On
June 24, 2008, Louie and I curled up on the couch to watch seven of the
nation's foremost water resources experts testify before the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Subcommittee on Water
Resources and Environment.
This was a new experience for us.
For my part, the issue to be addressed -- "Comprehensive Watershed
Management Planning" -- was certainly a change of pace from the
subjects I ordinarily follow in Judiciary and Intelligence Committee
hearings. I wasn't even entirely sure what a "watershed" was. I knew
that, in a metaphorical sense, the word referred to a turning point,
but I was a bit fuzzy about its meaning in the world of hydrology.
(It's the term used to describe "all land and water areas that drain
toward a river or lake.")
What was strange from Louie's point
of view was not the topic of the day, but that we were stuck in the
house. Usually at that hour, we'd be working in the backyard, where he
can better leverage his skill set, which includes chasing squirrels,
digging up tomato plants, eating wicker patio chairs, etc. On this
particular afternoon, however, the typically cornflower-blue San Jose
sky was the color of wet cement, and thick soot was charging down from
the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. Sitting outside would have been about
as pleasant as relaxing in a large ashtray.
It would have been difficult, on such a day, not to think about water.
June 24, 2008: Water on the Brain
In
California, of course, it was the lack thereof. Thanks to the driest
spring on record in many areas -- including in San Jose, where
recordkeeping began in 1875 -- the whole state was parched. Far worse,
large chunks of it were burning. To be precise, on June 24th, there
were 842 wildfires blazing, the result of "dry lightning," which --
I've now learned -- happens when conditions are so dry that the rain
never makes it to the plain. It evaporates in mid-air.
In the
Midwest, on the other hand, water was everywhere, cascading across the
land and through towns; or, it was threatening to do so, as terrified
homeowners and volunteers desperately hoisted sandbags onto levees that
were failing, due to forces as powerful as the mighty Mississippi and
as seemingly innocuous as burrowing muskrats. The flooding had been
ongoing for weeks, killing dozens of people, displacing thousands, and
causing billions of dollars of crop, building, and other damage. With
California burning and Iowa underwater, the Red Cross national disaster
relief fund for 2008 was already entirely depleted, although six months
of potential weather devastation of various sorts still lie ahead. The
balance, its finance director had announced, was "zero."
Meanwhile,
the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Weekly News was reporting
that the deluge had swept record amounts of storm-water into lakes and
rivers, "bringing along pollutants from urban streets, farm fields and
construction sites." To make matters worse, as of late June, Wisconsin
communities had already identified 164 "overflow events" -- a polite
term for the release of untreated sewage into the state's waters.
Where
were all these chemicals and all that muck ultimately headed? Some of
it would be spewed into the Great Lakes, already beset by a host of
problems. To name a few: slimy Eurasian water milfoil that clogs boat
propellers, fish viruses, chemicals that cause glandular disturbances
(think: intersex fish), Asian carp that eat everything in sight, zebra
mussels by the trillions, and -- not to be forgotten -- lots and lots
of chicken manure. (This is a huge and serious issue, but I can't
resist mentioning that it was the topic of the recent Great Lakes
Manure Handling Expo, which you may have missed.)
The quality
of water in the Great Lakes was not the only challenge; there are also
myriad ongoing conflicts about quantity -- about the right to use the 6
quadrillion tons of water the five lakes contain. Ironically, on June
24th, Nestlé Corporation, a party to an infamous Great Lakes water
dispute, was also facing a water quality problem. That very day, the
Federal Drug Administration notified Northeasterners that Nestle's Pure
Life Purified Drinking Water was not as pure as might be imagined.
After filling its bottles with Lake Michigan water, Nestle had managed
to contaminate some of that very same bottled water with cleaning
compound.
But back to the June floods. Where else will the
pollution from them be heading? For one thing, down the Mississippi
River to the Gulf of Mexico. When it gets there, the nitrogen and
phosphorus swept into the current from upriver farmers' fields will do
what those farmers intended it to do: make things grow. Unfortunately,
it will be fertilizing algae, which sucks oxygen out of its surrounding
waters as it decomposes, adding to an already existing "dead zone" in
the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can no longer live.
