CHESAPEAKE BAY BLOG

Lessons from Lake Erie

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:50:16 -0400

Traveling the Anacostia river by kayak through the mist of a summer dawn, it becomes suddenly apparent what we are working for on this RAVE: Why I got up at 4:30am to meet Lee Cain of the Anacostia Watershed Society for a paddle through the quiet tree lined waters of a still sleeping Washington DC; Why 8 photographers of the International League of Conservation Photographers are working with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to bring the troubled waters of the Chesapeake watershed before the US Congress.

The reason is this: a sleeping beaver floating on the still water’s surface, a great blue heron running across the water en route to the sky, a great egret shrouded in the rainbow mist of the rising sun. This is a river much forgotten, but it is not lost. The Anacostia and its wild creatures and plants are just waiting, quietly for the kind of attention and care that decades ago saved a great lake from death and ignited a national consciousness of the essential need for clean water.

Great blue heron flying over the Anacostia River

Over the course of this project I had a conversation with a woman who remembered fishing on Lake Erie as a child with her family. She also remembered the day they stopped visiting Erie, and her mom’s explanations as to why. “The lake is sick. We can’t eat the fish there anymore.” That was back in the 1970s when Lake Erie was widely considered biologically dead. So famous was the demise of this lake that it earned a place in a Dr. Seuss story the Lorax.

You're glumping the pond where the hummingfish hummed.
No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed!
So I'm sending them off: oh, their future is dreary!
They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary,
in search of some water that isn't so smeary -
I hear things are just as bad up at Lake Erie!

Lake Erie and its watershed became a wake up call for a generation. It inspired songs like REM’s Cuyahoga, about the Erie feeder river that caught fire several times in the late 1960s. A Time magazine article described the Cuyahoga as a river that "oozes rather than flows" where a person "does not drown but decays.”

All this attention for the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie led to a piece of legislation at the heart of the Chesapeake RAVE, The Clean Water Act of 1972. Thanks to this law, the Erie of the 70s is on the mend. It is not healed, but it is healing. And that is what we hope can happen for the Anacostia River and the entire Chesapeake watershed—if we can just get people to pay attention and spare some care for these waters.

If everyone could spend a quiet morning gliding through the forested stretches of this river, I’m sure we could find the resolve to work with corporations and municipalities to responsibly protect our waters. Not everyone can make this morning journey, but everyone can take steps to help the river and the bay. Find out how at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation website.

Middle-aged Tarzan

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:23:55 -0400

Remember when every kid had a swimming hole and every river a rope swing? I remember heading down to the creek swinging a metal pail with an apple and sandwich Ma made for me, fishing pole on my shoulder, Albert waiting for me at our favorite spot. Wait, no, that was Little House on the Prairie. But I swam in rivers once, I think. Don’t remember. But I do remember very clearly the day when I was about 9 years old and my mom wouldn’t let us go swimming with a group of kids in the St. Joe River in northern Indiana. A friend of hers had recently gotten a chunk of glass lodged in his leg while swimming in the river, and it was off limits to us ever after.
Not being able to swim in a river on a hot day is kind of like being dehydrated, having a glass of water right in front of you but knowing it is at least a little bit poisonous. It’s torture, the deepest kind of alienation from the earth. But I’ve always figured we were all in the same boat. I didn’t think people swam in urban rivers any more, which is why during my trip to Richmond to cover the James River for the Chesapeake Bay RAVE, my jaw dropped wide open when I saw a whole community of people swimming off the city’s riverbank. My first inclination was to stop the people around me and say, “Did you see this? What the crack are they doin?” Multiple rope swings were set up along a stretch of the river in downtown Richmond. Kids and adults alike waited in line for their turn at the rope. Grown men hollered Tarzan yells and tried to outdo each other when it came their turns. Is this Mars? 1950? A rerun of Gentle Ben?

Few people swim in the Potomac or the Anacostia Rivers, in part because it is illegal in the District of Columbia due to concerns about the health of the water. I once did a triathlon swim in the Potomac, but there were daily tests of the water quality leading up to the event. Had there been a good rain, the swimming portion of the event would have been canceled rather than risk illness of swimming in the river. So seeing these apparently normal human beings swimming in the James made my head spin. It looked like so much fun. It occurred to me, maybe the James is just that much cleaner than the Potomac.
No, not really. The sewage that flows into the river after large rains pours in downstream of where most people swim, which helps increase water quality for swimmers. But the suburbs and rural agriculture runoff that enter the James upstream ensure that unhealthy chemicals and fecal matter are part of the water here just as they are in the Potomac. Swimmers can get ear and intestinal infections, and who knows what else, but the idea of not swimming in the river must be worse than swimming in a polluted river. How’s that for a choice?

Happy fish in poo stream, James River, Richmond.

On a walk along the James the following morning, I happened across one of the signs the city of Richmond displays to explain the sewage overflow system to its citizens. In an unfortunate choice of colors, the brown sign has a caricature of a fish who looks quite pleased with himself for swimming above the outflows of sewage coming from urban Richmond. The text supports the contentment of the poster-fish, saying the fish and birds are not harmed by sewage because the pollutants are mixed into the river water by the rapids. Water + poo = smiley. The sign also reads: “Releasing storm water here two or three times a year is an economically and socially prudent way to combine the impact of a vibrant urban community with the need for a clean and healthy river.” I’m not sure how putting sewage in the river makes it cleaner and healthier, but I’m no expert. And that fish sure looks happy.

