Chesapeake Bay Action Plan

(Posted by Roy Hoagland.)

The Pew Environmental Group recently issued a report, “Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Production in America,” which included a focus on the pollution problems contributed by agriculture to the Chesapeake Bay. Agribusiness interests quickly condemned the report, claiming that as of today, the industry was both “diligent and innovative” in its work to achieve a healthier environment.

The most visible organizations responding to the Pew report were the National Chicken Council and the US Poultry & Egg Association—two of the organizations now leading the fight to undermine the current initiative to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.

The current clean up initiative, an ecosystem-wide “pollution diet,” is recognized as one of the most promising ecological restoration efforts in the nation. Yet the Chicken Council and the Poultry & Egg Association are now, in their pursuit of “diligent and innovative” environmental stewardship, arguing in federal court and in Congress that we should shut down this unprecedented state-federal partnership to achieve a healthy Chesapeake Bay.

What hypocrisy.

Monitoring data and modeling results establish that agriculture is the number one source of nutrient and sediment pollution to the Chesapeake Bay, accounting for nearly 40 percent of nitrogen pollution and approximately 45 percent and 60 percent of the phosphorus and sediment pollution, respectively.

During my tenure as vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, we helped deliver literally millions of dollars to farmers across the Chesapeake Bay watershed for assistance in implementing pollution reduction efforts. In partnership with others, we not only helped lead a successful effort to obtain the largest amount of federal Farm Bill dollars ever for those working in agriculture in the watershed, but we also worked side by side with farmers on the ground from the New York/Pennsylvania border to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to improve barnyard management, establish streamside buffers, employ precision feeding, and implement many other progressive changes.

Conservation organizations across the watershed, from national groups like The Nature Conservancy to regional organizations like the Foundation to state agencies like the Chesapeake Bay Commission to local organizations like the James River Association have worked hard to help provide farmers with assistance and as a result more farmers are doing the right thing. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the industry as a whole has not done enough. A recent study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture says as much.
If we are to accomplish the restoration of local rivers and streams across the watershed and in the Chesapeake Bay itself, agribusiness, as well as developers, homeowners, and other pollution sectors, must do more. Thus, the need to put the Chesapeake Bay on a pollution diet—an ecosystem-wide pollution reduction initiative that calls on agriculture and others to cut back on the pollution they are feeding to the Bay.

For the Chicken Council and the Poultry & Egg Association to argue that its industry is being “diligent” in its Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts while attempting to stymie this pollution diet, the only legitimate initiative for restoring the Bay, is, quite frankly, a lot of chicken poop.

Roy A. Hoagland is the owner and operator of HOPE Impacts, LLC, Richmond, Virginia. HOPE Impacts works with nonprofits, funders, and governmental agencies on environmental matters, including work on reducing pollution from agricultural sources. He has served as co-chair of America’s Great Waters Coalition, chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Chesapeake Bay Program, and vice president of Environmental Protection and Restoration for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

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(Posed by Sarah Meyers.)

Last week, Pew Environment Group released a report entitled Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America. The report draws on data from the USDA going back to 1950 and explores the history, growth, and impact of the chicken industry within the “Broiler Belt.” The production of broilers has increased nationally from just over a half billion in 1950 to almost 9 billion in 2007, while the number of farms producing these broilers has decreased from 1.6 million in 1950 to just 27,000 by 2007.

This increase in chicken production has had an unintended consequence: a massive increase in chicken waste in a very concentrated area. This is most apparent on the Delmarva Peninsula, where the density of chickens is extremely high (6 percent of the country’s production on just 0.5 percent of its landmass). The waste produced by chickens in Delaware and Maryland is about 42 million cubic feet or enough to fill the U.S. Capitol dome nearly 50 times. The waste contains nutrients that, when used in moderation, are a good organic fertilizer for crops throughout the region; however, there is too much in too little an area and the excess goes as runoff into the water, be that groundwater, streams, rivers, lakes, or estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay.

Agriculture is by no means the only source responsible for pollution going into the Bay, but it is a significant source of the Bay’s nutrients. Pew recognizes the voluntary efforts being taken by farmers for better nutrient management practices as well as individual state efforts already in place. However, further regulations, as with any industry in the United States, are needed. Based on the report, Pew is making the following recommendations:

• Caps on total animal density.
• Shared financial and legal responsibility for proper waste management between farmers and corporate integrators.
• Monitoring and regulation of waste transported off CAFO sites.
• A requirement that all medium and large CAFOs obtain Clean Water Act permits.

Read more about Big Chicken from the Pew Environment Group, and check out Pew’s collection of videos.

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(Posted by Mary Ann Lisanti.)

Two decades ago, when the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort began, the leadership of local officials was viewed as nice, but not essential. Times have changed. Today, with the deadline to develop local Watershed Implementation Plans looming, it’s clear that when it comes to improving the health of our local rivers and streams, and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay, the elected leaders of town and county governments and the appointed leaders of local soil conservation, storm water, and planning districts throughout the Chesapeake watershed will be the ones to make it happen.

