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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.