Put Up (your pollution controls) or Shut Up (your whining)!

Supporters of the EPA project are pleased with the draft TMDL released this week, and urge congress to pass the current changes to the Chesapeake Clean Water Act in order to further support future clean-up efforts. The states that received the harshest criticisms from the EPA are, of course, complaining the most that the TMDL is unfair. Virginia, for example, skirted the issue of funding in their WIP, while the official summary of the Chesapeake Clean Water Act dictates allotments of funds to implementation grants, technical assistance to foresters and agriculture producers, and stewardship grants. Opponents are calling it a “hostile agenda aimed securely at rural America” and saying this process has been too “rushed”, to which I have to say they’ve had almost 30 years to take care of their own chore lists—they have no right to bitch now because mom is tightening the screws. 



Please note the brief foray the river makes into Maryland....
Photo courtesy of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission



One argument for leniency that I might make is in favor of the Maryland WIP, one of two (out of seven) to be accepted by the EPA as relatively complete. The EPA seems to think that Maryland should put more emphasis on regulating the Susquehanna, along with two other rivers.  The Patuxent and the Choptank are both primarily located in Maryland; they should certainly be addressed accordingly.  The Susquehanna, on the other hand is located mostly in Pennsylvania, with a significant chunk in New York.  The mouth of the river is in Maryland, but the bulk of the problem nutrients and sediment are accumulating upstream. It's ridiculous to expect Maryland to be able to regulate that effectively.

The TMDL is not a bid for power by the EPA. As they continually remind us, they are federally mandated to produce the TMDL because of the “insufficient restoration progress over the last several decades in the Bay” on the part of the bay states, and the timetable was agreed upon by the governors of said states two years ago (granted, some of those governors are no longer representing their states). The development of the TMDL consisted of three major steps: the EPA set limits for pollutants, the states and DC based their Watershed Implementation Plans on those limits, and then the EPA drafted the TMDL, defining “backstop allocations” where the WIPs were insufficient. Those backstops are what all the opponents are protesting as too heavy handed.

These are not dictates by the EPA--I'm sure they would much rather have the jurisdictions do their part of the work and come up with more constituent-friendly options, but that is the responsibility of the localities in question! It’s much easier, more visually supportable, and just more popular to attack open sewer pipes and defend the poor, subjugated farming and construction industries that couldn’t possibly afford to minimize their impact on their neighbors, immediate or remote. The deficient states seem to be relying on the general public to fear the involvement of federal government more than they fear the looming (but less imminent) environmental disaster that is developing in our nation’s water. The TMDL and related legislation may be landmark cases in future water quality conflicts. "If EPA can't make it work here, they can't make it work anywhere," said Oliver Houck, an environmental-law expert at Tulane University told The Washington Post.

Public opinion seems to be negatively influenced by the faulty reasoning that if you can’t see the Chesapeake from your balcony, you have no reason to be interested in its upkeep. Residents in Loudon County, VA (through which runs Loudon Creek, a secondary tributary of the Chesapeake) recently protested additional zoning to regulate construction sites near waterways, claiming they were too intrusive and expensive. County Supervisor Kelly Burk told The Washington Post that people felt that they didn’t “have an impact on the bay.” All the parties who feel threatened by the TMDL language cite the cost of implementing pollution regulation. No one seems willing to look at the big picture, to see past their profit margins to recognize the long term impacts of the Chesapeake Bay turning into China’s Yellow River.



Pollution-driven algal blooms in Norfolk, Virginia, starve the Bay of oxygen, creating ‘dead zones’ where nothing can live.  Photo by Morgan Heim, part of R.A.V.E. exhibit in DC. (http://www.cbf.org/Page.aspx?pid=2040)

Dead zones continue to impact fishing and shellfish industries, and not only in the Chesapeake: the US coast now has hundreds of these blemishes. The 2010 oyster harvest in Maryland was 96 percent lower than that in 1983 (the FIRST year in which the bay states missed the deadline for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay), and the previously bay-reliant economy of small towns like St. Michael’s, MD, are becoming more and more focused on tourism for their income. Who’s going to visit (or build/buy homes or raise families or found businesses in) these towns when they overlook a morass of sludge, speckled with dead fish and overflown by majestic vultures instead of the ospreys and eagles that are so much more aesthetically pleasing?