"Frontline" investigates troubled state of Chesapeake, US waters
The Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound provide scenic and thematic bookends for a troubling examination of what ails our nation's waterways in "Poisoned Waters," a two-hour documentary airing Tuesday night on PBS' "Frontline." Pardon the plug, but it really is TV worth watching.
Veteran journalist Hedrick Smith takes viewers along as he explores the threats to those two iconic water bodies and how their problems are shared across the country. He interviews watermen who lament the loss of the bay's seafood abundance and tracks the Chesapeake's "dead zone" back to its biggest source - the proliferation of chicken houses (and manure) across the Delmarva Peninsula. He also examines the perils to the Chesapeake and to Puget Sound from growth and development, as well as from the multiplicity of untested and potentially harmful chemicals that wind up in our waters.
It's a complicated picture, and one that requires explanation. The documentary starts out a bit slowly, with a series of talking-head inteviews. Normally, TV's impact comes from showing, rather than telling. But the comments are clear and compelling, as is Smith's narration, and they build momentum as the story unfolds showing how the Chesapeake and Puget are "indicators" of a larger national problem.
To place the bay and the sound in historical context, Smith briefly recalls the beginning of the modern environmental movement, when burning rivers and vanishing bald eagles drew 20 million Americans into the streets on the first Earth Day in 1970 to demand an end to pollution. President Richard M. Nixon responded by creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and Congress adopted the Clean Water Act over Nixon's veto. (He apparently didn't want "Eh-pa," as he called it, to get too tough with his corporate buddies).
The Clean Water Act called for all the nation's waters to be fishable and swimmable by 1983. It lead to crackdowns on factories, sewage plants and other industrial polluters, and many if not most have cleaned up. But as the documentary makes clear, the legacy of that pollution lives on in the sediments on the bottom of Puget Sound and other water ways. PCBs and other long-lasting chemicals make their way into the aquatic food chain, contaminating the fish we eat and possibly even poisoning the Puget Sound's iconic killer whales.
The people that Smith interviews on camera about the bay will be familiar to anyone who's read The Baltimore Sun. Most prominent of them is eloquent author Tom Horton, former bay columnist and longtime reporter for the paper (and, personal disclosure, a friend). But Smith also gives air time to Jim Perdue and the spokesman for the Delmarva poultry industry, who defend their long and - until recently - successful resistance to government regulation of polluted farm runoff.
Interestingly, the failure of the state and federal governments to crack down on farm runoff may finally be ending. EPA lately has taken a tougher line on requiring chicken farms to get pollution discharge permits, prompting hundreds of growers on the Shore to reluctantly bow to regulation. Smith mentions that development in passing - it probably happened too late in the documentary's final editing to devote much more to it, and to be fair, it's not clear yet if it will really change anything.
Farm runoff notwithstanding, though much of the most visible pollution has been cleaned up, there are new and largely invisible threats. Smith follows government fisheries biologists as they study fish kills and mutations in the Virginia headwaters of the Potomac River. Those are problems that experts believe may be linked to the soup of hormones and chemicals getting into the water from consumer products like medicines, soaps, toothpaste and household cleaners.
The documentary closes by looking at how sprawl is destroying the natural buffers protecting our waters, and how efforts to curb it run up against cherished traditions (and legal principles) of private property rights. It's interesting to hear how King County, Wash., which includes Seattle and its suburbs, has been dragged into court by rural property owners angered over their inability to develop their land under a 1994 "critical areas" ordinance - not unlike Maryland's Critical Area law adopted 20 years earlier. Resolving such collisions between development and clean water are essential to saving the bay, sound and everything in between.
Smith returns East to look at how Northern Virginia illustrates the worst and best of the growth issue. Tysons Corner stars as the poster child for sprawl, while Arlington bows as a model of "smart growth," with development clustered around Metro subway stops. Though transit-oriented development is catching on, sprawl and the attendant stormwater runoff are a growing threat to fish and water quality everywhere.
The documentary closes by arguing that the fate of the nation's waters depends on engaging the public. It harks back to those earlier scenes of mass protests on that first Earth Day, but the engagement called for today is about getting everyone to take responsibility for their contribution to the overall problem, not merely pointing fingers at others.
"It's about the way we all live," says Jay Manning, head of Washington state's department of ecology. "And unfortunately, we are all polluters. I am; you are; all of us are."
Something to ponder on the eve of another Earth Day.
(Photos of scenes from "Poisoned Waters," by Susan Zox)
I report on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, I have focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, I've crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. Recently, I have been covering the growth and development transforming the landscape. I love seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. I hope to share some here.
Comments
I am looking forward to watching this tonight. The program was discussed on NPR yesterday and sounded very good.
Posted by: bdc | April 21, 2009 9:03 AM
For another point of view, David Farenthold, who covers the bay for The Washington Post, found his attention drifting as he watched "Poisoned Waters."
Read his review here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042003737.html?hpid=features1&hpv=national
Maybe I'm just a bayholic, or maybe it was because I previewed the doc while on a plane - with no channel flipper to hit - but I thought it picked up steam after a slow start.
Posted by: Tim Wheeler | April 21, 2009 11:58 AM
Clean Water: Because of Our Farms, Not in Spite of Them
It’s almost Earth Day. And along with this year’s volunteer trash pick ups and tree plantings, celebrations and speeches around our region, there will be people taking steps to improve the environment in a quiet but determined way. Earth Day is in springtime when farmers come out of their winter planning to plant their crops into warming soil. Included in their plans, beyond how much harvest they hope for, are a host of conservation practices aimed at stewarding the land they work and minimizing impacts on streams, rivers and the Bay.
