Watershed News is about watershed science, watershed pollution and how our estuaries, salt marshes, and rivers and streams struggle with nonpoint source pollution, stormwater runoff, and hardening shorelines. These watersheds feed and heal our coastal ecology, yet we know so little of how they work. We tell you more and why we must protect them.jealously in Watershed News

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Porous pavement, according to its advocates, filters those contaminants out by letting rain run through road surfaces instead over them. That allows the contaminated water to filter through the soil before heading to the rivers and streams that take it to the estuaries and oceans. The secret  of porous pavement is larger stones mixed in with the liquid asphalt or tar. Much smaller stones or even sand is the normal ingredient and that makes pavement non-porous. Pretty simple concept, isn’t it? There are drawbacks. This image here shows how much bedding is needed for porous pavement to work, and that’s got to be expensive. Keeping the porous pavement porous also means keeping the surfaces clean of sand and dirt. On the plus side porous pavement involves   considerably less, even the elimination of, sanding and salting of roads. One of the beauties of porous pavement is it is much less susceptible to flooding and icing over. That means porous pavement could ultimately put a serious dent in road maintenance budgets as well as accidents. And it's great for the environment.

Apparently, the pros outweigh the cons because porous pavement is catching on. Google News produced five pages of results for porous pavement. This is a science daily story about Temple University students mixing plastic in with soil and making a permeable substance that they say can be used for sidewalks and such. If we were to combine that product with the porous pavement, we could put a serious dent in the road runoff problem. That would save lots of money not spent spreading salt and plowing and help communities meet the new federal road runoff requirements. Expect to hear a lot more on this subject this winter, and we hope we'll see a lot less of this in winters to come.

PBS had this documentary over the weekend. It's an inspiration for anyone intimidated by the ecological disasters this country faces today. A river that was on fire from extensive pollution in the 1960s now is talking seriously about having bass, chain pickerel, and walleye pike returned in numbers large enough to make a halfway decent fishing hole. What impressed us most about the movie is the massive volunteer effort, and the willingness of those volunteers to get filthy in pursuit of the dream that now appears to be realized along the banks of the Cuyahoga. That movie got us thinking about a similar effort on a similarly stricken river in Massachusetts called the Shawsheen. That too, was heavily polluted during the Merrimack Valley’s industrial heyday.

Rumor has it, the river used to run different colors depending on what color plastic sunglass frames the company that discharged wastewater into the Shawsheen was making on any given day. That's not the case now, thanks to the efforts of an anonymous crew called the Shawsheen River Watershed Authority.

Hundreds of spare tires, shopping carts, refrigerators, and just about anything else you can think of have been pulled from the river by volunteers willing to get just as filthy as those who helped restore the Cuyahoga. Those volunteers, and we have to single out Bob Rauseo who is the heart and soul of the SRWA, are the sole reason the Shawsheen is as clean as it is today. So, who can fault NBN for being so optimistic about the future, when we have clear cut proof right in front of us that even the worst messes made in nature can be made whole again. Here's a link to a short vid on Return of the Cuyahoga.

Imagine buying land on the water with the dream one day of building a home with a waterview or, even better, a good swimming beach and/or deep water dock. Imagine you’re just getting serious about following through on your dream when the county passes laws restricting construction on your land to little more than a cottage. Welcome to Craigville Beach, MA, a ribbon of land between ocean and estuary 60 miles southeast of Boston. The Cape Cod Times ran this piece Friday about the county’s passage of laws that restricted construction of McMansions along this coveted stretch of real estate and started the story with an anecdote like that above.

The country says the rules are designed to: improve groundwater quality, protect scenic views and wildlife, require setbacks, increase corridor views, and such. NBN suspects the first reason is the real driver of this legislation. Nowhere in the legislation or the CC Times story is mention of the disaster overdevelopment has made of the Cape’s ponds and estuaries, one of which snakes right past Criagville Beach. The paper says opponents decry being stripped of their “time honored property rights.” However, a Craigville Beach property owner quoted in the story cuts closer to the real issue in saying the new rules will divide the  community into a new set of have’s and have-nots.

This woman is one of the haves. She owns a home along Areys Pond on Cape Cod. She’s holding up algae and seaweed that’s choking off all other life in that pond because fertilizer rich cesspools have pretty much soaked the entire Cape in you-know-what. Algae love you-know-what. Most Cape communities didn’t build sewage treatment plants for fear it would encourage development.  That didn’t work. Now Cape communities like Craigville Beach are looking at more draconian ways to curb development and that’s angering the have-not’s: those who, unlike the Areys pond woman, don’t have homes on the Cape and want to build them. Clearly this is not a dispute between societal castes: pretty much everybody is rich out on the Cape. Which is what makes this case such an interesting example of what’s driving the national political debate and this week’s election: the role of government in our lives. Examples abound of citizens chaffing at government regulations.

As our population approaches 300 million, our natural resources are getting stretched nationwide. Like Cape Cod, the ground water underneath millions of acres of Midwest farmlands are also getting fertilized into infertility which is washing down the Mississippi and turning the Gulf of Mexico into the World’s largest deadzone. How do you think a government dictate that all our crops be raised organically would go over in this political climate in a place like Kansas?  NBN has documented ad nauseum the fight over government regulations to stem the relentless decline in North Atlantic ground fish. And what about the biggest environmental battle of them all: global warming. The most effective policy to curb that, Cap and Trade is being held up as a poster child for the ongoing battle of personal liberties against big government.

But these are not disputes over personal liberties, these are disputes over dwindling natural resource and government efforts to protect them for public use, present and future. Yet, the right to build a home on your own land is the “American Dream.” As much as we love to hate the Koch brothers and Halliburton’s of this world, they’ve invested lifetimes and a mountain of money that would be devastated if Cap and Trade went through. New England’s groundfishing fleet is as proud an American tradition as Midwest farming. However, if we don’t push for more government regulation like Criagville Beach, the Clean Water Act, and Cap and Trade, each of which absolutely strip property owners of legal rights, two things are inevitable: our resources will continue to dwindle and we’ll be fighting ever-more bitterly over what’s left.

