Environment>
Flying Wombat
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 94 13:40:13 PDT
Subject: Park Fire Policy Questioned
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Fearful of a public outcry, Yellowstone National Park officials continue to fight naturally occurring fires in violation of their own policy, an environmental group complained Wednesday.
"They defended the policy to let them burn, but they didn't have the guts to implement it," said Louisa Willcox of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, made up of environmental organizations.
The devastating 1988 fires at Yellowstone prompted sharp criticism of the National Park Service's policy of allowing naturally occurring fires to burn. The park service considered that criticism but resumed its policy of allowing most lightning-caused fires to burn unless they threaten life or property.
The policy is based on the belief that fires have an important ecological role and are not a major threat to wild areas.
The park service, however, has been "jumping on every fire they could get to," Willcox said at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the American Institute of Biological Sciences. That not only conflicts with the best scientific judgments, it is also "a huge waste of money," she said.
Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, a Yellowstone spokeswoman, said the park was not violating its policy. She said the park let two fires burn this year and one in 1992.
But she did not know how many naturally occurring fires the park had chosen to fight, so she could not respond completely to Willcox's criticism.
Park officials did fight more fires than usual this year, because of all the other wildfires in the West, she said. Yellowstone officials feared they could not summon the resources to fight any fires that might get out of hand.
On Tuesday, researchers at the meeting reported that Yellowstone has made a remarkably swift recovery from the 1988 fires, which blackened nearly 800,000 acres, or about 36 percent of one of the nation's most treasured wild places.
A carpet of wildflowers and aspen and lodgepole pine seedlings covers the fire-scarred soil, according to Monica Turner of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and William Romme of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo.
"Even in areas where all the plant cover was burned off, within a couple of years there was fairly good plant cover," Romme said.
The let-it-burn policy is in accord with scientific findings, Romme said. "Fire is a problem -- not a major threat -- to the wild land areas," he said.
Pun master
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 94 11:00:12 PDT
Subject: Mt. Everest To Get Outhouse
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) -- The world's tallest mountain will soon be the site of the world's highest toilet.
Associated Metal, a Scottish firm that normally makes sinks and commodes for hospitals, oil rigs and ships, has built a $10,500 state-of-the-art outhouse that will be installed 20,000 feet up Mount Everest.
"Until now, climbers and Sherpas have had to go off and find boulders and bushes to hide behind," said Phil Tolan, the company's managing director.
"Now life will be a bit more comfortable, private, and clean for them."
Steel ropes anchored with ice picks are intended to keep the toilet, and its occupants, from blowing over in howling Himalayan winds. It comes equipped with a wooden seat for warmth and a lock for privacy.
The toilet is being shipped to Nepal, where sherpas will carry it up the mountain in seven 50-pound sections that will be assembled for use by the 55-member British Mount Everest Medical Expedition. The group will conduct a research project on the mountain next month.
When the scientists have finished their work, the toilet will be dismantled and reassembled further down the slopes for use by visiting mountain climbers.
Since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled Mount Everest's 29,000-foot summit in 1953, hundreds of climbers attempting to follow in their footsteps have left behinds tons of garbage and human waste en route. The refuse decomposes slowly in the cold, rarefied environment.
The Nepalese government has restricted the number of expeditions allowed and raised fees in an effort to protect the peak's fragile ecology.
Pun master
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 94 15:20:20 PDT
Subject: Rubber Ducks Aid Science
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In this age of computers, lasers and orbiting satellites, scientists are learning a lot from rubber duckies.
Some 29,000 rubber ducks, turtles and other bathtub toys spilled overboard on Jan. 10, 1992, in the North Pacific when a freighter carrying the cargo on its deck was hit by a storm.
So far, 400 of the bobbing toys have been found along 500 miles of Alaskan shoreline, and that is helping researchers trace wind and ocean currents.
"This is serious science," said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer at Evans-Hamilton Inc., a consulting company in Seattle. "We are learning a great deal."
A preliminary study of the duckie migration was published this month in EOS, official journal of the American Geophysical Union, by Ebbesmeyer and computer modeler W. James Ingraham Jr. of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle.
