Image courtesy of USDA @ flickr.

Last week, CLF filed a lawsuit against the EPA and Curtis Spalding, EPA Regional Administrator, Region 1. (You can find a copy of the suit here, and copy of the press release here.) I want to take a moment to explain why this lawsuit is important.

The alewife is a critical “keystone” species in marine and fresh waters – it is an important source of food for many fish and marine mammals and for numerous birds.  The alewife is a native fish to many Maine rivers and is anadromous, meaning it starts its life in freshwater ponds and lakes, migrates down river to the ocean where it spends most of its life and then returns to its native waters to spawn.

As on many Maine rivers, alewives on the St. Croix River were all but extirpated due to pollution and the damming of the river. However, in the early 1980’s, the population of alewives in the St. Croix River was restored, reaching more than 2.5 million a year due to cleaner water and effective fish passage at the dams on the river.  But in 1995 the Maine legislature passed a bill specifically designed to block alewife passage at the Woodland Dam and Grand Falls Dam on the St. Croix River, based on what turned out to be unsubstantiated claims that alewives were causing a decline in the non-native smallmouth bass population in the St. Croix watershed. In 2008, even after those claims were found to be without merit, the Maine legislature amended the law to allow alewives passage only at Woodland Dam, restoring only 2% of the natural habitat previously available to alewives – effectively preventing them from accessing 98% of their natural habitat in the St Croix above the Grand Falls Dam.

As a result of this change, as I said in my letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, “the Maine Legislature intentionally and effectively changed the water quality standards for that section of the St. Croix [from Class A] to Class B.” As we allege in our suit, this action obligated the EPA to review and reject that change pursuant to its non-discretionary duties under the Clean Water Act (or CWA).

Under the Clean Water Act, any change to an existing water quality standard must be consistent with the state’s anti-degradation policy and must be submitted to the EPA for review. The de facto change to the water quality standards of the St. Croix was not submitted to the EPA for review, nor did EPA review the change for approval or disapproval, as required.

As a result, Maine was allowed to circumvent its responsibilities, and the EPA failed to fulfill its legal obligations.

As I said in the press release, “The law is fundamentally at odds with the legal requirement that the St. Croix River provide natural habitat unaffected by human activity for these fish and EPA has a continuing obligation to review and reject this change in that requirement.”

I was joined in my statement by Bill Townsend, a longstanding member of CLF and one of the deans of Maine’s environmental community, who noted that when he served as President of Maine Rivers, it obtained the funding and data to support studies that alewives are not detrimental to small-mouth bass populations, the original basis for the law. “The failure of the Maine Legislature to change the law in the face of that evidence and of the EPA to take every possible step to address that wrong is unacceptable.”

For more, find copies of my letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson here, CLF’s filing here, and our press release here.

Stay tuned for more!

When people think of Sugarbush Resort, they envision scenes like the one pictured below: high mountain peaks blanketed with pristine snow beckoning skiers to swoosh down the slopes.  Of course when springtime comes that snow melts, feeding small streams that flow first into the iconic Mad River and eventually to Lake Champlain.  These high mountain streams are incredibly important yet sensitive and vulnerable links in the clean water chain.

A skier rests on a sunny day at Sugarbush. Photo by pinneyshaun @ Flickr Creative Commons

Rice Brook is one of the streams that flows through the heart of the resort area.  Over the years, runoff polluted with sediment from gravel roads, driveways, and parking lots degraded water quality and habitat conditions in the stream. By 1996, the Brook no longer supported a healthy community of aquatic wildlife, leading state officials and EPA to “list” the Brook as “impaired.”

Sadly, it was a story unfolding around build-out at other ski areas across the state and in areas around lower elevation streams where forest and farmland was being converted into stripmalls and other pavement-heavy uses.  By the early-2000′s, sixteen other Vermont streams were also officially listed as impaired due to runoff pollution, a.k.a. “stormwater,” with many more placed at risk of impairment.

During this time, Conservation Law Foundation and other partners began an 0ngoing advocacy campaign pressuring regulators to enforce requirements in clean water laws designed to ensure that developers of properties that contributed polluted runoff to streams were doing their part for cleanup.

Sugarbush got ahead of the curve in accepting responsibility and committing the resources necessary to do its part for clean water moving forward.  Sugarbush partnered with the environmental consulting firm of Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. (VHB) to tackle the problem.