Bridge over the James River, Richmond, VA.

The reflections of the city off the river in soft morning light, combined with thoughts of a city of middle-aged Tarzans hurtling themselves into the James, highlight what an amazing resource the river is. This city seems in the process of a great revitalization. There are terrific restaurants featuring local foods, there are new galleries and river parks, the kind of things that lead to healthier living and greater quality of life. But soft-pedaling the impact of human waste, street and industrial runoff, and agricultural pollutants flowing into the river seems unnecessary. We have made strides on water quality. Many rivers are in better shape than they were a couple of decades ago, thanks to the Clean Water Act. But we have a long way to go before we can tell people they no longer have to make a choice between swimming in our rivers and their health. Pathogens with ominous names like vibrio, cyanobacteria and crypto sporidium, along with mercury from coal plants and nitrates from farm and lawn runoff, pose potentially serious health risks to people and wildlife. Back in the 1950s and 60s we may have had the excuse that we didn’t know the impact of human pollution on our watersheds. We no longer have that excuse. Now it comes down to a choice between making important changes, or continuing business as usual and accepting our alienation from our own rivers.

Chesapeake Bay RAVE Video Blog

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:04:21 -0400

This video blog, created by Jenny Nichols at the International League of Conservation Photographers, details a morning out of the Chesapeake Bay Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition (RAVE).

Rediscovering the Anacostia

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:40:24 -0400

I’ve lived in the Chesapeake Bay watershed for more than 10 years. I’ve hiked many of the mountains, hills and fields that drain into the Bay, and paddled some of its tributaries. I’ve even paddled the same stretch of the Anacostia River I was on today. But I’ve never seen it quite like this.
My assignment on the Chesapeake Bay RAVE is to document the challenges that the Washington DC metro area poses to the Bay. The issues are many and complex— in some ways it’s hard to even begin to understand the magnitude of the impact that DC’s 5 million people have on the Bay. My job here is not just to try to understand it, but to make images of it that tell the story for others.

So I asked my neighbor and friend, Brent Bolin, who works for the Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS), if he could show me the Anacostia River, and help explain what is going on here. We started in Bladensburg, Maryland, at the Bladensburg Waterfront Park which by itself tells an important story about how intense human population and industry have altered what was once a natural watershed system. This spot, which sits about a mile from my house, marks the historic location of a busy deepwater port. In colonial times, Anacostia River depths reached 40 feet, making it possible for huge ships to travel here. Today, due to deforestation upstream, siltflows into the river have drastically altered it. At low tide it is now possible to walk across the river in Bladensburg. And in the riverbed and floating upon shallow waters, a relief map of decades of pollution is drawn.

Once out on the river in a pontoon boat, floatillas of garbage and oil slicks greeted us. I’ve been on this river in a canoe before, but somehow the magnitude of the distress this river is under did not hit me. The Anacostia is notorious around here. It’s fish are not edible due to chemical contaminants. Swimming is officially discouraged due to fecal and other pollution. But because I had never turned my eye to the sad state of the Anacostia, I didn’t realize just how beaten down this waterway really is. And the sight of it strikes me hard. How is it possible that a society, the nation’s capitol no less, will allow things to get this bad? That we will destroy our children’s ability to swim in a clean, safe river; our own ability to go fishing and eat what we catch; even just the ability to paddle a canoe in waters not littered with garbage. Somewhere along the way, this city ceased caring about these things, about the Anacostia itself.

Gladly, not everyone stopped caring.

There are those, like Brent at the watershed society and many others who are working hard to return the river to what it once was. Regular river clean-up days and educational outreach by individuals and organizations are pecking away at the indifference that has degraded the river.

Brent showed me the wetlands that people have been working to restore and explained that even when money and expertise are focused on rebuilding lost wetlands, it is not always simple here. A population of non-migratory Canada geese see to that. The geese were introduced long ago in order to provide a game species for hunters. The hunters stopped hunting as this area urbanized, but the geese remained. Now their population is so high and omnipresent, that the minute people finish planting a wetland restoration project, the geese move in and mow down the plants. We saw hundreds of geese along the riverbank and in the shadow of the Pepco power plant in Washington DC. We also saw a man who had made his home on the river, in a shack perched precariously at the edge of the water, with all his belongings stacked in piles in the vegetation beneath his makeshift roof. Not far from there, Brent pointed out an outflow location where in heavy storms a combination of raw sewage and stormwater flowed directly into the river. And upstream from there, a man was standing waist deep in murky water, washing his face. It was almost too much to take in, too much information about a river that helps make up the very character of the city I call home, but which until now I barely knew.

Hopefully for the city at large, a consciousness is slowly building. It will take time, but if people could just see the potential of the river, could experience the sight of osprey fishing and great blue heron standing silently along the banks, could remember a time when it was possible to jump into a river on a hot summers day, there would be hope for restoring this treasure to the people and to the wildlife. Every step forward can make a difference: from picking up garbage you see in your neighborhood (and which ultimately ends up in storm drains that flow into the river), to conserving water use in your home, to planting a native garden rather than a lawn; and of course letting your elected officials know that you care about the Anacostia and the Chesapeake.