Oil Spill Cleanup Seeks Volunteers

  • Until they work out the logistic challenges that go along with hosting out-of-town volunteers, organizations are looking for people who are locally based, who are easily within driving distance and may be able to contribute a day’s worth of work.(Photo courtesy of the NOAA)

No one really knows how many thousands of barrels of oil have gushed from the British Petroleum pipeline on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But, the environmental damage is expected to be astounding. Lester Graham reports… Gulf Coast groups are preparing for the worst.

Transcript

No one really knows how many thousands of barrels of oil have gushed from the British Petroleum pipeline on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But, the environmental damage is expected to be astounding. Lester Graham reports… Gulf Coast groups are preparing for the worst.

The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana is a consortium of environmental groups trying to coordinate volunteers to help clean up the environmental damage to hit the coast.

Steven Peyronnin is Executive Director of the group.

“There is the potential that we may need volunteers for extended periods of time–for weeks, but certainly there are challenges to arranging logistical and housing support for that. So, in the interim we are looking for people who are locally based, who are easily within driving distance and may be able to contribute a day’s worth of work.”

Right now they’re in need of people with HazMat training, but anyone can register to volunteer. The website is crcl.org.

You can also volunteer for clean-up at volunteerlouisiana.gov.

They’ll likely be looking for volunteers for months.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Oil Spill Worse by the Day

  • The gulf region is the world's largest producer of oysters and shrimp(Photo courtesy of the NOAA)

When an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded last week, gulf coast officials knew they had a problem on their hands. But as Tanya Ott reports from Alabama, everyday they find it’s worse than they originally thought.

Transcript

When an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded last week, gulf coast officials knew they had a problem on their hands. But as Tanya Ott reports from Alabama, everyday they find it’s worse than they originally thought.

It’s estimated more than 200-thousand gallons of oil are spewing out of the well each day. Cleaning up using chemicals causes problems because it might make it easier for marine animals to eat the oil. Burning the oil on the water is not great either. Casi Callaway is with the environmental group Mobile Baykeeper.

“The air quality impacts from it and therefore the health impacts from it are great – and frankly unknown.”

It’s not just an environmental crisis. It’s an economic crisis. This area is the world’s largest producer of oysters and shrimp. And the pristine gulf coast beaches fuel a tourism industry worth 20-billion dollars a year.

For the Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

Related Links

Rebuilding the Lower 9th Ward

  • Pam Dashiell is with the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. The Lower 9th Ward is in the background. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina
hit New Orleans. The city still
hasn’t figured out how to protect
itself. Most of the conversation
focuses on rebuilding the city’s
levees. But some people in New
Orleans are starting to think beyond
levees. They call their strategy
resilience planning. And they think
New Orleans can become America’s
leader in it. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina
hit New Orleans. The city still
hasn’t figured out how to protect
itself. Most of the conversation
focuses on rebuilding the city’s
levees. But some people in New
Orleans are starting to think beyond
levees. They call their strategy
resilience planning. And they think
New Orleans can become America’s
leader in it. Samara Freemark reports:

When Pam Dashiell moved back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, she couldn’t believe what people were saying about her neighborhood.

“People were saying, well, the 9th Ward should be a drainage ditch. There’s no way it can possibly come back.”

Dashiell is the co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. And after the storm, she became one of the leaders demanding the city be built back exactly as it had been before. New houses put up wherever old ones had been knocked down. Social services restored to all neighborhoods. And most importantly, levees. Levees big enough and strong enough to protect the city from anything a hurricane could throw at it.

“That was the fundamental argument and discussion back then. That was the battle.”

But Dashiell’s thinking has changed over the past couple of years. The levees that were promised after Katrina still haven’t been completed. Dashiell says eventually she gave up on them and started looking for other solutions.

“You’ve got to move. You’ve got to go forward. At this point we are not protected. So we gotta act like that and deal accordingly.”

