Friday, May 17, 2013

Let Us Get Our Feet Wet

I live near the Chesapeake Bay on a river that feeds into it.  Five major rivers flow into this bay and numerous tributaries also dump water into this largest estuary in the United States.  Two theories hold strong for the formation of this bay.  One an asteroid collision or two a giant glacier.  If you are a numbers person, the Chesapeake Bay is 200 miles long. fed by 48 major rivers, and fills from 100 tributaries that drain across a 64,000-square-mile watershed.  These are rivers that run by highways, cities (including the Nation's Capital), subdivisions, and farms.  These are rivers that collect lawn fertilizer, farm pesticides, and runoff from highway oils on their rush to the sea.  The fertilizers from farms are one of the worst pollutants creating huge algae blooms and eventual die-offs falling to the bay bottom and resulting in dead zones where oxygen does not exist.  And the average depth of the bay is 21 feet..not very deep at all.  In fairness to farmers, they have reduced their use of fertilizers over the years through better practices.

Cow poop and pee plus packing of the shoreline...not so good for the river.
Two thousand seven hundred plant and animal species attempt to live in and near the Bay.  At one time there were so many oysters in this Bay that the water was completely filtered, ALL OF IT, in a week!  One Algonquin Indian translation of the word Chesapeake is "great shellfish bay."  That was when you could wade into the water and see your feet---I am guessing if you did not cut your foot on the many oysters shells.  "Such huge numbers of shellfish had a major impact on the environment.  Oysters are filter feeders, which means that they remove nutrients from the water as they siphon it through their gill system.  This filtering process removes the phytoplankton and other small organisms that grow in the water.  In essence, each oyster is a small, water-treatment plant that cleans the water passing through it as it feeds.  The cumulative effect of millions and millions of oysters feeding each day was to keep the waters of the Chesapeake clear and pristine.  Biologists have estimated that when the English settlers reached Virginia and Maryland in the 1600s, oysters were filtering the entire Chesapeake Bay once a week.  The result was waters of remarkable clarity, even down to depths of twenty feet or more."  Those days are past as we have less than 2% of the number of oysters growing in the Bay.  They have died off due to disease from pollution stress and also disappeared from over-harvesting.  Work is ongoing to restore oysters to the Bay... a slow, but perhaps ultimately successful process if we get a handle on the pollution and get better cooperation from the oyster fishermen which is a different species than the oyster farmer.

We have a former state senator, Bernie Fowler, who was an avid fisherman as a young man, and noticed the declining clarity of the water on the Patuxent River when he would wade in each spring just north of where I live and try to see his feet.  In 1988 this 'wade-in" became an annual tradition to remind people of the declining clarity of our waters and also gave energy to a movement where then Senator Fowler sued the Environmental Protection Agency for its lack of enforcement of pollution laws.  The Bay is no where near healthy, but at least has stabilized in its decline and Senator Fowler has brought it to the public attention.  He is now 89, but still does his wade-in.

Pinkney Island, South Carolina, protected shoreline
Since we live in the 'critical area' I only fertilize my flowers and perennials with a slow release food and I am super conservative with pesticides and fungicides.  I am removing those plants that require too much spray to survive.  We still keep a few fruit trees that are demanding.  We no longer fertilize or herbicide our lawn so it can look like a golf course.  It does look like mowed weeds and we have allowed more clover to take over.  The clover is good for the soil and rabbits like clover to eat instead of my flowers.  If you live in a first world nation and fertilize your lawn, allow run-off from your roof, are not careful when you fill your lawn mower with gas or any endless number of things that hurt our water quality...remember that like fossil fuels clean water is also is a finite resource.  (My next post is on drinking dinosaur pee...really)

14 comments:

  1. Here too, and the culprits are sheep and goats as well as bovines and humans. (Bovines and humans is a good pairing, don't you think?) We too are trying to walk a more mindful and thoughtful path when it comes to rivers and waters generally, but there are times when I could slap some people silly. What the hang is wrong with our species anyway? There are places here where one could almost walk ON the water and not in it.

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  2. I think it is possible to reverse damage done by human tinkering with the balance of nature, but not always easy--mostly not easy to convince large enough numbers of the critical importance of doing so.