They also analyzed an earlier example of inadvertent oceanographic science when 61,000 Nike shoes fell off a ship in 1990 and floated toward the West Coast.
Data from the two spills, Ebbesmeyer said, give useful information to oceanographers in predicting where other floating debris will go after spills.
Flying Wombat
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 94 22:10:10 PDT
Subject: Organic Lawn Care Treatments
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Ken Graham used to feel sick when he walked across chemically treated lawns as a door-to-door solicitor for Greenpeace.
Now he's taking care of lawns himself -- organically. Graham founded Organically Correct this spring to treat grass with natural fertilizers and pesticides he says are safer for people and the environment.
"I feel I can make a difference by running the company totally organic because there's not really anybody else in town like that," he said.
Graham's months-old company is small. But he's part of a growing trend toward organic methods in the $13 billion a year lawn care industry.
The number of households buying natural pesticides has risen to about 4.1 million last year from 1.4 million in 1989, according to a survey by the National Gardening Association, a nonprofit group in Burlington, Vt.
Purchases of natural fertilizers like manure, blood and bone meal, and rock powders showed similar gains, said Bruce Butterfield, the agency's research director.
Statistics weren't available for organic use by professional lawn care companies. But interest is high enough that most chemical-using companies now offer organic alternatives, said Ann McClure, executive director of the Professional Lawn Care Association of America, in Marietta, Ga.
In his quest for environmentally kind methods, Graham will cut lawns with an old-fashioned push mower, hopes to buy a smaller, more energy-efficient truck and talks of someday using solar-powered machinery.
One recent day, Graham's truck broke down, leaving he and an employee, Dan Smith, to stuff their equipment into the back of a Honda Accord. At their first stop, they squirted a fine plankton-based powder into the holes made by insects invading a handsome old tree.
The insects crawl across the powder, which will "slice them in half like a razor blade," said Smith.
At their next stop, they fed a lawn by injecting seaweed emulsion into water from an ordinary garden hose.
The idea behind organic care is to develop a lawn that eventually will need no further applications or only a single application each year, Smith said.
Organically Correct tests each lawn for a range of nutrients, including nitrogen, potassium, calcium, magnesium and sodium, and then adjusts those nutrients to their best levels.
Over the long run, the cost of organics vs. chemicals is about the same, Graham maintains. He sells his product, in part, by criticizing chemical-using lawn companies that create "dependency."
"If they don't come six times a year and treat that lawn, there's nothing down there for the lawn to really survive on," Smith said. "And it's really a Twinkie application, too. You're not really giving the lawn a good meal."
Such claims drive the owners of chemical-using companies crazy.
"It would behoove people to be wary of claims that sound too good to be true," said Dave Murphy, who owns Green Valley Co., in suburban Merriam, Kan. "Scare tactics are an improper way to focus the need for care, whether you're dealing with organic fertilizer or pesticides."
Murphy said chemicals are used much more sparingly than when he started his lawn business 24 years ago. "We're all environmentalists," he said. "We're all trying to do the best we can with the least."
He also disputed claims by Organically Correct that many chemicals used on lawns are carcinogens and that the chemicals contaminate groundwater. The products aren't water soluble and don't reach groundwater, he said.
Still, Graham's company is pulling in clients. He estimates that he's bringing in between $1,500 or $2,000 a month.
Al Frisby, a biology teacher, met Graham at an environmental program at Frisby's high school. Frisby said he used to lecture his students on the dangers of chemicals, then go home and splash his lawn with a pesticide to fight grubworms.
But it always bothered him.
"My ultimate goal is to get away from chemical pesticides and herbicides and try to become more organic," he said. "I'm not sure I can become 100 percent organic. (But) I had to do what I tell the kids in class."
Flying Wombat
not that spokesmen for chemical-pesticide producers or users are unbiased or anything. I wouldn't call them "environmentalists" either. why take the chance that you aren't going to become ill in the long run because of chemical exposure?
there's a case pending at a major aerospace firm, involving a new building which was occupied before completion, and which has exposed workers to various chemicals.. causing a variety of health problems including liver damage. the environmental engineer who was assigned to ensure the building's safety was removed from the task before he could do his job. the reason? the corporation decided that in its budget cuts, worker health and safety was expendable, and that the risk of lawsuit was low enough that they thought they could get away with it.
what recourse do people have other than to sue the offending corporation? what recourse do >any< of us, as "consumers," have, other than boycotting products which are produced by unethical means, and choosing to support products whose manufacture is more environmentally sensitive? publicity never hurts, though corporations rely on the public becoming jaded and apathetic.
