
understandable focus on the big municipal and industrial
dischargers which have been heavily controlled for decades.
In the transitional zone, between water and land, America
appears to be achieving the goal of no-net-loss of wetlands, set by
the first President Bush. It might even be close to a net gain,
according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s latest Status
and Trends of Wetlands in the Coterminous United States: 1998 to
2004 (PDF). This is quite an achievement given massive
losses of these significant aquatic resources, often approaching 80
or 90 percent, in states such as Missouri or California.
Wetlands not only provide habitat and flood control benefits,
but they filter out pollutants that might otherwise contaminate
surface and ground water.
There is debate as to whether or not some of the gains in
wetlands may be attributed to an increase in man-made ponds, such
as water traps on golf courses and stormwater retention basins that
do not have adequate replacement or ecological values and functions
in terms of biodiversity or hydrology.
On balance “we’re not destroying wetlands at the rate we were,
but we’re continuing to lose wetlands of higher value and gaining
wetlands or waters of lower value,” says Jeanne Christie, executive
director of the Association of State Wetland Managers. The Fish and
Wildlife Service will, no doubt, be looking at this question.
MOVING OUT OF THE WETLANDS, and on to the uplands, we find more
good news. We see remarkable growth of private stewardship of
natural resources, and a renewed spirit of volunteerism for
conservation, as evidenced by the phenomenal growth of private land
trusts.
This growing movement obviates the need for government
infringement on private property rights by utilizing voluntary,
free market transactions in the service of land and watershed
protection. Its tools are conservation easements, outright
purchase, and civic education.
According to the recent 2005 National Land Trust Census conducted by the
Land Trust Alliance (LTA), total acres conserved by local, state,
and national trusts doubled to 37 million acres over the past five
years. According to LTA this is an area 16 ½ times
the size of Yellowstone National Park. Moreover, the number of land
trusts grew to 1,667, a 32 percent increase over the same
period.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources
Conservation Service (NRCS) reports that, between 1997 and 2001,
2.2 million acres of land were developed in the United States.
However, Patrick O’Driscoll of USA Today, after reviewing
the LTA data, notes that private land protection efforts “now
preserve about as much open space each year as is lost to
sprawl…”
Which brings us to the subject of dirt. Soil erosion, a
fundamental problem dating back to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,
encompasses both the removal of layers of soil by rainfall and
runoff as well as wind erosion which detaches, transports, and
deposits soil where it does not belong. It robs farmland of its
productive capacity while polluting nearby rivers, streams, lakes,
and estuaries.
Between 1982 and 2003, soil erosion on U.S. cropland decreased 43 percent. As reported by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, total erosion amounts continue to
decline across all major river basins with the most significant
reductions occurring in the Missouri and the Souris-Red-Rainy/Upper
Mississippi.
Again, life on earth will always present challenges and
setbacks. To my mind the shortage of potable water in developing
countries and the loss of habitat and biodiversity are huge
problems directly linked to the lack of vibrant economies, the rule
of law, and stable governments.
But God gave us brains and the will to deal with these and other
issues that we cannot yet imagine. So it is wise to take one day a
year to learn from our successes rather than obsessing about our
failures. It might as well be Earth Day.