You know who will win those fights? Not Joe the Plumber or Soccer Mom, the Koch Brothers and Halliburton: the folks paying off the politicians to pass the legislation that protects their stranglehold over the nation’s dwindling supply of natural resources. Yet Joe and Mom have been recruited by the Koch Brothers and Halliburton to wage war nationwide against government efforts to protect these dwindling resources for public as well as private use. Sadly, government regulations run counter to a lot of the principals this country was founded on. Hence the ease with which people who truly love this country are recruited to fight government efforts to protect public over private interest. The Tea Party ingenious for any fan of politics and dispiriting for any fan of humanity. If you want to read Frank Rich making the same argument, this ran in the NY Times over the weekend.

When campaigning for local office outside the Orient, NY, post office many years ago, I was regaled by a local bulkheading business owner upset over my promise to: "Stop Bulkheading and Save the Creeks." He argued that bulkheading is actually good for our creeks. It improves water circulation and that flushes out pollution while bringing in more plankton from the bays for the clams and mussels to eat. He said he’s seen it happen: Clam beds bouncing back in creeks after bulkheads are installed. My marine biology college courses failed me completely as this fellow provided me with insights from 40 years of pounding timbers soaked in creosote and chromated copper arsenate into Long Island creeks. He was right: increased tidal circulation does clean out the creeks. There was little I could say. He walked off feeling smug and I went on to lose the election.

Fast forward to a rainy October afternoon at a construction site near that post office where my builder buddy is regaling me on the state’s ill-advised dredging policy aimed at saving winter flounder. I’ve little sympathy for anyone not willing to lay down their lives to save the winter flounder. These delicious fish are the first excuse each year for any avid fishermen to wet a line right from shore. They’ve also largely disappeared and rampant dredging to keep creeks open to boating is being blamed. But my buddy was making a good point.

He said the new state dredging policy was based on one 1975 finding that dredging ruins winter flounder spawning grounds. For that one study, New York creeks are now silting up in August, just when boating season hits its stride. Then he added that increasing the water flow through dredging cleans out the creeks. Again I was at a loss for words, he was right. Dredging does improve water circulation.

Ironically, both the bulkheader and the builder make the same point being made by many environmentally minded civic engineers now pushing to widen road culverts restricting the tidal flow into creeks up and down our coasts. Now, in the presence of my computer, where I do the regaling, I’d like to point out a few differences. First, the culvert repairs are fixing a man-made problem where the bulkheading and dredging perpetuate other problems. Bulkheading wipes out a crucial section of marsh ecosystems called the intertidal zone while the wider culvert enhance those zones. A similar, albeit weaker, argument can be made about dredging damaging another marine ecosystem called the subtidal zone. The entrance to my buddy’s creek would be 10-inches deep, not 10-feet, if it wasn’t dredged. My buddy and I know from many April fishing trips that gaping hole is right next to where the winter flounder spend the winter. That can't be good for the flounder whether they are spawning or just sleeping.

So, can we say the bulkheaders and dredgers are manipulating nature, and their pro-environment arguments supporting that manipulation, for their own reward? Sadly there’s a new wrinkle to consider. Mute swan populations are skyrocketing and fecal bacteria from their copious droppings are increasingly closing Long Island creeks to clamming. At the same time over-development is pouring so many lawn chemicals into our creeks the only practical means of cleaning them is to amp up water circulation. So, do we let the dredging and bulkheading begin and find something else to fish for on those early April mornings? When it comes to cleaning up the environment, there are no easy options.

We have to end on a happier note then that. Scientists just launched a winter flounder fish farm on Martha’s Vineyard. The fry from there will be used to return the fish to creeks up and down the coast. Hey fellas, don’t forget Long Island.

As Joni Mitchell so famously sang at Woodstock: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” Would Joni would feel the same about this article in the Saturday NYTimes, which cites numerous product reviewers saying phosphate-free Cascade dishwashing soap isn’t what it used to be. The article notes it works great for the environment, curbing rampant algae growth that robs our lakes, ponds, bays and creeks of oxygen fish need to live. But if you really want to get those nasty spots off your glasses, you either rinse the glasses before putting them in the dishwasher, or use soap with lots of phosphates.

But in 16 states you can’t use dish soap with phosphates. Legislators in these states—Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Mass., Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington (State), and Wisconsin among them—would rather have spots on their glass then dead fish in their ponds, lakes, bays and creeks.

So just how bad is this new soap? Reading the reviews suggests there’s a lot of angry dish washers out there. So NBN figured we’d better take a look at our own dishwasher. Pictured here is what we found. This coffee pot doesn’t look too bad. But then again we usually rinse off everything before putting it in the dishwasher. We also wash everything before putting it in the recycle bin. Thanks to a little OCD, we didn’t even know Cascade was now a phosphate free product.

NBN tries hard not to exaggerate the environmental impact of stories  but this NY Times piece on the end of a New Jersey oyster reef project is a sleeper of interest to the nation’s entire Atlantic coast. Let’s forget about Jersey for a moment and focus on the two key players here: storm water runoff and oyster reefs. Runoff is quickly becoming ground zero in the nation’s fight against water pollution. All the septic and factory drain pipes that have been cleaned up or closed down in the past 40 years have been more than replaced with this much more insidious form of pollution—thanks largely to the rampant residential development along our coasts during this same time.

This is where the oyster reefs come in. There was a time, before all this water pollution, that oysters were the dominant life form everywhere fresh water met salt. So much so, they formed eons-old reefs comprised of one oyster growing on top of another and so on. Some scientists today believe these reefs were the back-bone of Atlantic Coast estuarine ecosystems—those are the marshy places were fresh water meets salt. Those reefs filtered the water in those estuaries looking for plankton to eat. In the process they filtered out a lot of other stuff making the water much cleaner and clearer along the way. Those reefs also provided all sorts of nooks and crannies for other little life forms to hide in functioning very much like tropical coral reefs. Imagine what those tropical coral reefs would look like without the coral and you have a picture of the transition in North American estuaries like New York Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay from the early 1800s to today. Sadly, we have to rely on imagination here because the only evidence we have about early Atlantic coast oyster reefs are a few early maps which drew them in as navigational hazards.