John
How does that knob-head know his products don't reach ground water?
My lawn looks pretty ratty. But with some watering, and some organic fertilizers, it could look good. I don't understand the need of some people for their lawns to look like the gardens at the Vatican. Especially when this comes at a cost to the ecosystem around them, and potentially to the people themselves.
NightStalker
For the sole reason that they want their house/lawn/all surrounding area to look as good as possible. All neat and tidy, etc, etc... They don't really worry that much about any "global" effects.
Flying Wombat
lawns are an ego thing, actually. out here (in the foothills some ways from Seattle itself), lawns are more like pastures and orchards, and are kept green solely by the forces of Nature. it's not such a big deal if it turns brown during a drought.. at least we aren't wasting well water on it, and the grass is hardy enough to survive on its own.
we also have the advantage of not shelling out mass bucks for unneeded petrochemicals, and avoid running the risk of exposure to certain poisons.
Flying Wombat
and now, an example of what happens on a larger scale when mankind relies on poisons:
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 94 05:14:20 EST
When a Sea Dies
By Jessica Mathews (The Washington Post)
In a sad first, environmentalists recently notarized a death certificate for a sea, suspending further efforts to save the Aral Sea. Recognized as a crisis only in the mid-'80s, the sea has shrunk by two-thirds in just 20 years and has already split in two. A large fishing industry has been destroyed and once-thriving ports now lie 50 kilometers from the shore.
The fate of what was the planet's fourth-largest inland body of water, and the environmental and human catastrophe unfolding in the five Central Asian Soviet successor states, would make a 20th century morality play. The immediate culprit was cotton, which Moscow used to call "white gold" for its ability to earn hard currency. The real villains were greed, stupidity and unchecked, tunnel-visioned apparatchiks on the one hand, and on the other a
lethal combination - by no means unique to the region - of mankind's technological power and still largely unrecognized ecological ignorance.
In one sense, the result was not unintended. As the rivers that feed the landlocked sea were tapped to irrigate vast new cotton fields, the sea would have to shrink. Experts even argued (using the same kind of spuriously sophisticated but incomplete cost-benefit analyses that cause such controversy here) that the disappearance of the sea would be a good thing. The land where it had been could be used to grow more cotton, watered by canals from Siberia's rivers, or
by using nuclear explosions to make those rivers flow southward instead of - in this view - wastefully into the Arctic Ocean. What no one recognized was that the Aral Sea was the region's ecological linchpin, whose role even the most gargantuan technology could not replace. Normally, a huge mass of water vapor evaporating from the sea intercepted the fierce, dry winds that blow out of the north. As the sea shrank, summers
became hotter and drier and winters grew longer, colder and snowless. The local climate became less and less suited to cotton.
Wind erosion and salt storms blown from the receding seabed make what was once a fertile land resemble the site of a biblical plague. Salt fog, salt rain and dry salt crystals coat fields and poison people. Thousands of square miles of farmland cannot now grow anything, and on thousands more productivity is dropping, propped up only by heavier and heavier use of fertilizer and pesticides and more and more water to rinse the fields of salts after
each harvest. The added chemicals poison the water supply. The rinsing flushes away salts the soils need, requiring yet more fertilizer, and so on in a rapidly descending spiral. As always when the natural water balance is disrupted, where there isn't too little water, there is too much. In the frenzy to fulfill Moscow's plan, irrigation canals were built without liners in sandy soils so that as little as 20 percent of the water reaches the
fields. The rest seeps into the ground, turning productive farmland into useless, salinized swamps, poisoning fresh groundwater, causing buildings and power systems to collapse and flooding towns, which then require constant pumping at huge energy cost.
