Ending the Water Blog

Nearly two years ago, ahead of the publication of Water Connections, I began writing this blog about fresh water. I had spent six years writing the book, and I wanted to stay current on the subject.

With this posting I end the blog – not for any shortage of topics but instead for shortage of time. I’m pursuing several unrelated projects that demand attention.

The blog has taken readers to places and subjects that are covered in the book, and it’s also travelled to new places, too. Mars, for example. A posting last July was about three rocket launches that month to investigate the presence of water on the Red Planet; the landings are expected next month.

Other postings since March 2019 reported on technology breakthroughs in and around water, the movements of pollution, the economics of ice, the pros and cons of dams, variations of hydro, the science of sewers and many other topics, even the art and design of drinking fountains.

My research also exposed me to other water-focused blogs and relevant sources, among them:

Science Daily

Circle of Blue

The World Water Council

American Rivers

This blog ends with the appealing prospect of change in the United States, thanks to the inauguration of a new president and the start of a new administration last week. Renewed federal concern about climate instability means a lot, as do respect for science and active concern for environmental quality.

I plan to remain current on water, only not on this blog. Past postings will remain online for a spell. And the book that led to the blog (“Water Connections – What fresh water means to us, what we mean to water”) remains available in bookstores mainly in New England and also through Bauhan Publishing and Amazon.

Thanks for your supportive comments and suggestions along the way.

Best regards. Be healthy. Press on.

Jim Rousmaniere

Remember acid rain?

Next week’s scheduled arrival of a new administration in Washington promises a return to environmental sensitivity and protection.

 The commitment is there, certainly. So too is the capability, proof of which can be found in the historical record. Consider one accomplishment in that record that foreshadows an even greater challenge that we face today.

 That accomplishment is about the ending of acid rain.

In 1963 a scientist at the federal Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in northern New Hampshire collected a sample of rain that he found to be unusually acidic.

His discovery set in motion an initiative that over decades led to the recovery of lakes and forests, most of them in northern regions such as New England where I live.

The cause of the high acidity: excess amounts of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxides that had been delivered largely through rain. The clouds carrying that rain had been tainted by the emissions of upwind industrial facilities such as smelters and coal-burning utilities.

The evidence of damage was plain to see: crystal-clear lakes with declining populations of fish, and trees that had been so weakened that they couldn’t survive  common periodic stressors such as insect infestations and drought.

 And the problem was getting worse as coal-powered utilities fueled expanding economies.

Scientists who sourced the problem to power plants recommended that emissions be reduced. Environment-sensitive politicians pushed for a freeze on emissions and cutbacks that could cost polluters $5 billion.

 A resistant President Ronald Reagan all but said that acid rain was a hoax. He refused to take part in an international effort to cut emissions of sulfur dioxide,

The Hudson Institute, a major conservative voice, insisted that evidence of acid rain damage to lakes and forests was circumstantial. In any case, it said, bird poop was a more likely source of the problem than smokestacks.

Dramatically, a 1986 column in Fortune Magazine carried the headline: “Hysteria about acid rain.”

Yet President Reagan ultimately came around, prodded in part by diplomatic concerns in Canada, a neighbor that was on the receiving end of acid rain’s contamination.

 In just a few years – in 1990 – the Clean Air Act was amended and an Acid Rain Program was launched in Washington.

 A public-private regulatory system was put in place in which companies that were producing excess emissions could either cut back their emissions or purchase allowances to keep on polluting.

 The method relied on market dynamics and attention to the bottom line in that companies could both buy and sell the allowances.

 The result over the course of the following years: emissions dropped, and acid rain largely went away, at costs that were less than what had. been expected. Water quality in lakes in the Northeast improved. Fish returned. Forests returned to health.

 There are lessons in the acid rain experience that we can draw on today, principally that we can correct our ways. The lessons could be put to use immediately in the cause of addressing climate instability.

The new administration in Washington is clearly committed to that cause, starting with rejoining the international effort to address climate change. And in acid rain, it has a model for action that worked.

Sea levels rising, lake levels falling

Everyone knows that ocean waters are rising -- threatening coastal cities, flooding farms, endangering the economics of ports and turning off visitors to Venice.

But not all water levels are rising. The reverse is true in some large lakes, and that’s worrying experts. The problem for them isn’t the melting of ice sheets and glaciers that add water but evaporation that takes water away.

One studied example is the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake that’s located between Europe and Asia. Researchers at the University of Bremen in Germany say that water levels there could fall by an astonishing 50 feet by the end of this century. The effects: damaged fisheries, disappearing habitats, ruined economies, geopolitical strife.

The Caspian, which is fed by the Volga River, has no natural outflow to the ocean. Its water level is determined by (a) how much water the Volga supplies, (b) how much rain and snow fall from the sky and (c) how much evaporates into thin air.

That last point is important in a warming planet because warm air can hold more moisture than cool air.  

The web site Science Daily, citing Bremen research this month, says that unless current trends change, coastal ecosystems in the Caspian will be “transformed beyond recognition”:

“The expected escalating effects of Caspian sea level decline are likely to lead to a wholesale reorganization of ecosystems, and threaten unique Caspian biota that have been evolving in the basin over millions of years.”

 The report also raises possible economic and geopolitical consequences:

“Coastal infrastructure including ports will become obsolete as waters recede. Shrinkage of the Caspian Sea might further affect future claims by the five littoral states on the coveted oil and gas reserves. Maritime zones of jurisdiction and exclusive fishing rights will shift. Growing international political tensions would be expected regarding the reallocation of fishing grounds or national water extraction and desalination plans to help meet the increasing demands of the agricultural, industrial, and household sectors in water-stressed regions.”

The disturbing effects of falling water levels aren’t theoretical. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that between 1997 and 2000 low water levels in the Great Lakes forced ships to reduce their cargo tonnage by 5 to 8 percent, thereby raising shipping costs.

Other studies have found other effects, such as increased cases of algae blooms. A good source is the North American Lake Management Society.

Meanwhile, NASA has produced a striking visual report on the shrinkage of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Just how significant lake shrinkage can be (sometimes also thanks to droughts and overuse) is dramatically shown by the image of the Mongolian lake that illustrates this blog posting.