State and federal agencies like the FDA and New Jersey’s  DEP and the NYDEP are putting the kibosh on these projects or greatly restricting their proliferation because they fear people might eat oysters grown in waters polluted by stormwater runoff. NBN knows of a case on Long Island where state water inspectors refused to let a fellow with creek front property plant baby oysters in front of his home because the creek showed elevated levels of coliform bacteria. Coliform are a nasty bacteria that live in the digestive systems of many animals including humans. They are Public Enemy No. 1 for Taco Bell’s marketing department and they are the reason these state and federal shellfish regulations were put into place. Coliform are also a prime ingredient in stormwater runoff. So, the government concerns are well founded. If you like raw oysters, you’re eating coliform bacteria. (This gets tricky because there are various kinds of coliform, some bad some not so. Generally speaking the more coliform present, the greater the chances of getting the bad kind.)

So, we have governments clamping down on oyster reef proliferation in waters with lots of coliform-laden stormwater runoff to protect an unsuspecting public from possibly dangerous oysters. But this is insane. Right now you can collect and eat oysters in any of hundreds of Atlantic coast creeks closed to shellfishing because of high coliform counts. No one will be the wiser. Enforcement of closure laws is non-existent no matter what state you’re in. What state can afford to stake out its creeks in hopes of stopping illegal oystering? Worse, the last we checked, oysters weren’t exactly a mainstream source of the nation’s nutrition. Yet, we have a potentially affective cure like oyster reefs for such an irascible form of pollution like stormwater runoff,  being pulled back to protect the quality of such an exotic food source.This sounds like very poor policy. Are you listening Congress?

Which, is the country's most polluted river? Wiki-Answers says it's the Chicago River, which is annually laced with green dye in homage to St. Patrick. This video says it's the New River which runs from Mexico to the US. Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire once. The Standells put in their vote in this 1970s song for the Charles River in Boston. It's likely there are a number of solid contenders across the country.

The reason we write about it here is this: the real pollution often isn't in the river, it's under it. We use the Merrimack River pictured above, another solid contender for most-polluted status, to illustrate. We're going to look at how the Merrimack River is getting un-polluted, if that's indeed possible. Unpolluting a river is much more complicated than just upgrading sewage treatment plants and building retention ponds for road runoff. You've got to get under the river and  that's what's happening in one particularly nasty stretch of the Merrimack in Lawrence, MA.

It's hard to imagine an American river that's suffered the environmental assault the Merrimack has. This was the birth place of industry in this country. There were some 40 mills in Lawrence alone. Not to mention Lowell, Haverhill and Nashua, NH, cities which have also sat on the Merrimack for centuries The mills in those cities were originally powered by the Merrimack. In Lawrence what powered them was a system of canals built on the banks of a section of river that dropped some 40 feet over a quarter-mile stretch. That natural drop, much like a waterfall only more gradual, provided engineers the opportunity to tap hydro-power from the river by channeling the fast moving water through mill buildings. An example of those channels, or chases, are shown just below. As the water rushed through the basements it was channeled past turbines of sorts. First it was a systems of paddles that turned gears and pulleys on machinery on the floors above. (A more industrial version of this image.) Later on, that water rushed passed turbines powering electric generators, the modern-day version of hydro-power.

That water power generated a lot of industry in the Merrimack Valley. Paper and textile miles first dotted the Merrimack. Later it was plastic companies, tire companies, shoe and buggy makers. All moved into the mill towns along the Merrimack. The Merrimack, and rivers across the country were quite literally the engines that drove the industrial revolution that helped make this such a prosperous country right from the start. What was less noticeable in the basements of these mill buildings were the discharge pipes. For well over a century everything these mills could flushed down a drain ended up in our rivers. Sadly, the logic back them was: why would you put it anywhere else?

A little perspective is in order here. Raw sewage is an esthetically unpleasant form of pollution, but in reality it's an almost organic pollutant. For the most part, it's all biodegradable. The biggest problem with sewage is the bacteria, which will make you sick, but it won't give you cancer. On the other hand, chemicals like dioxin, toluene, polychlorinated biphenyls, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, nickel, de-greasing solvents, tetrahydrofuran, benzene, ethylbenzene and xylene will play hell with your kidneys, liver and even your teeth. Getting back to the Merrimack.

What about those areas that can be cleaned up? It's an very imperfect science that costs horrendous amounts of money and will never get everything completely clean. The first, and most important step is: don't let the place be declared a Superfund site. The epicenter of the Merrimack clean-up, indeed you could make the argument the fall-guys in the Merrimack clean-up, is the GenCorp property.GenCorp is a former tire maker that had the misfortune to buy what is possibly, the single most polluted property in the Lawrence mill basin. The GenCorp property is now being called the Lawrence Gateway. This region of eastern Lawrence, MA, was so-nobly named back when the US economy looked like the it had the strength to revitalize an impoverished mill-city 30 years past its manufacturing prime. The GenCorp property also held what was essentially the trap, to use a plumbing term, for the waste discharge pipes draining a large complex of mill buildings on the Merrimack's northern shore. This little stretch of canal is to industrial pollution what Yuca Mountain is to nuclear waste. But it's not a Superfund Site.Although, right now it may look like one. These canisters above are chemical filters located on the GenCorp site.

Warning! Tangential digression approaching: The US EPA operative overseeing the GenCorp clean-up told me it wasn't named a Superfund site because GenCorp was doing such a fine job of addressing federal and state clean-up concerns for the site. However, a local newspaper editor opined at the time the Superfund decision was being made, that politics more than pollution played a role in keeping GenCorp off the roll of Superfund sites. That ruling came down about the same time the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy was taking heat over his nephew's rape allegations. Lawrence Eagle writer Edward Achorn, now of the ProJo, speculated that Kennedy could have made life miserable for GenCorp director Michael O'Neil by pressing for the property to be put on the Superfund list. According to Achorn's column, O'Neil was a relative of the woman who was allegedly raped by Kennedy's nephew. Sorry, no link to Achorn's column. Back to the point.

