Organization unveils plan to tackle the state’s biggest water quality threat

11/5/12

Today, California Coastkeeper Alliance (CCKA), which represents 12 California Waterkeeper organizations throughout the state, announces the appointment of Sara Aminzadeh as executive director. Promoted from her role as acting executive director, Aminzadeh assumes the role simultaneously as she launches a two-year campaign to tackle California’s biggest—yet largely unknown—water  quality problem: polluted runoff.

“We’ve made huge strides in controlling pollution from pipes, but toxic runoff from agriculture operations, the urban landscape and industrial facilities still plagues our coasts, bays, and rivers,” said Aminzadeh.  “It is a low profile, high-impact problem that degrades the California way of life and our state’s ocean and tourist-based economy.”

According to CCKA, polluted runoff is often considered an issue too complicated to solve, but left ignored, the problem has serious economic and public health implications.  Research shows that contamination from polluted runoff at Southern California beaches sickens approximately one million swimmers every year, resulting in public health costs of up to $50 million.

The two-year campaign enables CCKA to organize its locally based Waterkeeper organizations under a single focus, helps Californians understand the problem, mobilizes citizen and engages businesses in new ways. To begin, Aminzadeh will seek statewide permits that effectively regulate runoff to California waters as required by federal and state pollution laws, and enable citizen action to improve local water quality.

“Citizen monitoring and investigation by local Waterkeeper organizations of industrial and municipal facilities helps highlight pollution hotspots, spurs immediate improvements to water quality, and can inform the development of better policies and regulations,” said Aminzadeh.

Aminzadeh’s experience includes advocacy before state decision makers as policy director for CCKA and as a policy analyst with San Francisco Baykeeper.  In 2010, she helped launch CCKA’s climate change adaptation programs including work to address sea level rise and ocean acidification. Aminzadeh serves as the public representative on California’s Water Quality Monitoring Council, working to communicate water quality data and information to the public in an easily understood manner.  She received a juris doctorate from University of California, Hastings College of the Law and a bachelors of science in Environmental Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, where she graduated with honors.

Learn more about CCKA’s new Executive Director and Stormwater Campaign at CAcoastkeeper.org.

California Coastkeeper Alliance is a state-local partnership with California’s 12 Waterkeeper organizations to ensure that Californians enjoy clean water and a healthy coast. CCKA is a member of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, a movement with almost 200 programs around the world.

10/29/12

Down here at the end of Manhattan, on the border between evacuation zones B and C, I’m prepared, mostly. My bathtub is full of water, as is every container I own. My flashlights are battery-ed up, the pantry is crammed with canned goods and I even roasted a pork shoulder that I plan to gnaw on in the darkness if ConEd shuts down the power.

But as I confidently tick off all the things that Governor Andrew M. Cuomo recommends for my defense as Hurricane Sandy bears down on me, I find I’m desperately missing one thing.

I wish I had some oysters.

I’m not talking about oysters to eat — although a dozen would be nice to go with that leftover bottle of Champagne that I really should drink if the fridge goes off. I’m talking about the oysters that once protected New Yorkers from storm surges, a bivalve population that numbered in the trillions and that played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston.

Crassostrea virginica, the American oyster, the same one that we eat on the half shell, is endemic to New York Harbor. Which isn’t surprising: the best place for oysters is the margin between saltwater and freshwater, where river meets sea. Our harbor is chock-a-block with such places. Myriad rivers and streams, not just the Hudson and the East, but the Raritan, the Passaic, the Kill Van Kull, the Arthur Kill — the list goes on and on — flow into the upper and lower bay of the harbor, bringing nutrients from deep inland and distributing them throughout the water column.

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

But 400 years of poor behavior on the part of humans have ruined all that. As Mark Kurlansky details in his fine book “The Big Oyster,” during their first 300 years on these shores colonists nearly ate the wild creatures out of existence. We mined the natural beds throughout the waterways of greater New York and burned them down for lime or crushed them up for road beds.

Once we’d hurled all that against the wild New York oyster, baymen switched to farming oysters. But soon New Yorkers ruined that too. Rudimentary sewer systems dumped typhoid- and cholera-carrying bacteria onto the beds of Jamaica Bay. Large industries dumped tons of pollutants like PCBs and heavy metals like chromium into the Hudson and Raritan Rivers, rendering shellfish from those beds inedible. By the late 1930s, oysters in New York and all the benefits they brought were finished.

Fortunately, the New York oyster is making something of a comeback. Ever since the Clean Water Act was passed in the 1970s, the harbor’s waters have been getting cleaner, and there is now enough dissolved oxygen in our waterways to support oyster life. In the last 10 years, limited sets of natural oyster larvae occurred in several different waterways that make up the Greater New York Bight.

Alongside nature’s efforts, a consortium of human-run organizations that include the Hudson River Foundation, New York-New Jersey Bay Keeper, the Harbor School and even the Army Corps of Engineers have worked together to put out a handful of test reefs throughout the Bight.