However, the feedback coming from local government is simply this: They need information, direction, and flexibility in choosing approaches, otherwise budget challenges will keep them from reaching their goals.

As the chair of the Local Government Advisory Committee to the Chesapeake Executive Council, it has become clear to me that there is a real disconnect between the expectations of the federal officials managing the new Chesapeake TMDL process and the understanding of many of the local government officials now charged with developing the plans to implement watershed improvements.

This is a critical moment that calls for clear, direct communication to local governments so local officials understand what they need to do, and understand the benefits their work holds for their communities.

Our committee, called LGAC for short, has begun to address this need. We worked with private funders and communication professionals to develop an initial education piece for local government leaders. We plan to follow it with more information. Last week in Richmond I presented the need for communication to the Chesapeake Executive Council and the Bay Program leaders. We now have their attention, but we need more help to get out the word.

There are 1,800 units of local governments in the watershed and nearly 11,000 elected officials. Reaching them all will take time. Individuals can help. The senior Bay leaders who created this blog and the Chesapeake Bay Action Plan can be of particular help. You are all influential, committed, and have been for a long time. You understand how the actions taken locally benefit not just that community, but the system as a whole. You can help us reach leaders in your communities.

Download a copy of our report, Our Waters, Our Towns, and put it in the hands of local elected officials and influential community leaders. Help us fill the information gap. Help them understand what they need to do, and how it will benefit them and their community.

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For those who dream of a chemical-free Cheasapeake Bay, this guest post from Safelawns.org founder Paul Tukey demonstrates that dreams can, in fact, come true.

The topic of what, exactly, facilitates real change in human habits has been the focus of behavioral scientists, political pundits and clever marketers for as long as we’ve had a mature free market system in North America. In the non-profit world, where resources are scarce, almost by definition, we’re constantly looking for ways to get our message its proverbial 15 minutes in the limelight. Often, we’re lucky to grab 15 seconds of someone’s attention, so our message better damn well be clear.

At SafeLawns.org, founded in Maine and Washington, D.C., in 2006 to reduce the toxic load on our backyard lawns, business and college campuses and public parks, we’ve taken many of our cues from a lone Canadian doctor. A quarter century ago, when Dr. June Irwin, a dermatologist, heard the renowned author and activist Gordon Sinclair say that “letters to the editor are free,” she took it to heart.

Her relentless six-year letter-writing campaign and monthly visits to town meetings in her village of Hudson, Quebec, led her town to become the first municipality in the world to ban the applications of lawn and garden pesticides — the insect and weed killers that are applied by the millions of pounds in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and elsewhere in United States. By then it was 1991; she had started writing those letters, not just to her own newspaper, but to papers regionally and nationally, back in 1985 when she discovered a common lawn weed killer, 2,4-D, in the bloodstream of a very ill patient. And she always made a point of dropping off copies of her letters with her local mayor and town clerk.

The lawn chemical industry, both in the U.S. and Canada, immediately mobilized against the town and doctor. In Washington, the chemical industry funded the lobby group RISE (the Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment) to convince people that those lawn pesticides and chemical fertilizers were not a threat to people, pets or the environment. In Canada, the billion-dollar industry sued the little town of Hudson with its 5,200 residents.

In retrospect, though, that lawsuit was the most ill-fated decision the lawn chemical industry ever could have made. It gave Dr. Irwin and her then growing legions of followers the opportunity to write even more letters, and to organize other media oriented events including anti-pesticide rallies, educational sessions and inspirational speeches. By the time the Chemlawn v. Hudson case made it to the Canadian Supreme Court in 2000, millions of Canadians had seen the news reports, read the letters and had already made their decisions to quit the chemicals on their own. The Court’s 9-0 decision in Hudson’s favor, by then a fait accompli, set an epic domino effect in motion. Town by town, province by province, Canadians have banned products like Roundup and Weed ’n Feed in the past decade. Today more than 80 percent of Canadian citizens live in municipalities where the applications of these products are against the law.

The result, ultimately, has been real change in behavior. The very perception of what constitutes a beautiful lawn has been turned on its ear in Canada, to the point where neighbors frown upon other neighbors who don’t have at least a few dandelions and patches of clover on their lawns. If someone in Canada does have a perfect weed-free carpet, their neighbors call them out as cheaters — as people who traveled to a U.S. boarder state, bought the lawn chemicals here, then brought them back to Canada illegally.

None of this change, to be certain, happened easily. It happened because one person dared enough and cared enough to speak out and others followed. We have strived every day to make the most of Dr. Irwin’s work; we even helped make a documentary film about her story, titled “A Chemical Reaction,” that has played at theaters, high school auditoriums, church basements and living rooms across North America (see trailer below).

But have we had our 15 minutes? Not hardly. Sure, we’ve won a few awards and changed a few minds with our campaigns and the movie, but we’re still waiting to hit the zeitgeist. Yes, Maryland and elsewhere are starting to regulate phosphorus in lawn fertilizers, but toxins like Roundup and 2,4-D are still applied unabated. We rejoice in the fact that New York and Connecticut have passed the Child’s Safe Playing Fields Act to restrict the applications of pesticides on school grounds, but we bemoan the fact that similar measures have been shot down in numerous other states — because a well-funded lawn chemical industry shows up and lobbies like hell. They literally have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend to convince people that they’re somehow un-American if they let dandelions grow on their properties.