Farmers invest in these sound land management practices on their own and in partnership with others. This year, after a hard fought battle that farmers waged along side land preservation, environmental groups and the majority of our region’s congressional delegation, there is far more federal money going to assist farmers in protecting our air and water.
In the Shenandoah Valley, farmers who are part of the Waste Solutions Forum will be using flexible electric wire to keep cows out of the streams. Funding comes in part from the Chesapeake Bay Funders network. In Pennsylvania, a group of farmers who work with American Farmland Trust (AFT) will try lowering their fertilizer use on fields where there may be sufficient residues to grow their new crop. Farmers on the Eastern Shore in both Maryland and Delaware are going high tech with sophisticated computer equipment that shows precisely where to apply fertilizers; putting it on the acres that need it most but resulting in less being applied on the farm as a whole.
As Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley puts it, “Farmers, like homeowners and all residents of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, play an important role in protecting our soil and water resources.” It is a priority of the O’Malley-Brown Administration to “protect the health of the Bay for all to enjoy and to strengthen the family farms that anchor our rural communities and economies, preserve productive land, and provide a local source of food. Farmers are strong partners in conservation.” The Maryland Department of Agriculture launched a campaign last spring that urges citizens to take tips from farmers about how to cut back on pesticide use, reduce soil erosion and manage fertilizers wisely.
Earth day is an important reminder of all we must do to meet the challenge of restoring the Bay. It will require a concerted effort from all its citizens and governments and business – including farms. Indeed, a PBS Frontline documentary: “Poisoned Water” will air this week on water quality and makes this point eloquently.
AFT agrees with the point made in that film, that farmers like everyone else, can and must be part of the solution, and everyone living in the Bay watershed must do more. In order to do so, some farmers will need technical expertise to learn new practices or additional resources to help implement them. Some will argue that we need to get tough with farmers, and for a few that may be necessary. But farmers have been and will be an ever more important part of the water quality solution in our region. Farmers can make pollution reductions at a lower cost than can factories, utilities or the residential sector. Well-managed farmland can be a pollution solution, but only if that land remains in farming and doesn’t become just another parking lot.
We can clean up the Bay and we will. But we will do it because of our farms, not in spite of them.
Jim Baird, Mid Atlantic States Director
American Farmland Trust
Jim Baird is the Mid Atlantic States Director of American Farmland Trust (www.farmland.org), and a Mid Atlantic native. AFT is the leading national advocate for farm and ranch land conservation, working with communities to protect the best land, plan for growth with agriculture in mind, and keep the land healthy. By working with agriculture leaders to develop legislative solutions that support on-the-ground programs and encourage the widespread adoption of conservation practices, we can make significant progress toward improving our nation’s water quality while enhancing biodiversity, maintaining rural communities and stabilizing farmers’ income.
Posted by: Jim Baird | April 21, 2009 3:10 PM
I appreciate Jim Baird's comments. I have lived on a cattle ranch all of my adult life. What Mr. Baird says is correct. On our ranch, like other farms and ranches, soil tests are done before fertilizer is considered. Fertilizer is applied only as needed by calculation based on soil test results. Some of the hay fields are fertilized with treated sewage from neighboring cities. The ranch where I live is ten thousand acres that will not be developed, and we produce food that goes all over the United States and Canada. My husband and I are both very concerned about the Earth and good environmental practices, and we do all we can to help, personally and in agricultural/agribusiness practices. I wish everyone who uses the food and fiber we produce in agriculture would make an effort to learn about its origins and how it is produced.
Posted by: Janet Barrow | April 22, 2009 1:22 AM
The Frontline program, "Poisoned Waters" was very good. It is disturbing that farming is still not practiced in a sustainable way over all. It is time to concentrate our attention to organic methods which focus on hedge rows, humus building organic fertilizer in the topsoil, and natural pest control, all of which contribute to healthy plants and much less run off into our waterways. Humus holds the land in place and reduces run off. Grass and hedgerows,act as filters and barriers to the run off that escapes the fields. The run off of organic farming would not have pesticides and herbicides that kill off the life in the waters of grasses, etc. Industrial animal farming is a problem everywhere. The animals are fed grains that are not natural for them to eat, so they produce very acidic animal waste that causes the most virulent form of e-coli. The run off from these farming practices is what caused our recent spinach contaminatation. It is not farming that is the problem, it is the way farming is practiced that is endangering our world. When I was a child in the fifties, the water was clear and clean. Then came new highways, and chemical farming. Over the years the larger tractors became more and more popular, which required larger fields with no hedgerowes in the way of the large machinery that packed the soil into hardpan. I remember well the kill off of the grasses in the early sixties. I presided for a little while, over the restoration of our family farm to organic methods in the seventies and the eighties. When the farm was sold, it reverted to chemical methods. The fields that had the organic methods employed the longest, continue to be the greenest in the most severe droughts, still surviving on the humus the new farmers have not been able to kill off yet. It is so sad to see the run off go into the ditches and into the nearby creek. It is hard to get people to listen to how important all of this is to the Chesapeake Bay and to our collective health.
We owe a lot to people like Tom Horton, a fabulous reporter and author and another very good friend of his, Tom Wisner, a scientist turned song writer and poet of the Chesapeake Bay, for striving to make us aware of the need to save the Chesapeake Bay. Thanks, Carolyn Egeli
Posted by: Carolyn Egeli | April 22, 2009 7:39 PM