An impoverished diet (no fish from the sea, no fruit and vegetables from the ruined land), toxic water and pitifully inadequate health care have created epidemic levels of once unknown diseases. Premature births are the rule, and women are warned not to breast-feed - their milk is too dangerous. Infant mortality is the highest in the former Soviet Union and may be - the data are not reliable - among the highest in the world. In the worst hit areas it is difficult
to find a healthy person. The region is now freed from Moscow's colonialist rape of its resources, but the collapse of the Soviet Union also means that five countries rather than one must somehow find a way to share too little water. Supplies could be doubled through easy steps like fixing leaky canals, but everything that needs to be done costs money the governments don't have. Making the water safe to drink and thereby lowering the health care
burden and restoring people's hope for the future will cost vastly more. Restoring the ecosystem - and possibly the region's future livability - would take a switch away from cotton and irrigated agriculture, and on that point countries' interests sharply diverge.
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, both dependent on cotton exports, would have to turn their economies upside down. Central Asia's tragedy is a cautionary tale for our time, a reminder that this one lifespan - from about 1950 to 2040 - will probably be the most significant in human history. In these few years, world population will nearly quadruple (from 2.5 billion to 9.5 billion), economic output will likely grow ninefold, and energy use and wastes
will grow concomitantly. For the first time, man has acquired the power to swiftly alter the systems that govern the planet's basic health, on a regional scale as in Central Asia, and globally.
The power to act has come before the knowledge to foresee the consequences. We must either acquire that scientific understanding and the wisdom to follow it very quickly - certainly in the next couple of decades - or likely leave the world permanently less hospitable to all future generations.
(The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.) <02:47 10-04a
Bookworm
Flying Wombat- There are a few of us in towns that don't care if the lawn turns brown either. I never saw the importance of it. I saw people watering their lawns when Seattle had to conserve water and wondered at the stupidity. It doesn't make sense.
Pun master
Date: 10 Oct 1994 03:46:16 -0400
Ecology: Greenhouse Gas 'Benefits' Limited
By Curt Suplee (The Washington Post)
For years, it has been hoped that Earth's greenhouse gas cloud might have a silver lining: Increased concentrations of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can lead to more trapping of heat, and thus to global warming; but higher levels also stimulate plant growth, which can lead to more absorption of the gas in plant tissue during photosynthesis. This "fertilization" effect, many scientists have argued, could offset the rising emissions produced by human civilization.
But now a report in the Oct. 6 issue of the journal Nature has cast doubt on that controversial hypothesis.
Walter Oechel of San Diego State University, with colleagues across the nation, conducted a three-year test of the idea. In the Arctic tundra in north-central Alaska (an ecosystem dominated by a grassy sedge called cotton grass), the group erected numerous greenhouse-like control chambers. In some, the level was kept at normal ambient levels of 340 parts per million. In some it was doubled. And some chambers had both 680 ppm and a temperature elevated 7 degrees F above normal. Sensors recorded carbon dioxide levels every six minutes. If the plants and soil stored (or "sequestered") more than they gave off, the chamber was considered a net carbon sink; if more, it was a net source.
For the first two years, the chambers with elevated levels functioned as net sinks. But by the third year, the ecosystem had adjusted itself and photosynthesis slowed. The high-chambers became net sources. Only those with elevated temperatures continued to act as sinks.
The findings, the team writes, "indicate that the responses of native ecosystems to elevated may not always be positive, and are unlikely to be straightforward."
In an accompanying editorial, plant biologist Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution of Washington cautioned that the results "may not be representative of patterns across a broad range of climate conditions and ecosystem types." Nonetheless, he concluded, the work shows that "increased carbon storage is not an automatic consequence" of increased levels. <02:14 10-10C9999-----
Pun master
Date: 9 Oct 1994 10:02:32 -0400
Source: The Washington Post.
Reheated Debate
By Jessica Mathews
Once the global climate treaty was signed with great fanfare at the Rio Summit two years ago, the debate about greenhouse warming seemed to end. The obvious explanations for the sudden shift from salience to silence - that climate change turned out to be another exaggerated fear or that the treaty set in motion whatever needed to be done - are both wrong.