In fact, the effects of climate change are numerous and sometimes surprising. For example, the increasingly intense downpours that we’re experiencing can cause lake waves to get larger, leading to erosion and flooding problems that are commonly associated with high water.

As noted above, climate instability affects oceans , too. One impressive source of information is Sofar Ocean, whose data-collecting skills can tell us a lot: check out this report.

Bottom line: climate instability is causing some waters to rise and some to fall, causing varieties of unplanned consequences along the way.

He looked out for land and water

With the end of the year approaching, my thoughts go to an environmental champion who passed away during 2020.

Huey D. Johnson, 87, died in July at his home in California as a result of a fall. His credentials were striking: presidency of the Nature Conservancy, founder of the Trust for Public Land, recipient of honors from the United Nations, and late in life the founder of the Resource Renewal Institute, an innovator in environmental thinking.

I connected with Johnson a couple of years ago while researching the book that’s behind this blog. The focus was his role in helping rescue Mono Lake -- at 45,000 acres the second-largest body of fresh water in California and the health of which was seriously impaired by diversions of water to Los Angeles 350 miles away.

In the late 1970s, while serving as secretary of resources under California Governor Jerry Brown,  Johnson received an unusual package in the mail. It was an artfully designed ceramic brick that was adorned with the hand-painted words “Save Mono Lake.” On another side was written: “One brick in every Los Angeles toilet tank could save Mono Lake.”

The brick was the creation of Deborah Small, a ceramics student at the University of California, Irvine. It was inspired by clay bricks that conservation-minded folks in Los Angeles had been putting in the backs of their toilets to save water.

The artist believed that making and mailing decorative bricks to about 20 officials in the state might draw attention to how diversions from streams leading into Mono Lake were harming the lake and the people and wildlife that depended on it by lowering its water levels and increasing its saltiness.

Johnson told me that he had been aware of the lake’s problems but he also had plenty of other things to attend to. He explained that he didn’t quite know what to make of the brick. The thing sat on his desk day after day until one day he gathered his staff around to talk about Mono Lake. They decided to arrange a series of hearings around the state.

The hearings called on Los Angeles officials to explain why they felt they had a right to disturb the ecosystem of a lake that was hundreds of miles away.

The record from those hearings ultimately played a crucial role in a state Supreme Court decision in 1983 that the water requirements of Los Angeles should be balanced against the impact of the water diversions on the environment and recreational activities in and around Mono Lake. Changes were made, and the lake has since recovered. Here’s a good short film.

The story of Mono Lake is ultimately about more than a single lake. It’s also about the range and depth of citizen action. Credit for the rescue owes initially to locals who cared, but also  environmental groups, donors, lawyers, the courts and state officials who got on board, even a young ceramics student who saw what was happening and tried to do something about it.

At the highest level, the story is about humans’ place in nature as expressed in the two following quotes.

The first is by Johnson himself, in testimony before a Congressional subcommittee on how better conservation in Los Angeles could reduce that city’s drain on Mono Lake: “The Department of Water and Power is captive to a cornucopian philosophy that there always be more.”

The second is from a remembrance of Johnson. that appears in a collection of salutes to him following his death: “Huey lived on the road to the future. He understood a fundamental reality: that the future of human society was critically dependent on the health of Earth’s natural systems.”

Good for air, bad for water

This year marks two anniversaries for a chemical that was designed to protect the air but that wound up fouling water.

 It’s the gasoline additive MTBE, or methyl tertiary-butyl ether. The story of this chemical compound is a story of environmental awareness, noble intentions, error, law, responsibility and money.

 The compound was first put into gasoline in the 1970s as leaded gas was being phased out.

The goal was to reduce smog-producing exhausts from cars and trucks. Air qualities improved, and refiners rushed to produce the stuff. Thirty years ago Chemical Week magazine reported that MTBE was the fastest-growing chemical in the world. That’s the first anniversary.

The second anniversary dates to a bare five years later -- 1995 -- when a chemist for Santa Monica, California noticed an unexpected item in a city water quality report: MTBE had leaked into the local water supply.

 Soon enough, the colorless turpentine-smelling compound was turning up in water reports across the land. Then it began appearing in court filings and eventual court judgments and settlements that directed oil companies, gas stations, pipeline companies and others to hand over billions of dollars to help states and cities clean up after the toxic contaminant and build new water supply projects.

 The payouts from these court judgments and settlements continue, long after MTBE was generally phased out and replaced by ethanol, a substance derived from corn. Just last summer, for example, the state of New Jersey announced $14.8 million in new settlements with MTBE polluters.

 The awards have gone mostly to build new water supply systems, but in some cases the money’s gone into projects unrelated to MTBE. In New Hampshire, for example, three percent of a $236 million court judgment against Exxon-Mobil goes to protecting land around water supplies.

 The whole MTBE experience has been contentious, certainly concerning culpability. Oil companies insisted that it wasn’t their fault because all they were doing was making a government-blessed motor fuel. The source of problem, they said with little success, was with the makers and users of underground storage tanks that leaked.

 An extensive study of the matter can be found in this 2008 publication by the Environmental Protection Agency.

 The Energy Policy Act of 2005 led to the use of other oxygenates in gasoline, principally ethanol, but not everybody’s happy with that, either.

 Ethanol comes from corn. Critics say that its use in gasoline can cause some air pollution, not to mention harm engines, reduce fuel efficiency and send up food prices. So, MTBE has had a ripple effect.

 The MTBE experience has also had an echo. In recent years the very state governments that sued the makers and providers of MTBE-treated gasoline are now going after the makers and users of another man-made substance that initially had wondrous use but wound up causing problems in water.

 It’s a class of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – PFAs or PFOAs for short. They’re behind such consumer conveniences as non-stick cookware. But the stuff has been found to be toxic and hazardous to human health. and it’s darn near impossible to get out of water once it’s gotten in. Hence the moniker “Forever Chemical.”

The lesson? We Americans understand the concept of trade-offs. We know that when you allow one thing there’s a chance of an adverse consequence. Sometimes we expect the consequence, sometimes not. Okay. But sometimes the consequence is harm to something precious and essential such as clean water. Proof is in the cases of MTBE and PFOA.

The future of geysers

Water’s fascinating in many ways -- its origin, its cycles around the planet, its power, its vulnerability, its utility, its aesthetic beauty.