“Levees and stuff like that are great, but they’re not going to be the salvation of this area.”

That’s Marco Cocito-Manoc. He’s with the Greater New Orleans Foundation. They’re one of the groups involved in rebuilding the city.

“We can’t just lobby for bigger walls, higher walls. The truth is that New Orleans can never be sufficiently protected from flooding. So everyone has to adopt what in this area is a brand new mindset.”

Cocito-Manoc calls that new mindset “resilience planning”. That’s making small, local changes to help the city manage flood water, rather than trying to hold it back at all costs.

It’s a strategy that’s being implemented in the Lower 9th Ward by Pam Dashiell’s group and others. A lot of these groups have moved away from pushing for more levees. Instead, they’re building raised houses on higher ground, and making sure they’re properly weatherized. They’re perfecting evacuation plans, so when evacuations do happen, they’re quick and orderly. And they’re installing permeable surfaces and rain gardens to reduce surface water. These kinds of changes won’t prevent flooding, but they’ll limit the devastation that sometimes goes along with it.

Cocito-Manoc says measures like these could actually set an example for other cities that will face rising sea levels in the next century. Think New York, or Miami, or Boston.

“I know that it’s difficult to see New Orleans as leading in much. But I think this is really our opportunity to become a global center for learning how to cope with water, and use water as an asset rather than as something that threatens our existence.”

As for Pam Dashiell, her focus right now is on the Lower 9th Ward. I asked her how she imagined the future of her neighborhood.

“I would see rain gardens. Strong green infrastructure. I see a new sewer system. I see the lower 9th ward recognized as a community that helped lead the way to a more sustainable future. (Laughs) I got good dreams.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Thinking Beyond Levees

  • New Orleans on September 9, 2005. Crews worked on areas where there had been breaks in the levee in order to avoid additional flooding. (Photo by Jocelyn Augustino, courtesy of FEMA)

Four years after Katrina, the
levees around New Orleans are
still being constructed. But
a report by the National Academy
of Sciences says the city shouldn’t
think of the levees as a cure-all.
Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Four years after Katrina, the
levees around New Orleans are
still being constructed. But
a report by the National Academy
of Sciences says the city shouldn’t
think of the levees as a cure-all.
Mark Brush has more:

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. A big reason it was so bad is because the levees holding back the water crumbled.

There’s a big effort to build up the levee system, but the National Academy of Sciences says the city should not solely rely on levees to protect it.

Jeff Jacobs headed up the report for the National Academy.

“There is no levee system that can provide absolute protection. There’s always the danger of over-topping. And there’s always a possibility of levee failure. And that holds true for the best maintained and the best inspected levee systems in the world.”

The New Orleans area has a particular problem. The ground can sink over time. That’s not good for levees.

The Academy recommends that people relocate to safer areas. Or, if people are going to stay, that homes be elevated – so that the first floor of a home is higher than the floodwater.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Taking Down Levees in Louisiana

  • The Mollicy Farms River Forest Levee (Keith Ouchley, Louisiana Nature Conservancy)

Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:

Transcript

Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:

The Mollicy Farms site in Northern LA provides a striking example of just how dramatically a levee can remake a landscape.

“Here comes the river down through here.”

Keith Ouchley is with the Nature Conservancy, and he’s showing me an aerial photo of Mollicy Farms. The site is split in half by a river. On the west side, there’s 30000 acres of primeval forest. On the east side, a swath of cleared land.

“Once, it was forest in the lower area of tupelo and in the upper areas of sweet gum. And every year the river would overflow and flood the forest.”

In the late 1960s, soybean farmers cleared the area built levees to hold back the annual floods – giant earthen walls, 150 ft wide at the base and 30 feet tall. Ouchley grew up in the area. He remembers the first time he saw the site after the clearing.

“I thought at the time you could almost see the curvature of the earth, looking across this massive clearing up there.”