The GenCorp property is so completely steeped in pollution it will never be completely clean. However, keeping it off Superfund may have been the right decision. There was so much industry along the banks of the Merrimack, you can travel another half mile upstream and find soil holding the same sorts of nasty chemicals being extracted from the GenCorp site. The GenCorp property may be as much about drawing the line in environmental clean-ups as it is about removing pollution: how much can you really hope to do and at what point are you just throwing money down the drain?

The Lawrence cleanup efforts are focused on a specific section of the GenCorp property called the raceway shown at right. This canal, which extends from the heart of the north half of the Merrimack industrial canal system, looks like it might have drained more than one building: numerous buildings have been torn down in the Gateway project. Here's an important point: when the river level was down from lack of rain, so was the flow of water through the raceway. So, what was dumped into the raceway didn't necessarily wash right away.

So, the clean-up now entails sucking contaminated water out of the raceway, purifying it through various filters on-site, then sending the water through a final sediment trap, shown here, before discharging it into the Merrimack. Intuitively, this sounds like the little Dutch boy plugging the dam with his fingers. The Lawrence Gateway is an eight-acre clean-up in the middle of several hundred acres of contamination  that can be found found in any of the Merrimack cities mentioned above.

Sadly, there is no solution here. The damage is done and can't be completely fixed. The clean-up may be mole-hill-mountain stuff but it is getting more pollution out of the ground. It's entirely possible there's some chunk of sediment under one of the dozens of other industrial sites in those cities that's contaminated with enough dioxin to give a rock cancer. Such potential contaminates are going to inexorably work their way toward, and eventually into, the Merrimack River. The river will then wash that dioxin, or some other chemical over the Joppa clam flats 20 miles downstream pictured here. There's been talk of re-opening those clams flats, closed for the past 50 years over pollution problems, now that the Merrimack is getting cleaner.

About two years ago I was talking to one of the most esteemed naturalists in one of the most esteemed natural locations in the country, the East End of New York’s Long Island, shown here. This fellow is making a frontal assault on 90 years old, yet he says to me, in stroke-slowed speech, “when are you going to write something about what’s happening in all our marshes. They’re dying.” He explained further that something called Sudden Marsh Dieback is killing salt marshes up and down the coast. I’d never heard of it, I told him. Further, I had to find an editor to buy the story before I could write anything. Then I found a group dedicated to the study of Sudden Marsh Dieback that was holding its second symposium on the subject out on Cape Cod. “Bingo, I’m in,” I thought. What editor could resist a story on the inexplicable, wholesale death of the most vital natural marine resource the planet has: salt marshes. Envisioning a 3,000 word cover article in National Geographic, I signed up for the symposium.

I walked out of that symposium as bewildered as I was alarmed. The Long Island naturalist was right, marsh is dying all over the country, but eight hours of expert lecturers from five East Coast states could not agree on why. Another 30 hours talking to even more experts on the phone yielded yet more theories on what’s causing sudden marsh dieback. In Louisiana, extreme drought was thought to blame. In New Jersey and Delaware, grasshoppers were a possible culprit. Connecticut marsh expert Ron Rozsa said marsh drainage and mosquito ditches might play a role. In New York, now retired DEC marsh expert Fred Mushacke said there was nothing sudden about the dieoff problem. He thinks it’s just the natural tendency of marshlands to subside, or sink, into the surrounding water. However, he said the subsidence problem is getting much worse in New York and he doesn’t know why.

Why am I beating this to death right now? Because another expert suggested all the above could be killing the nation’s marshes. The scariest theory put forth so far came from Massachusetts marsh expert Susan Adamowitz who, for lack of a more solid explanation, suggests the nation’s marshes are under all manner of stress; from pollution in stormwater runoff, to over fishing, to rising sea levels from global warming. Is it possible, we’ve just pushed our marshlands to the brink and now we’re seeing them lose the battle to whatever local predator or problem they’ve successfully fended off in the past? Let’s hope not. If so, it could spell disaster for the Gulf of Mexico salt marshes. A few weeks back we opined in these pages that those Gulf salt marshes may not be as vulnerable to the oil spill as everyone is saying. So far, there have not been any reports of them dying wholesale and it seems like enough time has passed for that to happen. However, if Adamowitz is right and all the country’s salt marshes are getting weary from decades of abuse, it could be a long drawn out death for the marshes set off by the oil spill.

One side note, the only national publication to show an interest in my story was the New York Times which gave me three slots in its regional issues for three different stories in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Audubon showed an interest but eventually killed the story because it wasn’t cheery enough. For real! The Audubon editor said they are tired of running bad news stories about the environment. Perhaps, we can see where he’s coming from. Bad news tends to outweigh the good in NBN, and we hate that. But my naturalist friend from Long island has watched salt marshes for some 80 years and he’s pretty bummed out about what’s happening. Should we just look the other way?

Property rights too often run afoul of environmental law needlessly. Take this story about this Salem, NH, Arlington Pond home. The photo here, originally printed in the Eagle Tribune, will help us tease this case apart. The homeowner here was fined $25,000 for the stone retaining wall and patio he built along the shore. Another $15,000 fine is suspended for three-years provided he doesn't break anymore of the state's wetlands protection statutes. He was also required to restore the property. Restore to what? The place looks beautiful. Reading the comments below the story provides insight into what is often the genesis of these conflicts, and they happen all the time, all over the country. The comments predictably run between tax payer anger over big-brother meddling in private property rights, to resident indignation over an arrogant neighbor thumbing his nose at official policy designed to protect the environment everyone enjoys. No mention is made in the comments or the story of the real problem or the solutions available.

NBN has been off-base enough in the past to have a little humility when we're right. That said, when NBC news last week cited biologist Kerry St. Pe saying the Gulf oil spill may not kill Louisiana's marsh grasses, we were just a little smug. On this page on May 25  we suggested the kinship between oil and plants might mean the marsh grasses in the path of the Gulf oil plume could survive. We realize now we failed to mention in that column our theory depends heavily on how much oil is spilled. We also left out that popular wisdom has it other marsh plants down there, like mangroves, are much more vulnerable to the oil spilled. Still the point is a good one because if the marsh grasses survive the wildlife that won't will return. If the grasses die it's a disaster on a scale with Chernobyl. 