 Then there are the entertaining sideshows that water puts on, geysers among them.

It’s estimated that there are 1,000 of these natural wonders around the globe, most of them in and near Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the best known of them being so regular in its performance  (roughly every 90 minutes) that it’s called Old Faithful.

 But Old Faithful’s history includes an experience that’s causing some people to worry about its future. The prospects at the extreme include the geyser going dry.

That happened before during a spell between 650 and 800 years ago. Last month the journal Geophysical Research Letters tied the hiatus to a prolonged period of warming and drought that reduced the supply of underground water that makes Old Faithful work.

The finding came from studying petrified wood from trees that survived at that early time only because they weren’t being drenched by Old Faithful’s average 200-degree water. Question: Why no hot water shooting 130 feet into the sky? Answer: Not enough rainwater water and snowmelt seeping into the ground to be heated by the Earth’s hot core and then sent back up in volcanic action.

That extraordinary Medieval warm period, which among other things also encouraged Viking exploration and settlement of Greenland, was brought on by a variety of developments that included reductions in volcanic activity, increases in solar radiation and changes in ocean currents.

Today, some climate-change deniers look to that period as proof that climate instability (a) comes and goes naturally and (b) without human cause. Few scientists agree to that second conclusion.

This blog is too limited in purpose to moderate the climate-change debate.  But this much can be said without doubt: geysers need water in order to work. If less water is going into the ground due to changes in rainfall patterns and extended droughts — as are occurring now — there’ll be less water available for geysers, not to mention water wells that billions of humans rely upon.

For that reason geysers make for more than a tourist attraction. They can also provide a lesson in science that has serious implications for the planet and the life that it supports.

© 2020 James A. Rousmaniere, Jr.

Fracking waters

The presidential contest that theoretically ends today has focused intensely on Pennsylvania, a swing state with a prize of 20 electoral votes.

The focus owes in part to a difference over a natural gas mining method that uses pressurized chemical-infused water to loosen up petroleum deposits deep in the ground.

Hydraulic fracturing – fracking for short – has helped bring about energy-independence to the nation and riches to Pennsylvania (the second-biggest gas-mining state after Texas) where fracking employment and wages are high and locally-paid royalties are meaningful.

But the extraction method has also raised wide-ranging environmental concerns. In 2016 the EPA declared that fracking posed a threat to water supplies. Among other things, spills of fracking wastewater have been found to contaminate creeks and groundwater in Pennsylvania.

So, there are differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on fracking. Does that mean that the election will decide whether fracking gets banned?

Beyond the rhetoric, the simple answer is “No.”  

The federal government can’t easily or legally prohibit a mining practice that occurs primarily on private land, regardless of environmental impact; further, Biden, apparently sensing how hard it would be to renegotiate existing leases on federal property, says that he’d bar fracking only on new federal leases. 

Bottom line: Fracking water, with all its suspected carcinogens and distillates, will continue to be shot into the ground in the cause of cheap energy that’s measurably better than coal.

I believe that the smart course is not to spend time and resources trying to ban fracking but rather work out ways to regulate it as the Obama administration began trying to do in 2015. For example: set rules on where fracking wastewater winds up, be more attentive to spills, limit fracking near wetlands, and so on.  In fact, such steps might actually boost economic activity, not constrain it, by stimulating the development of wastewater-cleansing technology.

I agree with those who see a well-regulated fracking industry as a bridge to a future not far from now when renewable energy is the standard. In the interim, nature generally – and water in particular – are at risk; the challenge is to reduce that risk as best we can.

For that reason, the outcome of the Nov. 3 election will be plenty important, putting aside the idea of banning this gas-extraction method.

Good can come of a bad aquatic weed

Lakes and ponds support a great many forms of life, including weeds that by definition are invaders. A prime example is Eurasian watermilfoil, a leafy plant can be found in the waters of most states and Canadian provinces.

In the eyes of some people, there’s nothing good about this non-native weed. It spoils a swim, it bothers boaters, it can displace native aquatic plants and it can devalue waterside properties.

Hence, considerable time and money gets spent to poison the stuff or rake it out of local waters.

But a reader of this blog recently pointed out that milfoil’s not entirely a negative. As in Nature and life generally, some bad things can also have good sides. For example, on dry land milfoil can make for a helpful soil amendment, an effective fertilizer or a good mulch.

A blogger in southwestern Wisconsin recently posted a reflection with the colorful headline “Milfoil Mulch: turning crap into crop.” Beyond providing a phosphorus and calcium boost, freshly harvested and still-moist milfoil mulch can help sustain some new plantings through a dry spell.

 Also, a distinct advantage over other mulches and fertilizers is the fact that milfoil doesn’t have seeds – it can’t spread on land as the components of some other composts can.

And, too, in lakes and ponds, milfoil can do good things. Its shady leaves can provide the right amount of light for native aquatic plants that thrive in semi-darkness.  Plus, small fish can find protection from predators in the leafy sub-surface forests.  Finally, milfoil can use up dissolved phosphorous that in other cases could ruin water bodies by feeding growths of algae.

None of this ought to be construed as a celebration of milfoil.  Call it, simply, an illustration that some things that are considered bad in fact have good sides, just as some things that are considered good also have bad sides.

An example of the latter is the use of herbicides to eradicate milfoil; the same chemicals that go after milfoil can also harm native aquatic plants. Likewise mechanical harvesting of milfoil; the machines get the weed out, but they also harvest small bugs that hang out on the weeds that might be part of the local food chain. Better, then, to focus on prevention — by preventing invasive aquatic weeds from getting into local waters in the first place, commonly by stationing volunteer watch-guards at boat-ramps.

Bottom line: In Nature, few things are black and white. That goes for the perceived good, and it also goes for the perceived bad.

How'd that get into the pond?

The face that accompanies this blog posting is that of a Northern Snakehead, a fish native to East Asia and that’s now swimming in some North American waters.

How might it have gotten here? First, some background:

Humans, being mobile creatures, tend to move fauna and flora around, not always intentionally and not always anticipating every consequence.

One example is Eurasian watermilfoil, an aquatic weed that’s native to northern Europe and Asia. It arrived in the United States sometime between the late 1800s and 1940 either in the ballasts of ships or as decorative foliage in aquariums.