Levees protect a lot of land for farming. But some people are starting to wonder if they’re worth the cost – not just the money it takes to build and maintain them, but the damage they do to ecosystems.

Denise Reed is a geologist at the University of New Orleans. She says hundreds of species depend on floodplain habitats- and without flooding, those habitats vanish.

“The river is the lifeblood of floodplain and delta ecosystems. When you build levees and you cut it off, we cut off those habitats from the river. And essentially they just degrade and die. Putting it back would definitely be a good thing.”

Levees might also raise the chances of truly catastrophic flooding downstream. Whenever there’s a lot of water in the river – say, there’s heavy rain upstream – that water shoots straight down the channel with enormous force. And it sometimes breaks through downstream levees that protect homes.

If you take down levees upstream some of that water has somewhere else to go – out into the forest or wetlands, where it spreads out across thousands of acres.

All of which is why Denise Reed says, instead of building more levees, it might be a good idea to take some down.

“Just because we’ve had levees on the river for the last hundred years or so doesn’t mean to say we’re always going to have levees on the river. The challenge for us is letting nature do its thing while still allowing us to navigate on the river and bring ships in, and that kind of things, and for us to live places where we’re not going to be flooded out. We can do that.”

After catastrophic flooding in 1993, the federal government started buying up levee-protected land along the Mississippi and its tributaries with an eye towards restoring floodplains. But the memory of that flood faded and funding for the program fell off.

That left private groups like the Nature Conservancy to take up the effort.

This summer they’ll punch holes in the levee at Mollicy Farms. As the water rises in the spring, it will gradually seep out onto the landscape, restoring the floodplain.

“50 years, 100 years, you’ll be able to take a boat out through nice, mature, bottomland hardwood floodplain forest. You know, see water moccasins and catch bluegill brims and alligators floating on logs and that kind of thing.”

Ouchley says he’d like to see the program replicated in floodplains all over the country.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Native Americans Lose Land to Climate Change

  • Choctaw Chief Albert Naquin has watched his tribe's island - the Isle de Jean Charles - go from four miles across to a quarter mile across. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Over the next century, rising
sea levels will change coastlines
all over the world. But the impact
might be most dramatic in South
Louisiana. A study out last month
predicts the state will lose up to
5000 square miles in the next
century – a chunk of land the size
of Connecticut. If the report’s
authors are right, that means a
lot of people in Louisiana are
going to have to relocate – become
climate refugees. Samara Freemark has the story of one of
the first communities to be displaced:

Transcript

Over the next century, rising sea levels will change coastlines all over the world. But the impact might be most dramatic in South Louisiana. A study out last month predicts the state will lose up to 5000 square miles in the next century – a chunk of land the size of Connecticut. If the report’s authors are right, that means a lot of people in Louisiana are going to have to relocate – become climate refugees. Samara Freemark has the story of one of the first communities to be displaced:

It was sometime in the mid-1970s that Albert Naquin first realized that Isle de Jean Charles was sinking. Naquin had grown up on the island. He’s the chief of a group of Choctaws who have lived there since the 19th century – and when he was a kid, it was a pretty good community: it had stores, a couple of churches, horse pastures and fields. But those are all gone now.

“Salt water kept coming in, faster and faster, and now it’s basically just beach.”

Isle de Jean Charles is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.

The list of reasons why is long. There’s subsidence- that’s the natural phenomenon where delta regions kind of settle down on themselves. There are the dams that block the sediment that used to wash down and build the land back up. There are oil company canals that slice through the wetlands, hurricanes that tear up the island’s coastline, and, of course, there’s rising sea levels.

All together they explain why Isle de Jean Charles used to be about 4 miles across and now has shrunk to a quarter mile.

“Now, we see the disaster that is Isle de Jean.”

We’re in Naquin’s pickup truck, and he’s driving me out to the island.

“See this little house moved across the way, this house. These 1, 2, 3 are deserted.”