The loss of media and public interest has actually been due to a change in the weather - caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The volcano threw enough dust and aerosols into the atmosphere to cause a temporary cooling and break the stream of record-breaking global temperatures of the 1980s.
Policy makers know full well that short-term weather has nothing to do with long-term climate trends, but somehow the political system cannot energize itself to deal with global warming unless each year has spectacular weather.
The lull is about to end. Mount Pinatubo's effect is dissipating, and scientists expect the warming trend to resume. At the same time, the scientific consensus - which was always much stronger than the public debate among extremist views would have led you to believe - has deepened in important respects.
A just-released report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - a unique international body of independent scientists working on behalf of governments - reports greater confidence in the computer models that predict the warming trend and its likely impacts. It also emphasizes that even if the treaty's goals are met, they will be nothing more than a tiny first step in dealing with global warming.
The treaty calls for developed countries to try to stabilize their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. The IPCC emphasizes that even if they succeed - and right now none of the developed countries, including the United States is on track to meet the goal - atmospheric concentrations will continue to climb for several hundred years. Think of a bathtub: Emissions are what flows from the tap; atmospheric concentrations are the water in the tub. Currently, emissions are increasing - the equivalent of a loose faucet whose flow increases over time. Ignoring the contribution of the developing countries for the moment, the treaty's measures would tighten the faucet, decreasing the flow a bit and keeping it constant. But of course, the water in the tub would keep rising.
It is the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases that determines the amount of warming. Stabilizing concentrations at twice the pre-industrial level - a level that would mean a substantial amount of warming - will require not only the participation of the developing countries but deep cuts - not stabilization - in current emissions and, therefore, in current levels of fossil fuel use.
That will require decades of lead time. Hence, in the words of Dr. Bert Bolin, the IPCC's Swedish chair and one of the world's leading climatologists, "There is therefore a need to consider already now preparations for the realization of more ambitious goals during the early decades of the next century. You need to look beyond the year 2000 and aim for (additional) agreements soon."
Scientifically it's good advice, but it is unlikely to be heeded. Developing countries will insist on achievements rather than promises from the developed nations before they take action - even though they are the ones likely to be hurt worst by rapid warming. Developed countries will only be able to act together, and so far they have been unable to get in sync. Europe was ready to adopt carbon dioxide or other energy taxes in 1992, but the Bush administration was resolutely opposed. The new Clinton administration reached for a modest energy tax at the moment when European unity and confidence was at a low point. Now that the European Union is again actively considering new greenhouse taxes, their prospect in the United States is about nil.
Most developed countries have achieved huge improvements in energy efficiency in the last three decades, reflecting both technological change and a shift to service economies. Japan, for example, has dropped from 145 kilograms of commericial energy consumed (measured in oil equivalents, per $100 of GDP) to 13, Germany from 176 to 18 and the United States from 173 to 35. Some newly industrialized countries have done as well. South Korea, for example, has improved from 197 to 30. These countries are continuing to improve, but low energy prices mean that progress is slow both on efficiency and in developing non-fossil renewable sources.
On the other hand, Eastern Europe, the states of the former Soviet Union and most of the key developing countries have yet to begin to transform their energy economies. China's numbers are 195 and 187, India's are 169 and 132. Eastern Europe is stuck at 199. Without radical change, China alone could account for as much as 40 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
For all the contention that lies ahead, it is worth noting that the United Nations has scored a remarkable success in the IPCC. The idea of experts working as independent scientists (unencumbered by official instructions) but reporting directly to governments, with the job of educating policy makers and forging an international consensus as well as understanding the science, is brand new. While its job on global warming is far from over, the model is proven and stands waiting to be copied elsewhere.
(The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.) 02:27 10-09C9999-----
Flying Wombat
Date: 18 Oct 1994 05:18:41 -0400
Scorched Earth
Why the Hill has become an environmental disaster area.
By Jessica Mathews (The Washington Post.)
Deficit reduction, NAFTA and a few other achievements raised the 103rd Congress's overall record somewhat. But with respect to the environment, this Congress was pure scorched earth.
Legislators could not manage to fix the lawyer-riddled, overly expensive Superfund program for cleaning up toxic waste sites, even though 80 percent of the work was done for them by a coalition of business and environmental leaders who produced a compromise plan.