At some point milfoil got into public waters, after which boaters began inadvertently moving it from lake to lake on their trailered craft.

The book that’s behind this blog says the following about milfoil: “The feathery plant forms mats of vegetation and tangled growths in lakes and ponds that can crowd out native plants, inconvenience swimmers, clog the propellers of motorboats, provide habitat for mosquitoes, reduce the value of lakeside properties, and turn off tourists.”

 Milfoil is now in the waters of most states and every Canadian province. Millions of dollars are spent each year trying to get rid of the weed and also to prevent it from getting into new waters.

But note, please: Not everything that humans move from here to there, inadvertently or by intent, is bad.

“Water Connections” also describes an American minnow named Gambusia affinis that, by having been moved around the planet, has done good things. The tiny fish dines on mosquito larvae, hence its nickname “mosquitofish.” The minnow was native to central and southern parts of the United States where its appetite for mosquitoes was discovered, and at one point in the 20th century it was the most widely distributed freshwater fish in the world. It’s credited with having helped eradicate malaria in South America, and today it’s being enlisted to go after mosquitos that carry the Zika virus.

Not everybody has good feelings about the mosquitofish, however. In Australia where the minnows were imported in 1925 to battle malaria, they’re now considered a nuisance for their tendencies to attack other fish, plus eat the tadpoles of various frogs, plus consume plankton that otherwise can help keep algae blooms in check. Rather coldly, Australia’s Biosecurity Act of 2014 lists Gambusia affinis as “a noxious fish.”

So, with that background, where in the order of things is the Northern Snakehead fish whose face is pictured with this blog?

Here’s what New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation has to say about the fish, which on this continent was first noticed swimming in a Maryland pond in 2002 and has since turned up in other Eastern waters:

“Northern snakeheads (Channa argus) are predatory fish native to Asia. They were most likely introduced to New York through aquarium dumpings and both accidental and intentional releases from fish markets. It is crucial that we stop the spread of this invasive predator to protect the health of our waters, wildlife and fishing industry.

“Northern snakeheads are long, thin fish with a single fin running the length of the back. They are generally brown with large, dark blotches along their sides and can grow up to three feet long. They have a somewhat flattened head and a large mouth with many teeth…

“Northern snakehead juveniles feed on a wide variety of microscopic organisms, insect larvae, and crustaceans on which native fish rely. As adults, they feed mostly on other fish species, but also eat crustaceans, reptiles, mammals and small birds. Snakeheads have the potential to reduce or even eliminate native fish populations and alter aquatic communities. Municipalities which rely on tourist dollars from recreational fishing may suffer losses should northern snakeheads continue to invade New York waters.”

As it is with the mosquitofish, however, not everyone is of the same mind about the Northern Snakehead. A few months ago an outdoors columnist for the Associated Press penned a defense of the fish that in one Pennsylvania newspaper was headlined “Fish Commission wrong again on ‘invasive’ species.”

So, there are differences over the fish, which is remarkable enough in ability and appearance to be nicknamed “Frankenfish” in some quarters. Among other things, its breathing mechanism is such that the fish can move short distances over dry land.

Concerns about the Northern Snakehead come at a time of heightened worries in the United States about invasives generally.

Last year a new law went into effect that calls for a federal strategic plan to deal with invasive fauna and flora. It’s the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. A draft of the plan is available here; the public comment period ends on Oct. 9.

o-o-o

 For more reading on the general subject, I strongly recommend “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants,” a landmark study by British zoologist Charles S. Elton in 1950 that for the first time catalogued the many ways that humans had shifted nature around for their own purposes. It’s a fascinating book for its accounts of human impact on the natural world.

How fire and water don’t get along

Water and fire have a complex relationship. On the one hand water can dominate fires by dousing flames.

 On the other hand, fire can damage streams, water infrastructure, water quality – a range of calamity that recent western-state wildfires bring to the fore.

A recent Yale 360 report titled “How Wildfires are Polluting Rivers and Threatening Water Supplies” offers a clear and worrisome picture.

Forest fires, for all the good they can occasionally do for forest health, can damage drinking water systems in a number of ways, including destroying above-ground plastic pipes that, once they burn, can send benzene and other chemicals into streams.  There’s the ash that can settle in drinking water reservoirs later to impair the operation of water treatment systems.

 There’s also the damage that can come after fires have burned down waterside vegetation and caused floods that eventually overwhelm dams and other components of water systems.

This is relevant information even outside of western states. About 80 percent of freshwater supplies in the United States get their start on forested land. So, the devastating forest fires in West today provide a sobering caution about the fire-related effects of climate change on the safety and health of drinking water systems in other parts of the country.

The subject has been studied. For informed but disturbing reading on the subject, see “Climate Change, Forests, Fire, Water and Fish,” an extensive USDA report that was published in 2012.

In another study, USGS experts in 2016 turned up elevated levels of lead, nickel and zinc in southern California streams that they linked to a fire seven years earlier in a nearby national forest.

What can humans do about any of this? Well, using different kinds of pipes that carry water and being more careful about fires are two good precautions, but stopping climate change would provide far greater protection for us, our water systems, aquatic wildlife and the planet.

What’s a stream to look like?

 For quite some time in many people’s eyes a perfect stream was a clean stream. That meant no tangled roots and woody debris in the water to obstruct the natural flow.

 To satisfy this expectation, we pulled trees out of rivers and brooks after they fell in or got washed in by storms. Commonly, the best photographs on our nature calendars showed no mess.

It wasn’t just aesthetic preference that led us to remove tree trunks and branches from waterways. Downed trees can pose navigation hazards, and safety hazards, too. Strong currents can pin swimmers and kayakers against or beneath fallen trees, and also send heavy wood crashing into bridges.

There’s been rethinking about woody debris in streams thanks to advances in river science, however.

Here’s a good explanation by Emily Howe, a writer in Cool Green Science, the conservation science blog of The Nature Conservancy:

 “In floodplain valleys and estuarine deltas, large log jams are island builders and river dividers. Log jams at the head of gravel bars eventually become large, forested islands.

“These islands force the river to meander across floodplain valleys, cutting through riparian forest in a braid of channels that reinforces the cycle of erosion, treefall, and island formation. The cycle ensures a complex mosaic of gravel bars, islands, floodplains, swift river chutes, quiet pools, and backwater streams — a kaleidoscope of habitats that offer salmon refuge from predators, feeding and spawning grounds, and safe routes to the sea.