Naquin himself moved off the island awhile ago. But for years he was happy to support families who chose to stay. In fact, when the US government came to him in 2002 and offered to pay to help people move off the island, he resisted.

“So, I said, ‘what they gonna do, tell us they’re gonna move us there and then next thing send us a bill for the house?’ You know, so I said, ‘no, that’s just a modern day Trail of Tears. We’re not moving.’”

But lately Naquin has just gotten tired. Tired of evacuating people before storms, tired of helping them rebuild after, tired of watching the sea nibble away at the island.

And so he decided – enough. For the past year he’s been on a mission to convince the 25 families still living on the island to abandon it.

“They’re not going to save the island. It’s going to be gone. Either we move now or we move later, ‘cause we will move.”

But not everyone is ready to leave.

(sound of greeting and talking)

Naquin pulls over to talk to Dominique Dardar.

Dardar’s house was leveled by Hurricane Gustav last summer. He’s rebuilding it with pieces of other houses he’s found blowing around the island- bits of roof and siding. Dardar says he’s not moving.

“I ain’t never gonna move. I’m gonna stay over here. That’s my territory.”

Across the street Wenselas Billiot lives in a house raised 13 feet in the air.

Billiot is Naquin’s brother in law. He’s in his 80s and has lived on the island his whole life. I ask him what he’ll do if the island shrinks any more.

“That’s going to be rough. But, as long as I can stay, I’ll stay. I was born and raised on the island. As long as I can stay here I’m going to stay.”

Albert Naquin hasn’t given up. He thinks if he can get everyone to agree, the government will help the tribe get a big piece of land where they can all relocate as a group. He’s already thinking of names for the new town.

“We could say, Island Number Two, or Isle de Jean Charles New Beginning, or something like that. But I think we just name it Isle de Jean Charles 2. I think that has a good sound to it.”

In short, Naquin is trying to figure out how to keep the idea of Isle de Jean Charles alive, even when the island itself no longer exists.

It’s a challenge many Louisiana communities could soon face.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Preserving Cultural Remedies

  • Faith learned about the use of many herbs for home remedies from her father in Louisiana when she was a small girl. (Photo by Kyle Norris)

When most of us get sick we go to the doctor and get medicine. But
some people are holding onto the old ways of healing. And many
people think we could learn a lot from the old ways. Kyle Norris has
this story:

Transcript

When most of us get sick we go to the doctor and get medicine. But
some people are holding onto the old ways of healing. And many
people think we could learn a lot from the old ways. Kyle Norris has
this story:


The small store is called Nature’s Products. It’s in a neighborhood with
a lot of abandoned buildings and store-front churches. When you walk
inside the store, the smell of incense clings to your clothes.
Green plants hang in the windows, and there are jars and jars of bulk herbs lining
the shelves.


Gary Wanttaga opened the store thirty years ago. He’s always been
interested in natural healing techniques and herbal medicine. That all
might sound new-agey, but this place is not new-agey at all. The
reason Wanttaga opened the store in his hometown of Detroit was
because he wanted to help the people who lived here:


“In lot of urban areas people are very limited on resources. They’re limited
with money. They’re limited with shopping resources. And this is one way
that I try to give back to the community”


Wanttaga says one of the main reasons he’s stayed in Detroit is because of
his customers. They’re some of his biggest teachers. Many of his
customers are older African-Americans. They came from the South to work
in the factories during World War II. When they came they brought with
them a cultural knowledge of herbs and natural healing techniques.


One of his customers is 72-year-old Faith. That’s her legal name – just
“Faith.” She grew up in a segregated farming community in Louisiana. Her
father was a farmer, and he taught her all about the herbs:


“I’m the youngest child of all, so I’m the baby. And he would often let me
ride on his shoulder. And sometime I’d be saying ‘Papa, what is this?’ and he
would tell me what that was, we’d be walking through the fields and he
would tell me what was, and he would tell me different things, what you use this for
what you use that for. I had 100 questions. Boy, I was a kid I had a 100
questions.”