So, we feel the scientific support we've since seen for our argument emboldens us now to take a few shots at media coverage of this event while presenting a little perspective on how “fragile” they say these marshes are. First, there is a serious problem with environmental journalism that even NBN, in earlier incarnations, could be accused of: doomsday dependency syndrome. We've all heard the newsroom mantra “If it bleeds, it leads.” For environmental news it's more like: “If it's dying, we're buying.” Let's face it: the public gobbles up stories on environmental catastrophe. That puts a lot of pressure on reporters and editors to give you what you want. Forget perspective, focus on the gooey stuff. When you have fragile marshes under assault from a massive, ugly oil slick, you get the “David versus Goliath” angle which makes the story even more irresistible. That puts even more pressure on the media to “get” the story. If the first sources you find won't support your story, find sources that will.

Which brings us to the perspective part of this analysis: how fragile are these marshes? You could argue that the entire country's marshes have been under assault since colonist started wiping out oyster reefs and bulkheading shore lines 200 years ago. Pictured here is the Jersey Shore, near Barnegat Light. Miles and miles of marsh here have been back-filled and bulkheaded to accommodate tens of thousands of waterfront home with pointlessly over powered boats parked out front. Yet, despite this assault—let's not forget the sewage treatment plants servicing these homes—a massive network of marsh islands still survives around Barnegat Light. The water is reasonably clear. You can even catch a fish of two there, if you're real lucky. Now, take a canoe through the Meadowlands between Manhattan and New Jersey. You could argue those marshes have been subjected to as much pollution and man-made disruption as any in this country. Yet they still turn real green each summer and there are plenty of birds.

Now, look at this photo. It depicts the plume of sediments washed into the Gulf of Mexico each spring from farms lining the Mississippi watershed which drains almost half the country. Wanna guess what's mixed in those sediments? According to these folks 700 million pounds of toxic chemicals were reported dumped into the Mississippi River between 1990 and 1994. And that's just what was reported, mostly by two fertilizer factories, according to the same source. We have no idea how much fertilizer is in the rain washing off all those farms and into the Mississippi each year.

It's clear these Gulf marshes have been absorbing their fare share of pollution for decades. Yes, BP cut disastrous corners our regulatory agencies should never have let them near. But it seems there's an element of hypocrisy in the nation's outrage now over this oil spill, particularly in the Gulf coast states. Like we pointed out two weeks ago, the 75th Diamond Jubilee Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, where “oil and water do mix,” is still on for Sept. 2-6 in Morgan City, LA. Also Louisiana has 16 oil refineries taking in 2.25 million barrels of crude each day from offshore sources. Texas has 26, Mississippi, six. It's anyone's guess how many people work at those refineries or on the thousands of offshore oil platforms feeding those refineries. There were some 175 people on the Deepwater Horizon alone. Katrina may have been a bad hurricane, but what happens if a worse one comes along. How do we know there aren't other hardware problems lurking in these oil rigs waiting for something else to go wrong before they can surface. Like Jimmy Buffet said on NBC last night: "We are all using the oil this platform was drilled to produce."
So, what lesson do we to draw from all this perspective ? You tell us. Here's a little theme music to help you think.

Is it too early to guess what the marshes of Louisiana will look like 40 years from now? Since the entire world of journalism is working overtime to tell you what it looks like right now, NBN thought it could leverage this Boston Globe piece, into some wishful thinking for what's shaping up to be the worst environmental disaster since Chernobyl. The Globe story itemizes the lingering impacts of a 1969 spill in Massachusetts that disgorged 200,000 gallons of No. 2 diesel fuel into Buzzards Bay, shown here. It's clear from the story the marshes in Buzzards Bay have rebounded. Could this mean Louisiana marshes might fare better?

To answer that, we ask if it's possible the grotesque globs of crude just now washing up in Louisiana marshes could be less damaging to marine life than the diesel fuel that blanketed Buzzards Bay 40 years ago. Consider this: crude oil is essentially plants, compressed over eons into the viscous stuff camera crews are fawning all over right now in the Gulf. Yes, the stuff washing up right now will smother hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres of prime salt marsh. The key question is: will it kill the root structure that is the foundation of these marshes?

Let's consider again the difference between diesel fuel and crude oil. Is it possible the crude washing up in Louisiana marshes won't completely smoother these roots, show here. Instead, might that oil be broken down into less toxic elements by those roots, scalding sunshine and other marsh elements normally heading into high gear this time of year? Break it down, perhaps more readily than the diesel that washed up in Buzzards Bay or the crude spilled along the frigid rocky waters of Valdez, AK. To get a handle on these questions, dig into a healthy salt marsh. You get into some rich, black, funky-smelling stuff. Kind of like peat. It's a far cry from crude oil, but it's definitely got the idea. Oil and plants are no strangers to each other. It's what biofuels are all about.

In the final read for this piece Tuesday morning we began to think: “boy, this is very wishful thinking.” Then we found this Time magazine piece which suggests maybe we're not nuts. Make no mistake, it's likely acres of oysters, mussels, clams and sea worms, along with tens of thousands of shore birds, crabs, minnows, bait fish, game fish and turtles to name a very few, will disappear for years to come. (No, we did not forget shrimp. Please see Opinion Page.) But as self-appointed contrarians, it's NBN's job now to look for silver linings and we can't ignore the vital message being sent to the only country in the world that can prevent many million more times this sort of destruction in the near future. Yes, it's time to talk Global Warming. If you think this spill threatens the Gulf marshes, it's a joke compared to what rising tides will do to marshes world wide. This is where the all important marsh roots come in. If they can survive, or even help break down the crude oil, these marshes might bounce back quicker than Buzzards Bay. If the plants return, so will the animals. Rising sea level from global warming, on the other hand, will wipe out these marshes for good along with the animals that depend on them. Which is why we think this oil spill might be good news. Could the Gulf oil spill to be the country's ecological World Trade Center? This analysis in Saturday's NY Times suggests the administration may finally be waking up to this opportunity. If the marsh rebounds like we speculate above, this oil spill could end up being be a very painful lesson at a pivotal time in history we most need it.