“The entire process hinges on constant movement and constant change, creating an ecological portfolio that rivals the best the stock market has to offer.”

Here’s another comment that focuses on the biological benefits that come of logs in water, this one from Fishbio, a California-based fisheries and environmental consulting company:

“Logs and logjams benefit fish by interrupting the downstream flow of water. Nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen, which are normally quickly flushed downstream, get trapped in the pool areas upstream of logjams, stimulating the growth of algae and plants at the base of the food web.

“This in turn produces more macroinvertebrates that serve as fish prey. In and around logs and jams, fish benefit from pockets of slower moving water that allow them to conserve energy while watching for drifting prey in the main current. Logs also provide overhead cover for adults and juveniles from hungry birds, and the deep pools that form behind large wood can serve as refuge spots during harsh summers.

“Logjams force water to flow under and over them, which increases the amount of water that seeps into the ground or spills out onto floodplains. Logs themselves can also foster the sprouting of young trees, supporting the next generation of riparian forest.”

 These discoveries have led to new practices around streams, brooks and rivers in which we’re not merely leaving downed trees in the water but actively putting in large wood.

In fact, that’s the term of art for the tree trunks with tangled root structures that are increasingly being put into waterways: “Large Wood.”  A good history of the term and practice can be found in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association under the title “Management of large wood in streams: An overview and proposed framework for hazard evaluation.”

The article, written in 2016, describes how engineers are working to accommodate the change of thinking by doing such things as designing bridges with wider spans so as to allow floating logs to pass beneath them without getting stuck, and also, in the opposite case, anchoring tree trunks in streams to keep them from being swept downstream.

Such steps leave streams and rivers looking different; by traditional standards, they leave them looking a mess. In many respects, such is Nature. In many respects, such is life.

Surprise: land and water protected

It’s been a year of real surprises, some good, some bad. Here’s a good one.

A Congress that seemingly couldn’t get anything done voted overwhelmingly to fully fund the government’s single biggest land acquisition program -- the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

 And several weeks ago President Trump, who only months earlier had vowed to slash that program’s funding by 97 percent, signed the bill.

This is remarkable for several reasons, not least the fact that the Land and Water Conservation Fund – which draws none of its money from taxes and most of its money from offshore oil and gas lease income – has been funded at its $900 million limit only twice before in its 55-year history. (That sum is roughly double current spending.)

 What’s more, the action assures permanent funding that can be used to create, protect and maintain local parks, national parks, wetlands, wildlife refuges, fishing access and sources of drinking water.

It’s a conservation triumph, frankly. Historic. More on the how and why this year in a minute.

But first, a few words about an important aspect of the Land and Water Conservation Fund: the protection of water that comes about through the protection of land.

Here’s a case study that explains the relationship in economic terms. The report comes from the Land and Water Conservation Coalition, an association of 1,000 nature groups, land owners, small businesses, recreation advocates and so on that lobbied hard for full and permanent funding of the LWCF.

The subject is the Sterling Forest not far from New York City near the New York-New Jersey line.

“The protection of the 15,000-acre Sterling Forest in New York utilized $17.5 million from LWCF, matched by roughly twice that amount from state and private sources, to ensure clean drinking water for over two million residents of northern New Jersey.

“After the completion of the project, a study found that forest protection in the Highlands region (PA, NY, NJ, and CT) will save $50 billion in future water treatment costs. At the time of the acquisition, local municipalities in New Jersey were facing needed construction of a $160 million water treatment plant; however, the clean water protected by Sterling Forest made this unnecessary. 

“A New York City report that compared water purification on forest lands versus treatment plants concluded that every $1.5 billion invested in land conservation in the Catskills provided the same water quality as $8 billion spent on treatment plants.”

 Conservation has other benefits, of course. For example, wetlands have been found to store carbon quite well by drawing in greenhouse gases – hence a tool with which to combat climate change.

Then there’s all the recreation activity that open space and protected waters provide – a fact that’s explicit in the name of legislation that assured full funding for the LWCF: The Great American Outdoors Act.

The name helps explain why the success of this bill now after years of fruitless lobbying for full funding. In this year of pandemic, open and unconfined spaces have special appeal as evidenced in the sales of campaign equipment – they’re way up this year.  

Another supporting argument is that the restoration and repair of trails and other outdoor facilities resulting from the legislation could generate more than 100,000 jobs, which is relevant information at a time of high unemployment.

Then there’s election year politics. Why would a president who’s removed protections from millions of acres of federal lands and has repeatedly tried to slash funding for land and water conservation agree to sign this bill?

 Possible Answer #1:  The landmark Great American Outdoors Act was passed with veto-proof majorities in the House (310-107) and the Senate (73-25).

Possible Answer #2:  Two key sponsors of the bill were incumbent Republican senators in tourism-reliant Colorado and Montana who today find themselves facing unexpectedly strong competition in November. Both Senators Steve Daines (Montana) and Corey Gardner (Colorado) spoke at the White House signing ceremony.

A lesson from all this is that surprises can happen, preferably of the good sort.

Exhibit: The guarantee of full and permanent funding of land and water protections through the Great American Outdoors Act.

Thirsty hamburgers

I eat meat, but occasionally I act on vegetarian impulses. A recent report about water and agriculture encourages more such action.

 The report, appearing in Nature, says that cultivation of alfalfa, grass-hay and other cattle feed accounts for 23 percent of all water consumption.

 If that abstraction doesn’t jar you, try this: by one calculation it takes 450 gallons of water to produce a single quarter-pounder. For reference, the average American drinks less than one gallon of water per day.

 It’s long been understood that agriculture is the biggest overall consumer of fresh water. That’s meaningless for most people so long as rivers run full and rains fall. But when droughts occur and water gets rationed, we pay attention – or ought to pay attention -- to the fact that farms are thirsty places. All sorts of farms.  Consider: it takes five gallons of fresh water to produce a single cultivated walnut.

Disturbingly, the result of this profound thirst – no matter what kind of consumable protein comes of it – is that farmers in need of water have the ability to help turn rivers dry; they also go into the ground and pump it out, thereby accessing the savings banks that aquifers represent.

