Conservationists Put Earth on Their Wish List
Peter Kaminsky
New York Times
As the year’s end approaches, it is fitting to ask some conservation organizations for a New Year’s wish that they hope will improve the outdoors experience for America’s sportsmen and sportswomen. From the many groups that could have been included, here are three representing a cross section of states and terrains.
“There are no other Everglades in the world,” the naturalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas wrote in 1947 of the unique wetlands between Lake Okeechobee and Florida Bay. Unfortunately, in 2003, “Nine acres of the Everglades die every day,” Mary Barley, chairwoman of the Everglades Foundation, said.
Environmentalists trace much of this destruction to the sugar industry. More than 700,000 acres of cane fields, winter vegetables and a few sod farms occupy the upper quarter of the original Everglades. Conservationists say that the sugar industry’s ongoing discharge of phosphorous has choked the ecosystem with a level of nutrients that it cannot accommodate. Further, sugar has high water requirements in Florida’s dry season and less need in the wet season. Nearly a trillion gallons of water are diverted by the industry from the Everglades at the time it is most needed and excess water is dumped there when it is least needed.
Political pressure from activists produced the Everglades Forever Act in 1994. “It is not so aptly named,” Barley said. “It is the law that Florida wrote after the state was found in noncompliance with the Clean Water Act. The original goal of clean water by 2003 was moved first to 2006 and then to 2016. And then all it says is, we’ll have another look and see what we have to do.”
Barley’s wish? “Actually, we have two. One, to fix the Everglades and two, to make the polluters pay.”
In the Far West, the region known as the Rocky Mountain Front is little changed from the time when the first American Indians made their way along the Great Divide. It is home to the nation’s largest herd of big horn sheep and second-largest elk herd. It is also thought to have some reserves of natural gas.
A look over the border at the way Canada has handled natural gas reserves in a similar ecosystem is chilling to many. “Vistas have been destroyed and wildlife was decimated,” said Nathan Birkeland of the Montana Wildlife Federation.
The federation recognizes that energy independence is a national priority and it supported a proposed amendment (which did not make the cut) to the recent energy bill that would have allowed energy companies holding leases on the Front to trade their rights for leases in other less ecologically critical areas.
“There is no other piece of ground in the lower 48 that has such species diversity and wildlife density,” Birkeland said.
And, so, the Montana Wildlife Federation’s wish for 2004? “No more oil and gas exploration on the Rocky Mountain Front.”
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, wetlands conservationists are concerned about the effects of comparatively recent developments in industrial hog production.
“There are 10 million hogs putting solid waste into the ecosystem, each hog accounting for as much waste as 10 humans,” Rick Dove, who is the riverkeeper on the Neuse River, said. “That’s equivalent to the combined human populations of North Carolina, California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire largely crowded into the comparatively small space between I-95 and the coast.”
When he retired from the Marines with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Dove had planned on a second career as a commercial fisherman on the Neuse, which he first fished in the 1970’s. “It was close to paradise,” he recalled. “Now if you work for a week you would be lucky to feed your family.”
When Dove experienced memory loss, headaches and skin sores he said his doctors theorized that water pollution was the likely cause. Dove was fighting mad, and that was how he came to be riverkeeper, one of 130 such environmental watchdogs affiliated with Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper organization.
Dove often flies in a small plane over the Carolina lowlands documenting the waves of sewage that have inundated the region. “The purpose of these wetlands is to purify the water that flows into our rich estuaries and they have been completely overwhelmed by development,” he said. “Hog factories are not the only source of pollution, but they have put things over the tipping point.”
As riverkeeper on the Neuse, Dove’s wish for 2004: “Fill all the lagoons and get rid of pollution from the hog factories, end of story.”
To all of the above I add my wish. Peace among men, and good will toward Earth!
Copyright 2003The New York Times Company
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Posted by: Paul on December 07, 2003 at 12:46:47