Administration proposals to reduce subsidies that cause environmental harm while draining the federal treasury were all defeated. They included a century-old mining law that forces the government to give away billions of dollars of taxpayer-owned minerals, water subsidies that encourage waste by charging farmers a few percent of what it costs to deliver the water, federal grazing fees set far below market rates, subsidies that underwrite otherwise unprofitable logging, and federal flood insurance that supports development in coastal areas where no private insurer would take the risk. Each of these programs costs the taxpayer twice: once through the subsidy and later to deal with the damage it causes.
Reauthorization and needed improvements to the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act all failed. A harmless proposal to create a National Biological Survey to identify which species live where didn't make it out of the starting blocks. A bill to raise the Environmental Protection Agency to full Cabinet status went down. The Senate failed to ratify the Biodiversity Treaty, and the administration's proposed energy tax was slashed to insignificance.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the political arm of the environmental movement, called this unequivocally the worst Congress in the 25 years it has kept score. And it happened while polls show steady high public support for environmental protection.
Part of the reason is that the environment has become - for now - a one-party issue. Turning away from a long history of environmental leadership, today's GOP seems to have concluded that since it can't compete with the Democrats, it might as well get what it can from across-the-board opposition. Republicans' average LCV rating in both the House and Senate last year was a bleak 19 out of 100. (Democrats averaged 75 in the Senate and 68 in the House.) According to LCV head Jim Maddy, one-third to one-quarter the number of Republicans will vote for environmental legislation today that did 20 years ago, when the major environmental statutes were passed. Across the aisle, Democrats know that voters who care about the environment have nowhere else to turn, so they offer far less leadership than they have in the past.
The legislative debacle may also be a sign that the first environmental era has just about played itself out while the next is not ready to be born.
Until now, environmental progress has been achieved largely by government's setting standards and specifying exactly how they were to be met. Because of the difficulties of enforcing such detail, the focus has been on major polluters. Small sources and individuals have been largely ignored. There has been little integration of environmental needs with broad policy setting in areas like energy, agriculture and transportation, and virtually none with macroeconomic policy as a whole.
A great deal has been achieved, but because the legislation-regulation-litigation sequence is so slow, it is nearly always out of step with technological progress. And more often than not, regulation is a blunt, or even perverse, economic instrument. The next era should see a shift from primary reliance on regulation to the use of economic signals. These allow pollution to be reduced where that can be done at least cost. They can nudge change in the right direction without requiring the government to spend years deciding whether 0.01 or 0.013 is the safe level of a particular substance. They can be as easily applied to every consumer and small enterprise as to large businesses.
The ultimate goal is to make prices reflect environmental costs - the costs of resource extraction, of waste disposal, of land and habitat use, and of pollution.
The first step, getting rid of direct subsidies and indirect tax write-offs for environmentally damaging activities, will also reduce the regulatory burden. Dozens of federal subsidies, for example, encourage the destruction of wetlands, which the government, with its regulatory hand, forbids.
The next step is to use targeted taxes, so-called "green fees" to adjust prices. These can be familiar types, like emissions charges and deposit-return fees, or newer ones like time-of-day pricing on highways to reduce congestion. The revenues can be used to replace growth-inhibiting taxes on corporate income and payrolls.
For all its advantages, this shift to a more nimble, economically efficient approach to environmental protection won't come easily. Beneficiaries will fight for every dollar of federal largesse they now enjoy, and though targeted fees are less objectionable than any other, no tax is welcome. Thousands of lawyers and government regulators are financially or emotionally tied to the present system. Most important, the environmental movement is torn: Part of it has embraced the new approach; others believe that only regulation can force progress.
The good news is that change is coming, though very slowly. The bad news is that the 103rd Congress may be only the first of many unable to produce any environmental advance.
(The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.)
Flying Wombat
Date: 19 Oct 1994 05:22:07 -0400
Farm Herbicides Foul Tap Water For 14 Million
Environmental Group's Study Identifies 5 Chemical Culprits
By Gary Lee, Washington Post Staff Writer
Residue from potent agricultural weedkillers is contaminating the drinking water supplies of millions of Americans - including some Washington-area residents - according to a study released yesterday by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a District-based nonprofit organization.