She says back then, everyone knew about the herbs, and everyone used
them. At that time, people who were poor or black or who lived in rural
areas did not often have the option of going to a doctor. And so they turned
to the plants and trees around them for medicine, and they developed a great
knowledge about what did and didn’t work to keep people healthy:


“The pine tree was used for many things. Because it’s one of things where
you get turpentine from. It was definitely used for healing. And we used
turpentine for sores. And it works today! If you get a cut and you put
turpentine on it immediately as soon after you hit it, it will never be sore.”


Herbs were out first form of medicine. That’s what Suzanna Zick says.
She’s a naturopathic physician who teaches at the University of
Michigan. She says we have a collective knowledge about herbs that’s
thousands of years old. She says when you compare that to what
modern-day science knows about herbs, it’s not much of a comparison:


“In a sense we have just a tiny little window that science shows us, as
compared to the long use.”


Zick says we could learn a lot from these folks and the knowledge they
have, but not many researchers are studying people like the customers
here in Detroit:


“I think that we can actually learn what herbs they’re using a lot of and
what for. Because I think those are probably the ones that would be of
most interest. In particular, it’s a good question too if they’re using
them with conventional medications, it’s for safety issues. But also if
this is their primary health care for some of them, if it’s working, then
this is a very inexpensive way of providing health care for people who
might otherwise get none.”


Everyone we heard from in this story said the same thing. For us to
have good health, the old-school ways of healing can work hand-in-
hand with modern-day doctors and science. But the people who know
about the herbs are growing older and dying, and their knowledge is dying with them.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Termite Worries More Myth Than Fact

An email is spreading across the Internet warning about termites in mulch stockpiles from the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast. As the GLRC’s Tana Weingartner reports, the email is more rumor than fact:

Transcript

An email is spreading across the Internet warning about termites in
mulch stockpiles from the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast. As the GLRC’s
Tana Weingartner reports, the email is more rumor than fact:


The email says Formosa termite infested trees downed by Hurricane
Katrina are being mulched and sold off by the state of Louisiana. The
writer warns the infected mulch could end up at your local big box
hardware store.


The Mulch and Soil Council’s Executive Director says that’s just “not
true.” Robert LaGasse says the well-monitored clean up operation and a
preexisting quarantine banning wood products from being shipped out of
the area are part of what keeps the termites from spreading.


“We’ve never had an infestation issue with termites in mulch, in bagged
product.”


LaGasse adds even if the mulch was shipped out of the region, the
chipping and grinding process along with the heat generated by the
mulch would be enough to kill any termite.


The Formosa termite has been a problem for parts of the South since it
was first brought into the country after World War II.


For the GLRC, I’m Tana Weingartner.

Related Links

The Color of the Environmental Movement

  • Many hope that the future generations of envionmentalists and conservationalists will include more minorities. That's why the National Wildlife Federation now has a program to encourage youth and adult minorities to learn about and adopt careers in environmental fields. (Photo by Hans-Günther Dreyer)

The environmental movement and conservation agencies tend to be very white. There are relatively few people of color involved in environmental activism or getting jobs in resource management. If one man has his way, that will change in the coming years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The environmental movement and conservation agencies tend to be very white. There are relatively few people of color involved in environmental activism or getting jobs in resource management. If one man has his way, that will change in the coming years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


If you happen to go to a national conference of environmentalists, or conservation-minded organizations, you probably wouldn’t see a lot of black faces… or Latino… or Asian. Oh sure, a few sprinkled here and there, but mostly, it’s white folks.


But that’s beginning to change. Jerome Ringo is the chair-elect of the National Wildlife Federation. He will be the first African-American to head up a major environmental organization. He says times are changing.


“We are seeing a reversal of the trend. We’re not where we want to be with respect to minority involvement in conservation, but I can guarantee you we’re not where we were. Years ago when I got into the environmental movement, there were very, very few minorities involved.”