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  3. Out where I live, we might be able to fence our cattle and sheep from the creek (and we do except one spot they need to cross to another pasture and it's fenced to narrow how much access they have), nothing can be done about the elk and deer who also use the riparian zone. The main advantage for us in fencing the animals away isn't the clearness of the water but the growth of trees and plants along the creek which is healthier looking at least than if cattle have had access. Moving cattle a lot helps also on the damage they do but you are right probably the main polluter to waterways is human activity although some water is always muddy looking by the nature of what it runs through as they talked about some of that even in old journals. The main thing is that it be as close as possible to what it has been and has good fish and shell life within for a healthy ecosystem. Having big lawns probably is a bigger factor than people know as it takes a lot to maintain them. We left behind the world of lawns for pasture up to our house with only gardens fenced off from the sheep. But we do have to fertilize those pastures but not to the same level people do lawns and we can be careful we use products that are minimally invasive to the waterways. It's always a tradeoff as a person tries to weigh options for plus and minus. Kind of like everything in life.

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  4. My parents have lived since 1965 on the bay, near the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Bay Ridge. This is a subject close to my heart. I've been an organic gardener all my life and supported bay clean up. Thank you for covering it here.

    My 3 acre "lawn" has never been fertilized, it's all native grasses and plants and I think it's lovely. I let distant sections grow long when "weeds" are blooming and seeding, some more than others. I always let the bluegrass go to seed and over the years it and clover have become dominant.

    I have neighbors who have milk cows and chickens that they move frequently, rotating the pasture. The cows come first and eat the grass down, then the chickens follow, eating bugs, and weeds, spreading the cow's manure and adding their own. They mow, fertilize, kill all the ticks and do a lot of fertilizer spreading and weeding for you. The areas they've been over are really improved and beautified. They use temporary solar charged fencing, it's fun to watch the animals for a few days, they are never in a place for long. (Though gardeners want them in their veggie gardens over winter, they do such a fine job on garden pests.)

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  5. We should all be talking about the state of the land we inhabit!

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  6. We have a riparian restoration program going on here. Here the Walla Walla River and Mill Creek flow on down to the Columbia. These used to be salmon spawning waters before pollution took over. Domestic animals are being fenced away from the waters and serious replanting of trees and shrubs has taken place. We live in kind of an oasis in the desert in Walla Walla which means many waters. Tiny creeks feed into this system and travel through many city yards as well as the surrounding farms and are vulnerable to fertilizers and pesticides. I've let my lawn go without and it grows lots of pretty violets in the spring because of it. Other neighbors have begun replacing their lawn with low maintenance, drought resistant plants and stone walks. Some still keep a golf course like lawn anyway, it changes from house to house as you walk down the street. There was funding and a program to assist homeowners with restoring the banks of the creeks going through their yards with new plants and cover. I think it's out of money now but the results are good and quite visible. Still, at this time you wouldn't drink out of any of these waters.

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  7. Our California granddaughter calls clover seed "magic seed".

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  8. drinking out of mountain streams that look pristine isn't very safe either because of giardia. Many animals live on banks of streams and they don't concern themselves with where they defecate. Our stream is clear and looks perfect but I would boil any water from it if I was forced to drink from it.

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  9. This post was thoughtful and well-written. We all can do more to protect out precious. It's not like there's anywhere else we can go if we make this planet uninhabitable.

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  10. Well said hun and so true....amazing the differences that have occurred in our environment in such a short time.
    Rio Grand is our river and suffering the same fate....two states depend on this water and it is fast disappearing due to over irrigating. Sigh!!
    Hugs
    SueAnn

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  11. Exactly! We don't use all that stuff -- our lawn isn't the best, but that's okay, i can live with myself over it.

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  12. Wonderful. Our pollutants run downhill to the bay. I worry often about over watering of our unneeded grass and the fertilizer the gardeners use to keep it so beautifully green. So far it hasn't worked to remind the board that we live in a desert landscape and the lawns need to go.

    Thanks.

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  13. I am so glad you are aware of these things. We also are very careful and, as a matter of fact, use no pesticides or weed killers at all. Our yard is far from neat, but we are glad not to be adding poisons to Hilo Bay.

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  14. I don't think you'd be able to convince my husband to forgo our lawn treatments. By the way, our back yard backs up to wetlands where deer and other creatures live.
    He is old school and would have a hard time looking at his lawn being weed filled, etc.
    The hope is in our children. Perhaps they will act upon the ecological information they are being taught.

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Take your time...take a deep breath...then hit me with your best shot.