Five herbicides commonly used by farmers in the Midwest and the Chesapeake Bay region are seeping into soil, rivers and streams, and traces of them eventually wind up in drinking water systems, according to the report, entitled "Tap Water Blues."
The report concluded that the buildup of herbicides has slightly increased some Americans' risk of getting cancer. The average American faces a one in four lifetime risk of getting cancer. The EWG's analysis is based on the assumption that a person's lifetime exposure to drinking water should contribute an additional cancer risk of no more than one in 1 million. 34% In farm belt areas where herbicide use is heaviest, however, the buildup of contaminants in water has increased the cancer risk to residents by at least 10 in 1 million, the study estimates. For example, it pointed out that residents of Springfield, Ill., have about a 48 in 1 million chance of getting cancer from drinking water, thus increasing their overall cancer risk to 250,048 in 1 million.
In all, 14 million Americans are drinking water contaminated with the herbicides, and 3.5 million midwesterners face a slightly elevated cancer risk as a result of water contamination from the herbicides, the 277-page study said. In the Washington area, 2.4 million people are exposed to traces of herbicides in drinking water, it said. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol M. Browner said that Americans should be "concerned but not alarmed" by the findings. "Most drinking water systems in the country are well regulated and monitored frequently," she said in an interview. According to EPA figures, the health risk posed by tap water is "considerably less significant" than the report suggests, she added.
Browner also noted that she urged the 103rd Congress to pass an overhaul of the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, a federal statute establishing standards for cleanup of drinking water supplies, which would have included $1.3 billion for improving local water systems. Different versions of the legislation were passed by both houses of Congress, but a conference committee failed to agree on a compromise version of the bill. "During the Reagan and Bush administrations, little was done in this area," Browner said. "It's hard to reverse 12 years of nonactivity in two years." But Richard Wiles, the EWG staff member who directed the study, said that none of the current methods of removing herbicides from water reservoirs has proven effective.
"There is no acceptable solution to this problem short of banning these herbicides," he said. "The EPA (under the Clinton administration) has had two years to act and it has done nothing."
"The drinking water laws are simply too weak," said David Rall, a pesticide specialist with Physicians For Social Responsibility, a cosponsor of the study. Current laws do not include provisions for protecting infants and children, who are far more vulnerable than adults to pesticides and other chemicals, Rall added. "They should be upgraded to add further protections to public health," he said.
One key herbicide cited in the study is alachlor, marketed under the trade name Lasso. Although classified as a probable human carcinogen, it is heavily used by farmers to kill weeds and leaves that grow around corn. Another is metolachlor, which is used for the same purpose as alachlor but is less common. The others are atrazine, cyanazine and simazine.
EWG is a small organization devoted mainly to researching the use of pesticides in American agriculture. The two-year study, one of the group's most ambitious undertakings, is based largely on Department of Agriculture data.
The chemicals pinpointed in the study are extensively used, the report said. In the Midwest, farmers apply about 150 million pounds a year to crops, particularly corn and soybeans. While most of the chemicals are washed away, small traces, measured in parts per billion, showed up in tests of drinking water.
The use of alachlor and metachlor is already being reduced by 66 million pounds a year, Browner said, largely because of an EPA decision to register a substitute for them. The use of the other three is under special review, a process which could result in their banning, she said.
About 7.4 million pounds of the five herbicides are used annually by farmers in the Chesapeake Bay basin, including parts of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and the District, the study said. As the Potomac, the Patuxent and the Susquehanna rivers pass through the region, they become contaminated with pesticides, the report said.
Minuscule traces of some of the herbicides have been found in treated tap water destined for homes in the Washington and Baltimore areas, the report said. Over the past 10 years, however, use of the chemicals in this region and their presence in drinking water have declined significantly, the report said. "The problem in the Chesapeake Bay area pales in comparison to the problem in places like Indiana and Illinois," Wiles said. He credits the success of the campaign to clean up the bay with alleviating the buildup of pesticides. 02:28 10-19C9999-----
Environment> _