Ringo is working to keep the trend reversed. Through the National Wildlife Federation’s youth program, Earth Tomorrow, he’s encouraging young African-Americans and other minorities to learn about the environment and conservation.


And a few young people are listening. Kenneth Anderson is a college student, studying to be an ornithologist. He’s something of a rare bird himself. He grew up in the city – in Detroit – where he says a lot of his friends and neighbors are not all that interested in nature and the environment.


“Really, I mean I can understand why people wouldn’t because throughout most of their life, they’re in this urban setting away from as much wildlife or forests or anything like that so they don’t look at the environment as something of importance because in a way it’s already been taken away or hidden from them. So, that’s why you don’t have a lot of people of color or minorities involved in environmental fields.”


Being cut off from nature is only one obstacle. There are others. Kiana Miiller is a high school student in Detroit. She says a lot of kids are worrying about more pressing problems…


“People of color are in urban areas and urban areas have a lot of different problems like financial issues, stuff like that. So, environmental issues may not be number one on their priority list.”


Kiana Miller and Kenneth Anderson are among a handful of young people of color who are at a meeting to hear from activists and people working in wildlife management about getting involved in environmental issues… and getting jobs.


Like a lot of the kids, many of the speakers at this meeting grew up in the city. For example, Monica Terrell says she didn’t know anything about nature until someone took her on a camping trip when she was a kid. Now, she’s with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources working with state parks all over. She’s at this meeting recruiting.


“People of color and also women need to be made aware of the career opportunities. When you look at different fields, you usually look at people that you know who are already in those fields. You may have a father who is a doctor, a friend who is an attorney, teachers, plumbers, what have you. But we don’t have very many people of color and women who are already in those fields. And so, that’s why it’s so important for us to go out to recruit, select, hire these folks, mentor them, make sure they have a comfortable, successful experience in natural resource management fields.”


Getting the message of environmental involvement doesn’t stop at getting young people thinking about their options. The National Wildlife Federation’s Jerome Ringo says it also means getting grown-ups, especially the poor and people of color, to get active in their community when there are environmental problems. He says he first got involved in environmental activism because he knew of chemical releases that were being emitted from a refinery, and some of those chemicals could cause health problems for the people who live nearby – most of them low-income African-Americans.


“We have to readjust our priorities from just quality of life issues like where next month’s rent is coming from, how do we feed our family. Environmental issues have to be within our top priorities because, as I tell the people in ‘Cancer Alley,’ Louisiana, what good is next month’s rent if you’re dying of cancer? So, we’ve got to be more involved in those quality of life issues and make environmental/conservation issues one of those key issues in our lives.”


Ringo says whether it’s fighting pollution, or a desire to preserve a little of the remaining wilderness, people of color need to take hold of environmental and conservation issues, and make them their own.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Action Plan Not Enough to Shrink Gulf ‘Dead Zone’

  • Small shrimp fishers are concerned about the Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' because shrimp can't survive in the oxygen depleted water. (Photo by Lester Graham)

The government has been working with agriculture, environmentalists and scientists to come up with a way to reduce the size of a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone causes problems for the fisheries in the Gulf. It’s believed the dead zone is caused by excess nitrogen on farm fields in the Midwest that’s washed to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf. A government task force has determined that if the flow of nitrogen into the Gulf can be cut by 30 percent, the size of the dead zone can be reduced. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… a new study predicts a 30 percent reduction won’t be enough to make a difference:

Transcript

The government has been working with agriculture, environmentalists and scientists to
come up with a way to reduce the size of a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead
zone causes problems for the fisheries in the Gulf. It’s believed the dead zone is caused
by excess nitrogen on farm fields in the Midwest that’s washed to the Mississippi River
and then to the Gulf. A government task force has determined that if the flow of nitrogen
into the Gulf can be cut by 30 percent, the size of the dead zone can be reduced. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… a new study predicts a 30
percent reduction won’t be enough to make a difference:


The idea that fertilizer used on a corn field in the Midwest can cause a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico
is hard to fathom. But when you realize that all or parts of 31 farm states drain into the
Mississippi basin, it becomes a little easier to understand. Excess nitrogen causes a huge algae
bloom in the Gulf. When the vegetation dies, it decays on the bottom and bacteria feed
on it. The huge expanse of bacteria depletes the oxygen.