Even
before the relentless late spring rains, scientists had predicted that,
in the summer of 2008, this barren area off the Louisiana coast would
grow to be a Massachusetts-sized 10,000 square miles. Post-flood, with
even more fertilizer and freshwater pouring into the Gulf, that
estimate was increased to 12,000 square miles or more, the equivalent
of the state of Maryland.
Now, I'm neither a scientist, nor an
engineer, nor anything remotely similar to either of the above. Once we
got past the planaria in Biology 101, I could never find whatever it
was we were supposed to be analyzing on that microscope slide. (I'm not
proud of this: it's simply the stark, unvarnished truth.) But even to a
layperson, these Viewmaster shots of the extreme water issues facing
the United States in the summer of 2008 -- random as they may seem --
suggest a panoramic picture of the state of water resources management
in this country. In four words, it is sheer chaos.
Still Floundering After All These Years
It
would be easy, even tempting, to blame the turbulent state of the
nation's water affairs on the Bush administration. Certainly, they've
provided ample cause: gutting, and failing to enforce, the Clean Water
Act, for instance, and, at best, simply ignoring the obvious problems
of floods, droughts, and hurricanes, of shifting weather patterns, of
contaminants old and new, and a myriad of other water disasters through
eight long years.
The truth is, though, that scientists,
engineers, and environmental planners have been advising Congress for
years that holistic watershed management is the only rational and
practical way to address complex water quality and quantity issues. Why
that persistent recommendation? As Delaware River Basin Commission
Executive Director Carol Collier told the Subcommittee on Water
Resources and Environment on June 24th, bodies of water don't respect
political boundaries; we have to manage them "on the rivers' terms."
And the stakeholders from both riverbanks -- as well as from up and
downstream -- all need to be at the table. Notwithstanding this
long-term chorus of expert advice, our elected officials have merrily
continued to legislate piecemeal, funding billions of dollars of local
water-related projects without regard to their overall value or impact.
Tragically, as it turns out, faced with the urgent need to
change our management of U.S. waters, Congress has, for decades, been
standing "up on the watershed" -- just as in the Indigo Girls song --
and they've been floundering. But you can't say it hasn't been a
bipartisan effort.
Although the witnesses at the Water
Resources and Environment Subcommittee hearing were decidedly
nonpartisan, the testimony of each and every one made this fact
abundantly, even painfully, clear. They were all measured and polite,
of course, but you didn't have to be Karnac the Magnificent to sense
the frustration.
Consider, for example, the testimony of Larry
Larson, the Executive Director of the Association of State Floodplain
Managers. He began: "Once again we are seeing devastating floods in the
Midwest -- likely billions in losses to farms, homes, businesses and
infrastructure." Then, he ticked off some causes: population growth,
migration, climate changes, degradation of water-based resources,
deteriorating infrastructures, encouraging wetlands-draining and crop
growth on marginal land, addressing water quality but not quantity,
over-reliance on dams and levees to prevent floods.
His conclusion?
- "Without
dramatic shifts in our approaches and actions, by 2050 flood losses are
likely to be far greater, ecosystems may well collapse, the nation's
quality of life will be diminished, and all hope of sustainable
communities will be lost."
Not long after that cheery forecast,
there was Paul Freedman, Vice President of the Water Environment
Federation and President of LimnoTech, an Ann Arbor-based water
consulting firm. While preparing his presentation, he said, he had
recognized some irony:
- "Twelve years ago this month, I
co-chaired one of the earliest and largest watershed conferences ever
to occur. [The Water Environment Federation] organized it jointly with
fifteen federal agencies. Well over a thousand experts participated and
more than five thousand participated through videoconference… At the
time it was kind of this aha moment, you know, we'd made enormous
progress since the Clean Water Act of 1972, but further progress toward
restoring the physical, chemical and biologic health of our water
resources, and protecting public health and well-being was stalled.