When the collection of sign-waving folks gathered outside the American Legion Hall in Southold, NY, Saturday said they represented the 9-12 Project, I thought it was some kind of zoning regulation. It took a little explanation before the women closest to our car said they were part of the TEA Party: Taxed Enough Already. As I drove off, I wondered what they'd think if I told them I want a tax on rain.

As communities grapple with an insidious form of pollution called stormwater runoff and expensive federal mandates to clean it up, rain taxes are being proposed all over the country. Few places need a rain tax quite as much as the town these 9-12 folks were raising over-taxation awareness in. In some respects the term rain tax is a good one: when it rains, the water washes pollutants off our roads, lawns and parking lots and into the nation's rivers, streams, bays and oceans. Rain tax tries to stop that, yet the term is also becoming a poster child for government taxing excess. It doesn’t help that this rain tax seems to be arising in communities struggling to close budget gaps as noted in this USA Today piece.

Let's put this rain tax idea into different perspective. As we’ve noted many times in this website, any community 50 or older probably has a particularly nasty form of rain pollution called combined sewer overflow that discharges raw sewage directly into the nearest river. Now, add that sewage to all the oil, fertilizer, plastic, pesticide, herbicide and other chemicals humans use to nurture or neuter nature and you have stormwater runoff. Should American's and businesses pay for their chemical contributions to stormwater runoff? That's rain tax. Look at this video above. It's the Powow River in Amesbury MA, swollen to flooding with rain that's just scrubbed 22.8 miles of New England neighborhoods and farm fields. That water is heading straight to the Merrimack River and then the Great Marsh, considered one of New England's finest salt marshes. Southold’s beloved Peconic Bays suffer a similar fate, only worse. They swallow millions of gallons of CSOs on a semi-annual basis from the Peconic River sewage treatment plant at the mouth of this magnificent estuary,. The Peconics are also surrounded by farm fields and McMansions laced on a near weekly basis with chemical weed and pest killers. When I saw one sign saying “Taxed Enough Already” I wanted to step out and explain to the holder of said sign that some people aren't paying enough taxes. Then I notice half of the signs had a cut up snake on them and said: “Don’t tread on me.” It got me thinking. Since these folks are easily swayed by catchy phrases, maybe I'll join the next rally and hold up my own TEA Party sign: “Tax Effluent Adequately.” Nah! Too many syllables.

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Along the banks of northeastern Massachusetts' Merrimack River these past few days there was a distinctive sewer odor. An odor likely detected along other East Coast rivers swollen by the past weekend's deluge. That smell comes compliments of millions of gallons of raw sewage discharged into the nation's rivers every time inches out number days during a rain storm. It's one of the dirtier legacies of the our nation's early civil engineering called combined sewer overflows. Municipal sewer systems were first designed to discharge directly into the nearest river. With the advent of the sewage treatment plant, those old pipes were simply hooked up to the new plants, leaving the old river connections open and intact for emergencies. Now, when heavy rains overwhelm those aging plants, the old river pipes take the overflow which often means hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage are discharged into the bulk of the nation's rivers every year. This produces a flood of bacterial contamination that affects clamming, fishing and recreation. Below is a good video explaining CSOs.

Then along comes the Stimulus Bill. The failed Stimulus Bill according to some. The pork barrel Stimulus Bill according to others. However, the bill has $1.4 billion for fixing up sewer plants with $185 million of that to clean up Massachusetts rivers like the Merrimack. Yet skeptics like Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn criticize this and dozens of other expenses in the Stimulus plan as “non-stimulative.” These non-stimulative expenses, according to Coburn include:
• $2 billion to develop advanced batteries for hybrid cars
• $5 billion for weatherizing buildings
• $5.1 billion for environmental cleanup around military bases

In some respects the senator is right. If the fed wanted to stimulate the economy it could invest in small businesses, presumably through tax relief, with an eye toward making those businesses grow more jobs. Many of these projects he singles out are one-time fix-ups and clean-ups that don't sound like they are going to spawn more jobs. Are these improved sewer plants along the Merrimack going to put more people to work in those plants? Probably not.

So, upgrading these plants is hardly investing in a growth industry like Coburn wants. But the reduction in bacteria in the water from cleaning up the plants will mean fewer shell-fishermen sitting at home after heavy rains. That means more, less expensive fresh clams for restaurants—and there is no clam like New England Ipswich clams. Not to mention the myriad other benefits from not having hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage dumping into our rivers annually. As for the other items Coburn singled out: the $5 billion for weatherizing buildings mentioned above is hardly going into a growth industry. How many times can you weatherize a building? However, that work will mean fewer American dollars into the black crude blackhole overseas and more comfortable buildings to live and work in back home. Also not a bad return on investment. Same story with cleaning up around those military bases.

Such projects are not just about pulling the country out of an economic slump. They also aim to set the country on a different course. Accordingly, they may not be felt as immediately as cutting taxes, but the money has to be spent some day and many of these projects require immediate attention even if the pay back is less so. Bridges need to be fixed, our dependence on foreign oil has to decline. Are we going to wait for a rainy day to clean up the military bases? Cutting taxes doesn't fix these problems. Critics like Coburn like to say we're saddling our future generations with a tax burden with this bill. But, aren't we also saddling them with a burden, that could possible be more costly over time, if we don't fix these problems now?

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 The fellow proposing an oyster farm for a Mattapoisett, RI cove, has moved his project where it will offend fewer neighbors, and not clean up the water those same neighbors wanted to keep clear for recreational purposes. Is it unfair to assume "recreational purposes" in this case probably means some kind of gas-powered entertainment. At least more-so than sailing and canoeing? This is a Google Earth image of the cove. We see a marina but not too many neighbors. The fact is, the water these people were protecting for there fun will be dirtier than if the oyster farm went forward. A few fun facts about oysters and a reality check for the folks in Mattapoisett is in order.

A single Oyster filters as much as 50 gallons of water a day. The oysters that once grew in the Chesapeake Bay filtered all the water in that bay, (about 19 trillion gallons) in a week. Today, the same feat takes the remaining oysters more than a year. Accordingly, oyster farms are going in every where, as a means of pollution control as much as agricultural enterprise. (When you think about it, the enormous filtering abilities of oysters might make them more questionable table fair in this age of road runoff. Watch the video to get a good appreciation of how funky this runoff can be.)