All we have is the ability to write . . . letters . . . and lots of them. And we’ll keep at it. And we’re thankful that organizations like Glenstone, a Maryland art museum in Potomac, has helped fund a long-term research project with the University of Maryland to help bring the best organic lawn information and practices to the Chesapeake Bay region. As Glenstone’s founder stated, “If we don’t do this, who will?”

On May 6, 2011, Hudson, Quebec, celebrated 20 years of chemical freedom on its lawns, playgrounds and playing fields. Property values have soared because people want to live in a toxin-free environment. Lawns and gardens are more beautiful than ever, having found a harmonious balance with nature.

We tell that story far and wide. And we hope you’ll help, because the Hudson experience should be our reality, too.

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(Posted by Erik Michelson.)

After centuries of unregulated wetland filling, land clearing, and shoreline modification, over the course of the past several decades, federal, state, and local regulations have been put in place ostensibly to reverse the trend of the declining health of the country’s waterways. As a rule, these have taken the form of a sequence of three options: “avoid, minimize, mitigate.” So, in the context of a development project, impacts to wetlands or trees in the critical area buffer should be avoided if at all possible, and if not avoided, minimized. Any impacts that do occur, should either be mitigated, or offset, preferably on the same site where they originally occurred, but if not there, somewhere else in the same jurisdiction.

The merits of this system can be debated, particularly the stringency with which the avoidance and minimization lines are upheld (or not), but at least in terms of metrics (e.g., acres of non-tidal wetlands) this method has a rigidity that allows politicians and bureaucrats to proudly declare “no net loss” of resources.

But what if, in the context of restoration, one’s intention is to increase the ecosystem benefits of a project without doing it in precisely the 1 to 1, in-kind ratio demanded by a strict metrics-based accounting? What if, on the way towards restoration, it becomes necessary to actually violate the letter of the law?

Turns out these aren’t just hypothetical questions. Certain stream and wetland restoration methods that have been studied by the University of Maryland have been shown to have the capacity to trap and treat sediment and nutrients, and create high quality habitat for wildlife. These projects involve permanently connecting eroded or incised streams to their surrounding floodplains. In virtually all cases, this involves temporary impacts to streams or adjacent wetlands with the goal of enhancing and improving the quality of the overall resource, both in terms of the metrics of record, but also in terms of less tangible factors, such as increasing fish spawning habitat. Nevertheless, the regulatory comments on these projects come back as though they were development projects, impacting natural resources so that a Wal-Mart parking lot could be built upon them, rather than capping old agricultural sediments trapped in a stream valley with a rich, biodiverse wetland so that they can no longer wash down to tidewater with each rain event.

Additional evidence that our current regulatory framework is more properly aimed at slowing the decline of the resource, rather than facilitating its recovery, could not be clearer than in the case of rare, threatened, and endangered plants. Any entry level gardener can go to Home Depot or the nursery down the street and buy a suite of noxious, invasive plants, such as English ivy or purple loosefstrife to drop into their flower beds and colonize the surrounding woods and wetlands. But, heaven forbid you want to try to bring back a rare, threatened, or endangered native plant species. Should you be so enterprising as to try, you will need a permit from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) just to possess or transport them. Best not to bother even trying to “re-introduce” them. DNR currently has no guidelines or standards in place to review such permits. The system is turned on its head.

At its worst, a purely metrics-based regulatory approach can actually harm the resource that it is intended to protect. Take the case of the South River. As mitigation for damage done to tidal wetlands as part of a bridge construction project, the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) was required by the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) to create tidal wetlands elsewhere in the watershed. On its face, it seems reasonable enough. The trouble is, the tidal wetlands that were disturbed as a result of the bridge crossing were only there because over the past century or so, agricultural sediments, rich in nutrients, washed into the open water of the river, filled it in, and became colonized with invasive phragmites reed. So, in order to compensate for disturbing an acre of farm mud in the river, the chief regulatory agency, despite the objection of a number of other regulatory partners and the South River Federation, required SHA to dump more fill and stone along the shoreline at South River Farm Park so that they could declare “no net loss” of wetlands. Meanwhile, we’ve lost an acre of shallow water fish habitat and several thousand feet of intertidal beach habitat, where horseshoe crabs and terrapins could nest. A better solution was on the table, but the regulators forced SHA back to the drawing board to spend more taxpayer money on an inferior design that was worse for the South River.

Current, federal efforts, led by the Environmental Protection Agency, requiring that the pieces for Chesapeake Bay recovery be put in place by 2025 make these issues all the more salient. Even with unlimited funding and complete local support, neither of which exists, reaching Bay clean-up goals is a stretch in that timeframe. Without a regulatory apparatus that can move smoothly between development and restoration review, and expedite and evolve its understanding of the latter, it will be impossible.

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