- "Everyone agreed there, watershed management was the only answer to take us into the twenty-first century."
Of
course, that particular aha moment occurred in 1996. But University of
Maryland Professor of Engineering Gerald Galloway -- a retired U.S.
Army Brigadier General who was the 2007 President of the American Water
Resources Association -- had a similar one in 1994.
After
floods in 1993 had devastated many of the same Mississippi River towns
that were once again inundated on June 24, 2008, he led an interagency
team to study the complex problem of floodplain management. And,
unsurprisingly, his team concluded that the United States should
abandon its project-by-project approach to water resources. Not only,
they pointed out, does such fragmented funding lead to ineffective,
sometimes conflicting results, it actually forecloses possibilities for
cooperation by, and among, federal agencies. As Galloway noted, "If you
don't have the money, it's awfully hard to come to the party."
We
could rewind to even earlier aha moments. On February 17, 1952, for
example, a New York Times headline reads, "Bill Asks Policy for River
Basins: President's Commission Files Draft that Sums Up its Plan for
Water Resources." The President in question was Harry Truman and the
plan was, according to the article, "based solidly on the commission's
original and far-reaching premise that entire river basins must be
considered in one broad and uniform policy." In 1933, of course, the
United States formed the Tennesee Valley Authority to execute a model
comprehensive, collaborative approach to the water and power issues in
that region. It has been, in Galloway's words, a "shining example" --
albeit one rarely followed.
Words of the Day
In the
end, when it came to an assessment of the current state of our national
water policy, there were precious few positive sentiments voiced at the
hearing. Instead, the most often-used descriptions were alarmingly
negative.
As applied to programs and projects, the words of
the day included fractured, ad hoc, isolated, random, haphazard,
inconsistent, stovepiped, and mish-mash. Relative to congressional
committees and federal agencies, the term was hodge-podge. Larry Larson
testified that there are a grand total of 36 congressional
subcommittees that oversee water-related issues in some fashion or
another -- with few clearly-delineated divisions of authority.
And
just how many federal offices are there in this mix? Well, last week, I
spent a really enjoyable day calling U.S. Government offices and doing
on-line research. In the end, I determined -- conclusively -- that it
is not possible to actually know how many federal agencies engage in
freshwater-related research, administration, projects, oversight,
disaster relief, and/or reconstruction.
There appear, however,
to be at least two dozen: The Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Food &
Drug Administration, the Department of Transportation, the National
Park Service, the Agricultural Research Service, the Natural Resources
Conservation Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of the
Census, the Office of Housing and Urban Development, the Bureau of Land
Management, the National Science Foundation, the Small Business
Administration, the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences, the Economic Development Administration,
the State Department's International Boundary and Water Commission, the
Rural Utilities Service, and several Department of Homeland Security
offices that are probably too secret for us to be talking about.
Finally,
with regard to laws, the operative terms were outdated and inadequate.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 has made a dramatic difference in water
quality and is justifiably considered to be a big success. As Freedman
explained, however, the problems that exist in today's environmental
landscape are "dramatically different in scale and in nature" than they
were thirty-some years ago.
In the 1970s, he said, the main
environmental driver was "point source pollution" -- that is, harmful
substances spilled directly into water. Now, however, concerns include
contaminants from indirect, but ever more ubiquitous, "nonpoint
sources" -- remember the chicken manure? -- as well as "land use,
ecosystem restoration, water scarcity, flooding, invasive species,
endocrine disruptors, climate change, etc. -- the list goes on."
Consequently, Freedman told the Committee:
- "Trying
to solve these problems with the 1972 Clean Water Act is like trying to
use a 1972 auto repair manual to repair a 2008 electric hybrid. It just
doesn't work. So it is with other independent and dated federal
programs that don't reflect the large scale and complexity of the
problems we're dealing with today."
Too Many Uh-oh Moments
Writings 
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