 There are better ways. Inventors have come up with more efficient irrigation technologies. Agriculturalists have come up with less wasteful ways of growing -- no-till farming, for example. Scientists have come up with plant-based beef.

 There’s more, including a proposal to pay farmers to let their lands occasionally lie fallow from time to time. and therefore reduce their water requirements.

Still, water shortages are likely to continue, thanks not only to farmers but to others who deserve some of the blame for rivers going dry: the managers of golf courses, for example, and the proud keepers of green residential lawns.

In short, many of us have a hand in water shortages, and many of us can change our ways to help make a difference. That can include occasionally passing on a big fat juicy hamburger.

Water and planets

If all goes according to plan, on July 30th an Atlas V rocket will lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida carrying a rock-collecting rover named Perseverance, destination Mars.

 The intended landing spot next February is Jezero Crater, a place north of the equator that – acutely relevant to this blog -- once held a lake and a river delta.

Today’s posting is about water in the universe – starting with Mars and then touching on other planets including Earth where recent research has turned up fascinating new information.

Scientists believe that billions of years ago Mars was a wet world that could have supported life. The idea behind the rover’s rock-collecting mission is that mineralized water, once analyzed, might offer clues about the past.

The surface of Mars today is mostly desert, but the planet still has water, albeit mostly of the frozen sort; recently a team of  scientists detected a Texas-size chunk of subsurface ice between the planet’s equator and north pole.

Yet a couple of years ago, astronomers reported finding a large liquid lake beneath the red planet’s surface that’s similar to underground pockets of water that have been found near Earth’s poles.

As to why there’s no longer surface water on Mars, that’s not known, but researchers this year reported finding that Martian water escapes the planet uncommonly fast in the form of vapor. The causes include the planet’s thin atmosphere and weak gravity, which partly explains why vapor in the Martian sky doesn’t cycle back to the planet in the form of rain as happens on Earth.

There are many other questions about Mars that humans would like to answer.  Hence a surge of exploration. Within the last several weeks two other Mars missions got underway – one by the United Arab Emirates and the other by China. A fourth mission organized by European and Russian space agencies was to have started this summer but was delayed for two years due to complications surrounding Covid-19.

Meanwhile, astronomers are enthusiastically talking about a relatively new find of water vapor on an Earth-size planet outside our solar system. The discovery – on a planet that’s prosaically named K2-18b – was enabled through data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers’ excitement stems from the prospect that evidence of water can mean evidence of life, no matter if it’s 111 light years away.

Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s new science about water on Earth, specifically how it got here.

 For a long time it was believed that it was asteroids that delivered water to our planet by colliding with it. Asteroids are basically rock, but they contain water, too. Frankly, I have trouble picturing it – zillions of asteroids striking our planet in its earliest years, enough to fill our oceans with water – but I’m no scientist.

 Lately, however, different thinking is getting attention, specifically that our water was a product of the massive gaseous explosions that created our solar system. Here’s  Astronomy Magazine’s report on the idea in 2019.

Bottom line: There’s much to water on our planet and other planets that we are only now discovering. It takes a certain aptitude and knowledge to grasp the science behind the findings, but lay readers aren’t necessarily left in the dark. Highly recommended: NASA’s colorful and informative site that’s named “Ocean Worlds.”

Honoring Indian water rights

The recent Supreme Court decision that nearly half of Oklahoma is an Indian reservation was about where criminal cases should be prosecuted. The court ruled that crimes by native Americans on tribal lands are matters for federal or tribal jurisdiction, not state courts.

Notable as that ruling was for recognizing Indian sovereignty on reservations, criminal law isn’t the only field where laws regarding tribal lands are getting fresh definition.

Another field is water rights.

Since the late 1970s the federal government has participated in 36 settlements involving Indian tribes about who controls the water that’s on reservation land.

For example, a settlement in Oklahoma in 2016 set rules about how much water on reservations can be used by outside parties in non-tribal places such as Oklahoma City, the state capital, which draws on reservoirs on Indian land. The Congressional Research Service conducted a study of such settlements in 2019.

 Conflicts over who gets the control of water are nothing new. History books and court records are full of stories about mill operators or farmers who struggled with people upstream who limited the flow of rivers to them – and, conversely, stories about people in one place who saw water being drained willy-nilly from their lands for the benefit of people elsewhere.

Struggles over water and water rights can be more intense in places where water is short, which would include many lands west of the Mississippi where rainfall is half or less than half what it is in the East. Such would be many reservation lands.

Many native Americans know about such rainfall disparities first-hand. Ancestors of key groups in Oklahoma were forcibly moved there from the southeastern states beginning in the 1830s in what was known as the Indian Removal.

The basic rights of these peoples were generally unacknowledged until 1908, one year after Oklahoma gained statehood, when the Supreme Court ruled that reservation populations have a basic right to their own water.

Seventy years after that ruling, the federal government began helping resolve conflicts over water that had come up in the interim among reservations, states and non-Indian water users.

The negotiating brought up some interesting concepts, one being the idea of “paper water.” The term describes situations where reservations have a legal right to water but lack the financial resources to access it through dams, pipes and other infrastructure. One answer: federal money. By one estimate the government has put $7 billion to the purpose.

None of this means that tensions over water are forever gone. Droughts can lead to hardships. The installation of dams and pipes can lead to environmental conflicts over, say, wildlife habitats and water quality. The cost of water can vary depending on demand.

But the settlements over who gets to use water, and how much, at the very least validate tribal rights to water nearly two centuries after native Americans were uprooted and removed to where they are today.

Covid water utility economics

It’s generally understood that the coronavirus can’t get into the water that we drink. But it can get into the finances of the utilities that get the water to us.

 ITEM: The paying customers for more than half of all piped water -- colleges, offices, restaurants and factories –– have cut back or shut down, thereby reducing water consumption and associated water revenues.

ITEM: Laid-off residential consumers across the country have gone delinquent on their water bills, magnifying the revenue problem.

ITEM: The homebuilding industry has softened, meaning few new connection fees from new homes.

ITEM: Capital spending and badly-needed repairs to leaking pipes have been deferred.

In recent months trade groups for the nation’s thousands of water utilities have been studying the impact of the pandemic on their operations.