There's no doubt the residents surrounding this proposed oyster farm have a legitimate beef. The project being proposed for Matapoisett was an individual effort, undertaken as a retirement project. But as this image shows, they can turn open water into an obstacle course. An oyster farm will also result in more oysters growing everywhere, not just on the farm, and oyster shells are sharp. The idea of being propelled from your seat when your jet ski hits an oyster reef at 40 mph could keep you taking in the view from your dock rather than getting into the water. Add on the fact that these reefs, once they establish themselves, are kind of like a mound of razor blades jutting from the water at low tide. But such reefs once dominated the nation's bays and marshes. They are like the coral reefs of the north, attracting and giving shelter to all manner of water creatures. If we ever want these water bodies restored to their former ecological glory, they will have to once again. And that means making some sacrifices.

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From our "what-did-you-expect" department: General Electric's   Hudson PCB dredging project is sending PCB levels in the river water skyrocketing. This has the EPA and GE now talking of throttling back on the project, trying to keep PCB levels down, further stalling an already very drawn-out, very expensive project. Would it make more sense to just let the PCB levels spike and get the dredging over with? Then again, who knows how much of the industrial lubricant and suspected carcinogen is buried in the sediments of the Hudson. It's hard to imagine, in this age of environmentalism, the amount of pollution dumped into the nation's rivers between 1870 and 1970. It was so bad, some rivers used to catch fire. A lot of that pollution washed out into the ocean and is now locked probably forever in the sediments of the ocean floor. A lot of those pollutants are also locked into river bottom sediments like those now being stirred up in the Hudson.

This sediment problem gets even more interesting when you look behind the  75,000 dams still sitting in the nation's rivers. Many of these dams are derelict and are being removed at an growing pace as maintenance costs are proving too high to leave them in place. This links to a website which details 38 pages of dam removal projects across the country. That's some 550 dams in the process of getting yanked. This video above is of the Marmott Dam removal project two years ago in Oregon. It illustrates pretty nicely the dramatic change a river undergoes when a dam is removed.

That brings us to the other half of this damn dam story: they keep fish like salmon, herring, alewife, shad, and eels from swimming to spawning grounds upstream. Millions of dollars have been spent on clever fish ladders and lifts, like the one shown here at left, to help get these anadromous fish upstream to their traditional spawning grounds. Some work better than others and none work nearly as well as the river without a dam. If the fish migrations and pollution problems with dams aren't complication enough, here's another piece about the impact dams have on the species of fish in these rivers. So, why write about it here? NBN is a big proponent of tearing out dams and letting these watershed revert back to their natural states. At the same time, these demolitions will release a torrent of toxins locked up in the sediments behind these dams. Such concerns are doubtless why the Hudson River project has dragged on. We want to ask if it wouldn't be better to get it all done at once. Pull the dams, dredge the rivers, suffer the fish-kills and move on. Any takers on this one? Please leave a comment.

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Here's a wonderful article about progress going in a direction our founding fathers may not have envisioned. For the first time since colonial days, New Hampshire's Winnicut River doesn't have a dam. Dam removal is a big deal when it comes to restoring our rivers and the fish runs through them. Now, it's hoped that the Winnicut salmon and herring runs will return with the dam removed. If that happens, it will breath new life into the Great Bay's estuary ecosystem which is fed by the Winnicut. The Great Bay estuary is called an eco-system because there are all kinds of plants and animals that live and work together here in a way completely different from an ocean or fresh water environment.

Spartina grass provide homes for small crabs, eel grass does the same for shrimp and seahorses. Oysters reefs are once again starting to re-establish themselves in the Great Bay thanks to the great work being done by Ray Grizzle at UNH. It's hard to estimate how taking these dams out of these rivers will help all these critters in the ecosystems these rivers feed. That's because many of the dams have been here so long, we don't know what these estuaries looked like before they were built.

Heck, just take a look at this website. It's a 38-page list of  dam removal projects across the country. That's some 550 dams in the process of getting yanked. Oh yeah, there's 75,000 dams in this country. Still, dams are coming out every where. This is great news for fish runs. It's also great news for flushing contaminated sediments out of these rivers. But it's not all good. Removing these dams could mean less groundwater for surrounding communities to tap into. Also, people who owned homes on dam  ponds may not be thrilled to find themselves living by a stream after water levels drop. There are a lot of details to work out. But clearly, the fish, birds, grasses and overall ecosystems will benefit.

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The feds have granted Atlantic salmon in three southern Maine rivers endangered species protection, which means you can't “harass, harm, pursue, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect,” them. This protection means, in large part, that myriad bureaucratic gears start grinding should you seek permission to do any of the above. What this federal protection doesn't address are other things humans do to these fish. First there are the dams which keep salmon from reaching upstream spawning grounds. There are fish ladders and lifts put in place to help the salmon make this journey, but they don't work. That's one big reason why dams are being ripped out across New England, which has over 7,000 of the things. (Another big reason the dams are getting pulled out is dam maintenance is getting too costly. This is particularly true where the dams are privately owned.) That said there are 50,000 dams—yes 50,000—still standing in this country’s rivers and streams. They have made a mess out of fish migrations of every ilk. This image here is the Penobscot River’s Milford Dam. The Penobscot salmon is now an endangered species. Here is a great link for more local news on that.

But just tearing out dams isn’t as easy as it may sound. In some cases these dams provide a lot of electricity. Not just the obvious dams, like Niagara falls. The Great Stone Dam on the Merrimack River in Lawrence powers some 15,000 homes without using a drop of oil. However, the dam is also the reason only 57 Atlantic salmon made it upstream of Lawrence this year. Hobson's choice, wouldn't you say? There's another big, man-made problem the Atlantic salmon are facing. Fish farming. The bulk of the farmed salmon eaten in this country come from the Gulf of Maine. These three rivers singled out in the release above, run straight into the gulf of Maine. The salmon running into these rivers must first swim past the fish farms, and like all farms, fish farms have all kinds of problems controlling disease.