Nancy Rabalais is a professor with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. She
says most life under the water needs that oxygen to survive.


“The oxygen is depleted in the water column so that the fish and shrimp, anything that
can swim, leaves the area. All the indicators show that it’s gotten much worse since the
1950’s to present, and that’s consistent with the increase in nitrogen in the Mississippi
River.”


Since 1985, Rabalais has been measuring the size of the dead zone every year. The zone
ranges in size from about 2,000 square miles to about 10,000 square miles.
That’s about the size of Lake Erie.


Jerald Horst is a biologist with the Louisiana Sea Grant. He says it’s hard to know the
exact impact on life under the sea…


“Very difficult to say ‘Gee, this year the shrimp
production is down somewhat because of hypoxia,’ or whether the shrimp production is
down somewhat because of a host of other environmental factors.”


But the fear is the hypoxic zone could stop being a dead zone that shrinks and grows
– and one year disappeared altogether… and instead become a permanent dead zone where nothing would ever live. That’s happened in a few other places on the globe such
as the Black Sea. It’s not clear that the same kind of thing can happen in the Gulf, but
signs are ominous. Horst says upwellings of oxygen-starved water near the shore after a
storm used to be very, very rare. Lately, they’ve become more and more frequent. He
says it means the problem is getting worse.


There’s still a lot of debate about whether the dead zone in the Gulf is a serious problem.
But, at this point, most agricultural agencies and farm groups have stopped disputing the
science and whether their nitrogen is causing the problem. Now they’re trying to figure
out the best and cheapest way to deal with it.


The government task force that’s working on the problem has arrived at an Action Plan;
the task force has determined the amount of nitrogen getting into the Mississippi River
needs to be cut by 30 percent to reduce the Gulf zone by half in ten years.


Donald Scavia has been working on the problem. He was involved in the debate when he
was a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He’s
retired from NOAA and now directs the Michigan Sea Grant. From his office at the
University of Michigan, Scavia explained how the task force arrived at the figure.


“We agreed to a 30 percent reduction because it was similar to what was done in other
places, probably acceptable to the community and will head us in the right direction.”


After arriving in Michigan, Scavia started research to determine if a 30 percent reduction
would do the job. Using three very different computer models, Scavia and his team
learned that they could actually predict the size of the dead zone from year to year…


“From that analysis, that not only looked at the size of the zone, but actually looked at
potential inter-annual variability caused by changes in climate, changes in weather say
that probably 35 to 45 percent nitrogen load reduction’s going to be needed to get to that
goal in most years.”


Scavia’s study was published in the journal Estuaries.


A 35 to 45 percent reduction is a much tougher goal than the 30 percent the task force is
recommending. As it is, states were planning massive artificial wetlands and extensive
drainage programs to soak up excess nitrogen before it got to the tributaries that fed the
Mississippi River. They also planned to get farmers to reduce the amount of nitrogen
they’re using. That’s a tough sell for a couple of reasons. First of all, it would have to be
voluntary because nitrogen use is nearly completely unregulated. Second, farmers
often use what they call an insurance application of nitrogen… they use a little more than
is actually needed to get a good crop, because nitrogen is relatively cheap. The excess
often ends up washed into ditches and streams and creeks and rivers… and finally to the
Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone. So… cutting nitrogen flow into the
Mississippi by 30 percent was a huge task. Cutting nitrogen by as much as 45 percent… well… you can imagine…


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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