Smarter Growth. John H. Spiers

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СКАЧАТЬ Washington. While wastewater treatment had been the focus during the 1970s and 1980s, nonpoint sources such as runoff now received more attention. There were two consequences of this shift. First, the scope of activities to improve river health expanded from pollution cleanup to ecosystem improvement. While passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 had conferred federal protection on certain rare species to block harmful actions, restoration activities such as building wetlands offered a more holistic approach to sustaining habitats, not just individual species.⁷⁸ Second, members of the public became key partners in cleanup and restoration in concert with lobbying to improve policy making for water pollution.

      This new paradigm was evident in the campaign to restore the shad population to the Potomac, which was historically the river’s most abundant and commercially important fish. The construction of Little Falls Dam in the late 1950s, overfishing, and pollution had destroyed shad habitats and nearly depleted the fish’s ranks.⁷⁹ Beginning in 1995, biologist Jim Cummins harvested and fertilized eggs from shad during the spring spawning season in order to replenish the Potomac. Over the next seven years, thousands of volunteers worked day and night and through inhospitable weather to stock 15.8 million shad and create a self-sustaining population.⁸⁰ Many participants were local students who participated through educational programs sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Anacostia Watershed Society, whose mostly white, middle-class members had begun to engage a broader cross-section of the river’s community in its stewardship. To support the restocking, a new fishway was created through Little Falls Dam. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1999, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt remarked on the broader potential of restoring the Potomac: “For seven years, I’ve watched hundreds of cities restore their communities by restoring their rivers. Now it’s our turn.”⁸¹

      The shad restoration project was also an example of new efforts to compensate for the impact of large-scale development in Greater Washington.⁸² Another example was the expansion of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge between Alexandria and Prince George’s, which eliminated two hundred acres of forests, wetlands, and underwater grasses. Government agencies and environmental groups carried out a series of compensatory projects that included transplanting twelve thousand native plants and trees to replace invasive species at a one-acre site in Alexandria; planting twenty-two acres of underwater grasses in the lower Potomac and Chesapeake Bay; protecting an eighty-four-acre bald eagle sanctuary in Prince George’s County, and constructing ladders to help spawning fish traverse Rock Creek and tributaries of the Anacostia River.⁸³ As the sources of pollution became more diffuse, and government willingness (and ability) to regulate them eroded, public investment in the Potomac became more critical to the river’s health. The challenge would be to scale up from individual projects to an ecosystem-based approach that transcended political boundaries.⁸⁴

       Direct Action and Collaboration on the Potomac

      Metropolitan growth was a major contributor to the pollution of the Potomac, with runoff from built-up areas being the fastest growing source of pollution.⁸⁵ Compared to forested land, developed land offers far lower levels of water infiltration and soil conservation; and this exacerbated the overloading of wastewater treatment plants.⁸⁶ Close-in communities experienced “urban stream syndrome” characterized by “increased flash floods; elevated concentrations of nutrients and contaminants; altered stream morphology, including incised channels that cut off vegetation from its water source and increased sedimentation from eroded stream banks; and reduced diversity, with an influx of more tolerant species to counter the loss of more sensitive species.”⁸⁷

      Large-scale industrial farming outside of the metropolitan area also contributed ever-higher pollution loads as their operations expanded and came to rely on pesticide-intensive agriculture.⁸⁸ As exurban growth made its way into West Virginia during the 1990s, the state’s poultry industry more than doubled and dumped 4.6 million pounds of bird carcasses a year into the Potomac, which overburdened rural municipal treatment facilities that then dumped pollution back into the river.⁸⁹ This was a major reason why American Rivers, a national nonprofit conservation organization, ranked the Potomac one of the ten most polluted rivers in the late 1990s.⁹⁰ Many environmentalists, however, tended to discount the environmental impact of farms because they valued their open space, bucolic aesthetic, and wildlife protection. In a more critical light, one could argue that environmentalists held a sentimental view of farming that elided the industrial nature of its operations, particularly with chemical usage and waste.

      Federal policy making proved far less effective in dealing with nonpoint pollution than it had been with using command-and-control regulations to upgrade and build wastewater treatment facilities. The primary reason was that nonpoint pollution was generally a consequence of land use planning, which was traditionally the domain of local communities. The federal government had no mandate to intervene into zoning and land use planning except where federal monies, lands, or other interests were at stake. In addition, many federal agencies supported development through housing, highways, and business creation as well as overseeing an industrial model of agriculture that lacked strong pollution controls. Finally, controlling pollution from farms was largely the province of states and localities, whose imperative for growth often led to weak standards for compliance.⁹¹

      Even as more environmental actors turned their attention to nonpoint pollution, wastewater treatment remained a challenge as development continued apace in Greater Washington. During its inspections of Blue Plains in 1995, the EPA found deteriorating conditions, maintenance issues, and other violations of the facility’s federal operating permit despite a mandate nearly a decade earlier for the plant to add personnel and invest in operations. After filing a lawsuit against the District of Columbia, the EPA reached a settlement requiring the city to use its existing revenues to make upgrades and repairs over the next two years. By 2000, the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority (WASA), which operated Blue Plains, had invested $100 million and were able to cut the facility’s pollution by half.⁹²

      At the turn of the century, however, Blue Plains dumped three billion gallons of raw sewage per year into the Anacostia and Potomac as overflow during periods of heavy rains. Environmentalists sued WASA, and in a 2003 settlement the agency agreed to undertake a $143 million project “to upgrade pumping stations, reroute some sewage pipes and install dams in others.” A year later, it had reduced overflows by 24 percent. In 2004, WASA settled another lawsuit with the EPA when it agreed to build three underground water storage tunnels to eliminate more than fifty sewage overflow discharge outlets into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and Rock Creek.⁹³

      After years of planning, WASA deployed a special machine nicknamed “Lady Bird”—in homage to the former first lady’s commitment to conservation—that began digging thirteen miles of underground tunnels in July 2013.⁹⁴ Two years later, the machine had completed the first four-mile section of the tunnel, which measured twenty-three feet in diameter. Unlike the upgrades at Blue Plains, which were largely financed with federal money, the $2.6 billion tunneling project received less than 10 percent of its funding from federal sources.⁹⁵ This discrepancy was a by-product of the declining influence of environmental issues in national politics in relation to the rise of homeland security, reviving a struggling economy amid the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and a more conservative fiscal and political climate. Federal environmental agencies had also chosen to spend more of their money, time, and resources on legal action and implementing court orders than congressional mandates or capital financing.⁹⁶

      In a highly pluralistic and competitive interest group environment, it was difficult to find common ground for improving water quality on a large scale.⁹⁷ Environmental lobbying and litigation were often restricted to well-funded national organizations or affluent local environmentalists who had the skills to act on the political stage. In addition, these activities had a limited ability to inculcate a keen sense of public investment in environmental issues beyond updating constituents about the latest issues or asking for money to finance political activities. The rise of environmental education and local СКАЧАТЬ