Things like sea lice are ravaging wild salmon populations on both coasts. Caution! Personal  anecdote approaching. When I did this story on an off-shore electrical generator that uses wave energy to power off-shore fish farms, one person involved got very upset because I mentioned the pollution problems with fish farming. The reason they wanted to design the offshore facility was to protect the inshore fish, like the salmon from the farm operation pollution problems. Click the link, it's a cool story. Great art. But again we have a Hobson's choice. Fish farming makes it so less wild salmon are needed to fill markets, but the fish farms are killing off the wild salmon. Look at our story in Good News today for news about national policy on fish farms. Apparently, the feds are moving on this front.

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This press release was pulled this morning from the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back file. Ocean Lakes Family Campground In Myrtle Beach, S.C. announced its iCare program to reduce guest impact on the environment. The program provides plastic bags for campers to clean up after their pets and themselves. The bags are designed for markedly different contents but the message is the same: clean up after yourselves. While Ocean Lakes is quick to congratulate themselves on iCare, take a look at this aerial photo

Ocean Lakes obliterated a serious section of sensitive barrier beach ecosystem. The Jackson Companies which owns Ocean Lakes specializes in outdoor recreational facilities like campgrounds and golf courses. Weighing the iCare program against the plants and animals The Jackson Companies has killed to cash in on outdoor recreation is an unpleasant equation. This is what Ocean Lakes would look like without the Jackson Companies.

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Plucking statistics out of thin air is perhaps a dicey practice for a website dedicated to simplifying science, but what the heck, I'm the editor here. Lets say about half of the people who like to swim in lakes and oceans know anything about the biology of the water they swim in. Lets further speculate that maybe a tenth of those understand the role seagrasses play in that biology. That means this Associated Press story on the disappearance of 58 percent of the worlds seagrasses is pretty much lost on everyone. Yet this story touches on one of the strongest testaments to the widespread nature of the damage we're doing to this planet through a nearly invisible form of pollution called runoff.

Seagrasses are to our coastal environments what trees are to our forests. They provide shelter to creatures that can't live without it. To steal a term from college biology, they are vertical substrate.

Is it reasonable to assume the same is happening in 58 percent of the world's seagrass. Might as well throw this article in. Kelp beds are also disappearing. These truly are underwater forests. I've only spent a few hours diving in these magnificent environments. I can't speak to what is living there. But the prospect they are disappearing too, makes me want to head back out to California's Channel Islands before it's too late.

What's perhaps less understood by the swimming pool set, is the number of different creatures dependent on this shelter. Caution, long personal anecdote approaching! I was snorkling along New York's Peconic Bay shore this weekend. I know this shoreline well. We used to spear eels there as kids. We caught blowfish, by hand. We tiptoed around poisonous toadfish, played with the pipefish, and marveled at the legions of baby winter flounder. Even an occasional seahorse, a relative of the pipefish, would turn up in the minnow nets we'd pull along the seagrass bed that formed a 30-foot-wide belt of shelter for all of the above throughout the Peconics. All the above were no where to be found in the time I spent in the water this weekend.

Finally, we have to ask what is the ultimate cost of losing the seagrasses. Wiser minds than mine are working hard on the answer right now. President Obama has pledged $167 million to help restore some of these ailing ecosystems.

Time to cloud the issue a little. In fresh water the reverse seems to be happening. Algae, and plants called invasives, are clogging ponds, lakes, rivers and streams. So much so, they are becoming more like swamps than ponds and lakes. Enormous effort and money is being spent to tear them out. In short, we're struggling to pull the plants out of fresh water and put them back into the salt water. This is so confusing because environments are ecosystems, emphasis on the word system. There are many parts working together. When one goes the effects are felt everywhere.

There is one common denominator here: pollution. Not the stuff spewing out of smoke stacks or pouring out of pipes. Subtle stuff call non-point source pollution. Also known as run-off. It comes from the hardening of our shorelines, fresh and salt. Read the links and see what you can do to help control this form of pollution. As the name implies, it's coming from everywhere and nowhere in particular. The landscape at right looks beautiful, but much more beautiful for the environment would be trees and leaves which soak up the water and filter it through the ground before discharging it into the bay.

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Linda Friar, a wonderful PR person with the National Parks Service sent over this release regarding the Everglades. (sorry about the odd link it's the first one I found) This sort of work is vital if the putrifying tide of non-point source pollution is to ever be rolled back. The NPS release is a pedestrian sort of appeal for public input on federal plans to enlarge some bridges, culverts and such that will increase water flow into the Everglades. The same sort of expansions are taking place in the marshes of New England.

Marshes are the lungs of marine ecosystems. The nutrients and life they respire into open waters are the life blood of the planet's coastal environments. These infrastructure expansion efforts to improve salt marsh circulation are no less important to our marine environments than medicine to asthmatics. Dollars to donuts, 75 percent of this country has no idea what non-point source pollution is. A finsky gets you frosting that the same percentage of marine scientists will tell you nonpoint source pollution is the single greatest threat to our marine environments after global warming. (FYI, rising sea levels from melting polar ice caps will completely neuter all the world's salt marshes.) Improving salt water flow throughout marshes helps counter non-pointsource pollution

Fly over the Everglades or drive the bayside of New Jersey's Long Beach Island. Spend some times boating around Long Island's Great South Bay in New York. Or just look at the image on the right You'll see mile after mile of bulk heading has allowed construction of millions of homes that are now dumping lawn fertilizers and road run-off in place of the marsh marine life that has historically feed the world's bays and oceans.

(Mandatory coffee-fueled tangential digression here: I flew over the Florida pan handle returning from Disney World recently. Talk about perverting an ecosystem, Disney's Wild Safari as converted 160 acres of Florida marsh into African Savannah so people can get a better appreciation of nature! Folks if you want an appreciation of nature go to the NPS's Everglades National Park.

Back to the point. Thousands of square miles of once-fertile marsh has been diked, dammed and bulkheaded to accommodate all manner of man-made enterprise along our coastlines. And people ponder Florida's disappearing coral reefs. Let's hope the NPS carries through with their Everglades plans and that the rest of the world follows suit.