Yes, there have been some setbacks. New Jersey’s state Department of Environmental Protection actually demanded that a test reef from the nearby bay at Keyport be removed for fear that people might poach those test oysters and eat them. But the program has persisted, even in New Jersey. In 2011 the Navy offered its pier at Naval Weapons Station Earle, near Sandy Hook, as a new place in New Jersey to get oysters going.

Will all of these attempts to get oysters back in New York City have any effect in defending us against Sandy? Surely not. The oyster kingdom is gone, and what we have now are a few struggling refugees just trying to get a foothold in their old territory.

But what is fairly certain is that storms like Sandy are going to grow stronger and more frequent, and our shorelines will become more vulnerable. For the present storm, all we could do was stock up on canned goods and fill up our bathtubs. But for the storms to come, we’d better start planting a lot more oysters.

Paul Greenberg, the author of “Four Fish,” is writing a book about reviving local seafood.

Read Original Article

1-3 p.m. @ Humboldt Coastal Nature Center

A Halloween event for kids and their adults! Join some spooky dune characters for fun Halloween games and educational activities at the Humboldt Coastal Nature Center. Come dressed in costume and bring a trick or treat bag, or a t-shirt to make into a bag! Be prepared for a short hike in the sand. One hour tours will start every 30 minutes from 1-3 pm. Space is limited, call 444-1397 to reserve a spot. Tours en espanol en 2pm.

Humboldt Baykeeper will be there making re-useable bags out of recycled t-shirts to emphasize how easy and fun it can be to recycle and halt the use of plastic bags simultaneously.

The federal law has made life better nationwide, but 40 years later, it desperately needs to be updated.

10/17/12

On Thursday, one of the country's most effective environmental laws — the federal Clean Water Act — will turn 40. Los Angeles County residents owe the law a huge debt of gratitude. Because of it, Santa Monica Bay no longer has a dead zone, its bottom fish no longer have tumors and fin rot, and the days of baywide summer beach closures due to multimillion-gallon sewage spills are long gone.

These successes didn't simply happen. They required the combined efforts of government and public activists, and took considerable financial investment, along with excellent engineering and construction work, and leadership at multiple levels. But without the Clean Water Act, they couldn't have been accomplished.

The act sets wastewater standards and regulates the discharge of pollutants into the nation's oceans, rivers and lakes. Locally, one of the biggest focuses has been on coastal sewage treatment plants, which have upgraded their facilities and reduced by 90% the amount of sewage solids going into the ocean. Another local success has been with industrial waste programs, which have slashed their discharges of toxic metals and organic pollutants more than tenfold. Standards set by the act have led to cleaner beaches during the summer and the installation of more than 50,000 catch-basin screens and inserts to keep trash out of the ocean as well as lakes and rivers.

These measurable successes have reduced health risks to swimmers and surfers and improved ecosystem health. But they aren't enough. The Clean Water Act as written can't create the universally fishable, swimmable and drinkable (where appropriate) waters that Congress envisioned when it passed the act 40 years ago. It hasn't been updated in 25 years, and it desperately needs to be.

Many kinds of pollution stemming from agriculture, mining, septic systems and the timber industry are still largely unregulated, and they are causing problems such as dead zones, hypoxic waters and harmful algal blooms in the nation's waters. Storm-water pollution regulations also need to be strengthened. If you want to understand why, visit our local beaches after a rain. Many of them look like trash dumps, and about half of the county's beaches get Fs on the Beach Report Card after a rainstorm. Polluted urban runoff is often toxic to aquatic life.

It's no wonder that after 40 years, the Clean Water Act is in need of updating. We need storm-water pollution regulations that incentivize and require state-of-the-art technologies. We need infrastructure retrofits that will allow the capture and treatment of polluted runoff to the level required by water quality standards. And we need to upgrade sewage treatment plants to treat water to a level that can more easily augment local water supplies.

The question now is how to achieve these things. Some necessary fixes, such as tightening standards on storm-water pollution, can be accomplished through strengthening rules already mandated by the act. But other Clean Water Act modifications, such as regulating agriculture and mining, providing funding for green infrastructure projects or extending the act to cover groundwater, would require congressional action. In the current, highly partisan Washington atmosphere, that would be incredibly difficult to accomplish.

Still, polls consistently find a high degree of concern on the part of Americans about water quality issues, and most Americans value the protections that are in place. Representatives in Congress should listen to their constituents and move to finish the job of protecting aquatic life across the nation.

Without a more comprehensive federal approach to water management, the nation's aquifers, rivers, lakes and coastal waters will continue to degrade. This isn't simply an aesthetic or a tourism issue; clean water protects aquatic life and public health. Clean water is essential for drinking, and for agriculture, and for life. Congress had the foresight 40 years ago to override a veto by President Nixon to pass the Clean Water Act, which has served us well for four decades. Now the law needs updating to meet the act's ambitious goals and serve us as well in decades to come.

Mark Gold, former president of Heal the Bay, is associate director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Read Original Article