 Their findings illustrate that the supply of safe drinking water has many parts, and that a disruption such as a pandemic can have ripple effects. For example: tens of thousands of private sector construction workers don’t get hired when repairs to pipes and capital spending get deferred.

 The American Water Works Association and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, among others, have turned up some pandemic impacts that are common to all businesses: absenteeism, for example, and the difficulty (and costs) of getting ahold of personal protective equipment.

But some other impacts are unique to water operations themselves – for example, disruptions to the supply of purifying chemicals that are essential to providing safe water. And distraction from another public health crisis that’s associated with the millions of lead water pipes in the United States that need replacement.

 The overall economic effect on an industry that’s overwhelmingly government-run and typically not a money-maker in the first place is significant: nearly $14 billion nationally from lost revenues and added costs.

The situation has led to calls for coronavirus relief funding from Congress. Water utilities were left out of the first financial assistance bills that sent trillions of dollars around the country, and there are real questions whether Washington is open to adding new money for utilities. Here’s a report on the subject from Circle of Blue, an authoritative blog.

Meanwhile, financial pressures worsen. Drinking water is an essential commodity even when there isn’t a public health crisis going on.

Hence, providers of drinking water are delivering water to delinquent customers (the average residential bill is $70 per month), they’re restoring service to other customers who were previously shut off for non-payment and they’ve put off planned rate increases. Here’s a snapshot from National Governors Association.

The picture is one of a financial crisis rendered more dire by the fact that this blog posting so far has been about only one part of the water sector; there’s another segment – wastewater and sewage treatment – that’s also experiencing financial strain.

With the coronavirus situation still without promise of improving, don’t expect a brighter picture for water utilities anytime soon. And be prepared to pay for all this down the line. A handful of states have already asked utilities to keep track of spending during these times to support future applications for surcharges to recover those costs.

Covid-19 crimps stream water testing

Over the decades federal and state agencies have set standards for water quality in lakes, streams and rivers, and they rely on routine water testing to stay on top of things.

 Commonly these government agencies, along with non-profit lake associations and watershed groups, send out teams of two or three people to test water quality and then send samples to laboratories for further analysis.

Depending on location, sample-collectors can face moderate hazards – up around where I live in New Hampshire they include poison ivy and ticks. Those threats are manageable.

But what happens when the hazard is a dread disease for which there is no cure?

In some states this spring and summer, water quality monitoring in lakes and streams by government staff has been suspended or curtailed. And in other situations non-profit watershed groups have either stopped sending out volunteers or otherwise insisted that the teams that go out are comprised of only people who live together.

Adjusting to the coronavirus has been a job. Here’s an excerpt from a report by New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services, which ordinarily oversees a robust monitoring program in lakes and streams:

 “(Protecting against Covid-19) meant reconfiguring the lab where thousands of samples are processed each summer, obtaining sanitizing agents, masks, and putting in place limitations on shared vehicle use…Lake and river sampling by staff was reduced by one-third overall. Fecal bacteria monitoring for approximately 80 freshwater beaches was suspended pending further consideration, and aquatic plant services were cut in half…

 “Last, because of the majority disruption to our field operations and logistic challenges, we have reduced our intern training program from 15 to 4 individuals for summer 2020.”

Similar adjustments can be found in the non-profit sector. Kathryn Nelson, the head of the Nashua River Water Association in Massachusetts, told me:

“Monitors are now required to be cohabitating pairs and we have drop off of samples at our parking lot to a cooler with social distancing. The wastewater treatment plants that we used for labspace are not open to the public so a staff person has set us the testing equipment at her house. We are fortunate to have our own testing equipment and not rely on a lab. We are only testing for E.coli bacteria for this year.”

For most people the immediate consequence of this reduced monitoring is, well, manageable. Mostly what people worry about is E.coli in the water. That’s something that regular lake or river monitoring can pick up. But most people know – or ought to know – that fecal bacteria in swimming places is generally a temporary thing, just three days of contamination following hard rains. So, avoid swimming for several days.

But regular water quality testing can also pick up longer-term threats. For example, George May, the president of the Souhegan Watershed Association (a New Hampshire group that incidentally has suspended volunteer water-testing this year) told me of a time half-a-dozen years ago when water tests picked up high E.coli count that couldn’t be attributed to hard rains. He went looking upstream and discovered a Port-a-Potty that had fallen into the river.

There are a couple of lessons to be drawn from all this, the first being that water quality testing in the United States is widely practiced, and another being that the people who oversee the testing are resourceful and committed to the task.

An equally important lesson is that volunteers play a key role in water quality testing. As many as 100,000 trained volunteers around the country monitor streams and lakes looking for such things as temperature, dissolved oxygen, bacteria, lead, road salt contamination, invasive vegetation and so on.

It’s a citizen science thing whose origins go way back to the private sector in the 1920 when the Izaak Walton League in Chicago began the practice and later refined it into a celebrated program that’s called Save Our Streams.

Want to get involved? Easy. Just Google “volunteer stream water quality testing (your state)”and see what comes up. Properly organized and supervised, it can be safe, and it can have a positive impact, particularly at a time when government-conducted testing is being temporarily scaled back.

The dangers of dams

You might have overlooked National Dam Safety Awareness Day (that was May 31st), so consider this: As long as there have been dams there have been dam failures – recently two in Michigan that sent 10,000 people packing, and, memorably, the Johnstown flood of 1889 when more than 2,200 Pennsylvanians died in the worst dam collapse in American history.

 There are tens of thousands of dams in the United States that could do a significant number were they to fail. Confirming the possibility, most state governments run some form of dam safety program, and Stanford University maintains a running report on dam failures.

Confirming the need for such actions, last year, the Associated Press came out with an extensive report in which it said that at least 1,680 dams in the country were at risk.

 There are several explanations for this situation, one being that not all dams – whether built for flood control, hydropower, irrigation, water supply, recreation or industrial waste storage – are adequately maintained. Another reason of recent vintage: increasingly drenching rainstorms that are attributed to climate instability.

 Government apparently acknowledges the resulting risks, but not always with much follow-through. The New York Times recently reported that one federal dam rehabilitation program that aimed to allocate $445 million for a decade starting in 2017 didn’t receive a dime for the first two years; Congress chipped in  a comparative pittance of $10 million last year.

Clearly that’s not responsible. Nor is it responsible for dam owners – whether public or private – to keep their emergency plans gathering dust on the shelf, never updated, nor to have any emergency plans at all.

 There’s a lot on the nation’s shoulders at the moment: the pandemic, demonstrations against police brutality, the economy, elections. It’s hard to imagine having enough time and energy and resources to improve the performance on dam safety. Well, tough.  There’s also increasingly intense rain storms. Disasters are waiting to happen, and no one can say we haven’t been warned.

The lyrical side

 Since its launch more than a year ago, this blog has explored contamination, purification, technology, flood control, water power, the economics of ice, irrigation and other human connections to fresh water.

Rarely addressed in all this expression have been the lyrical or spiritual dimensions of water in the human experience.

But of course water can and does stir the soul. A particular image of it can stop you in your tracks and lift the heart – one example being the accompanying photo of Amen Lake in northeast central Minnesota that was taken by one of my brothers, Ned Rousmaniere.  

His photo is included in a collection of water images that’s stored elsewhere on this site.

Then there’s written expression, one example of which appears below.

It’s “Water” – a short piece of free verse by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the middle of the 19th century.

The poem is about material things, to be sure, not least the physical sensation of water and the potential of water to do harm. It’s also about the character of water and its relationship to humans. Ultimately, it’s about Nature.

The poem, like the photo of the lake, can cause one to stop and contemplate water unhurriedly, and be thankful for the experience.

Water

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Competing for water prizes

 Spend any time studying human connections to water, and soon enough you come upon technology. Consider the breakthroughs in hydro designs over the years, consider the evolving science of purification and treatment of drinking water, consider the engineering of canals and the methods of storm runoff control in urban settings, and so on.

 You can see technology most vividly on display in places where engineers and scientists get together to talk about new ideas. One such place is water technology competitions that have increased in number in recent years.

 Just last month, to pick a recent example, the MIT Water Club put on its latest Water Innovation Prize competition in which nine start-ups described their water-focused business plans to a panel of judges.

 The competition has been held annually since 2015, and it’s helped turn some new ideas into commercial successes – one being Boston-based Watchtower Robotics, a second-place winner in 2017 that today makes small robotic devices that scout out leaks from the insides of the pipes of municipal water systems, the aim being to cut down the zillions of gallons of water that disappear each year through broken pipes in cities across the country.

In this year’s competition – which due to pandemic concerns was conducted via Zoom -- the $25,000 top prize went to a team from the UK that pitched a way to inject chlorine into small-scale water systems in economically undeveloped countries. The team uses 3-D printers to create low-cost devices that have no moving parts and that don’t need external power.

The idea was the brainchild of Francesca O’Hanlon, a British degree-holder in sustainable development who, volunteering for Engineers Without Borders in Mexico City in 2013, noticed mistakes in how rainwater was being purified for public consumption. She fashioned a rudimentary chlorine injector out of nuts and bolts that could control the application of the disinfectant.

 Later, while volunteering for Doctors Without Borders in Sub-Saharan Africa, she noticed similar problems; she also saw that the costs of available tools that could  deliver chlorine were well beyond what locals could afford.

 That led to Blue Tap, today a non-profit that provides the injectors at the cost of $50 and that also trains local people to install and maintain the devices, initially in Uganda. “The expertise and technology stays in the community,” said O’Hanlon.

 Second place and $12,500 in the MIT water innovation competition went to Floe, LLC of Boston for a new way to prevent ice dams from forming on roofs.

Many people in northern regions know first-hand what happens when melted snow and ice gets caught behind such dams – it winds up getting under shingles and dripping into building interiors.

Instead of using electric wires to melt ice dams – a conventional method that carries costs and that poses fire hazards  – Floe combines a biodegradable de-icing fluid with drip-irrigation technology from the farm sector to create channels in ice dams that allow water to run off roofs.

The $7,500 third prize went to Harmony Water for a method to reduce and manage  the brine byproduct of desalinization.

As noted at the top of this posting, the water innovation competition at MIT isn’t alone in inviting fresh thinking about water technology.

 The federal Department of Energy recently launched a Waves to Water Prize that will award  $200,000 in prizes for new ways to power desalinization plants through the use of ocean waves.

Another competition: The Urban Water Challenge by Imagine H20, a non-profit facilitator of venture capital that for the last three years has run an international competition for solutions to urban water problems. Awards are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Last year’s winners included the aforementioned Watchtower Robotics, and also the maker of a system of decentralized wastewater treatment systems for colleges and schools in Mumbai, India, and also a firm that came up with a way to install and replace waterpipes using trenchless technology in Colombia.

And early this year the US Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation announced a Fish Protection Prize with $700,000 in awards. The competition aims to generate new ideas about how to avoid situations in which fish swim into pipes and dam intakes and become separated from their natural habitats, thereby threatening native fish populations and hurting recovery efforts for threatened and endangered fish species.

 Water technology competitions aren’t just for adults.

 The Stockholm Junior Water Prize, overseen by the Virginia-based Water Environment Federation, begins with high school competitions in 35 countries and ends with a fancy ceremony in Stockholm; last year’s overall winner was an 18 year-old from Australia who developed a way to measure ultra-violet light exposures that are needed in solar disinfection of drinking water.

 A different high schooler competition called Clean Tech is supported by Spellman, a huge New York-based electrical technology firm.

 Last year’s winners included a New Jersey student who developed an app that helps users track rain cycles – a benefit for rainwater harvesting.  Another prize winner was a team from Zimbabwe that built a remotely-controlled aquaponics system that uses fish waste to fertilize plant life.

These competitions generally celebrate the importance of innovative thinking, and the range of prizes and prize-winning entries underscores the many ways human society is connected to water.

 One other thing: The competitions remind us that science and engineering are in constant evolution, sometimes replacing earlier concepts and technologies that, well, weren’t all that wonderful when you think about it.

For example, we no longer turn to engineers to straighten rivers for our own convenience. We no longer use gasoline additives that ultimately contaminate local wells. We no longer run factories whose air emissions can kill downwind waters.

We are, in fact, capable of change. Not merely capable of it -- we encourage it by inviting innovative thinkers to come up with fresh ideas in such settings as science and engineering competitions.