Through implementation of a time-bound, state-approved “Water Quality Remediation Plan,” the Sugarbush team restored clean water and healthy aquatic communities to Rice Brook, creating a template for action that can be copied by others responsible for restoring degraded streams around the state and the region. Sugarbush and VHB:

• Identified the specific sources of the problem
• Established cleanup targets by studying conditions in healthy streams similar to Rice Brook
• Designed and implemented “best management practices” and structures to restore the landscape’s natural flood storage and pollutant-removal capacity
• Educated resort employees and contractors about streambank restoration, erosion prevention, and other water quality practices
• Monitored water quality and aquatic organisms to track progress
• Committed resources to ongoing operation and maintenance of runoff control and treatment structures

In recognition of the results, EPA approved the removal of Rice Brook from the list of impaired waters and Governor Peter Shumlin bestowed Sugarbush and VHB with a 2012 Environmental Excellence Award.

Too often, critics complain that it is either too expensive or too difficult to restore clean water to degraded rivers and streams. In their application for the Environmental Excellence Award, Sugarbush and VHB answered those critics, pointing out the multiple economic benefits to the tourist-based economy from their successful cleanup effort, including:

• water supply protection
• access to recreation such as swimming and fishing
• aesthetic enjoyment of clean waters by resort guests and others
• ecological sustainability
• greater certainty in future permitting processes based on proven approaches to mitigate development runoff impacts

Congratulations to Sugarbush and VHB for showing Vermont how sweet clean water success can be.

Until the last week or so, it’s been a dry spring here in Maine and so most of us have welcomed the recent spate of rain. But as I rode past the Back Cove and the East End Wastewater treatment plant in Portland this morning, it was hard not to think about the downside of all this rain–the runoff from streets, rooftops and other hard surfaces that overwhelms our sewer system and treatment facilities and washes untreated right into Back Cove and Casco Bay, carrying pollutants like oil, metals, waste and other accumulated debris along with it. It’s no surprise that these concerns might occur to me, given CLF’s long-standing involvement in tackling this issue, but it doesn’t take an advocate to see the need for action. For Chris Aceto, CLF’s landlord here at 47 Portland Street in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood, a recent article by Seth Koenig of the Bangor Daily News brought back some not so great memories of a dirtier Casco Bay and was a reminder that we still have a lot of work to do:

“I am 46. My mother used to take me to the East End Beach when I was 6 which would have been 1972. I can remember it so clearly because although I was 6, I thought, “This is not a beach!!” You could SEE the raw sewage like some kind of movie footage!  I think she wanted me to see the “beach” she went to when she was a little girl. My brother was the first lifeguard hired when that beach was opened up for swimming. It may have been 1979 or so. My cousins used to have a place at Peaks Island and NO ONE wanted to go there because the Ferry used to pull in to the docks on Commercial Street and you could not “see” water – it was brown, gross, stinky filth floating on top of the water.

Once the city showed some initiative to clean the water and build its first treatment plant, economically, Portland started to turn around. I am sure I am preaching here to the choir, but that article just brought back a ton of memories.” — Chris Aceto

Thanks to Chris for recounting that story that reminds us all about how important our continued vigilance is on finding short-term and long-term solutions to the problem of polluted runoff fouling our waterways, not just here in Portland, but around Maine and the country.

The City of Portland has made good progress in the past few years, but there remains a good deal of work to do.  CLF will continue to push for a solution that will allow us to stop sending untreated pollution and sewage to Casco Bay.

I just paddled in from Waltham and boy are my arms tired…Seriously, I know I am not alone among contestants in the 30th Annual Charles River Watershed Association Run of the Charles canoe, kayak, and paddleboard race who downed several ibuprofen after Sunday’s vigorous paddle.  I think I can speak for the entire ten-person CLF team when I say the pain was worth it.  While we didn’t win the race in the literal sense, everyone on the CLF team did feel like winners knowing that we work for an organization who’s longstanding commitment to clean water in the Charles helps make events like the Run of the Charles possible.

My fellow anchorman, Lake Champlain Lakekeeper Louis Porter, kept me digging for dear life as we passed up several boats in the home stretch. Still, I could not help stealing a second here and there to admire the stunning riverscape that unfolded before our bow.  Redwinged blackbirds, swallows, mockingbirds, kingfishers, sparrows of all sorts, and geese floated with and flew over us.  Anglers lined parts of the shore, wetting lines in hopes of a strike.  In some places industrial revolution-era mill buildings that once used the power of the river to make machines run still encroach.  But in other places, you could barely make out signs of civilization through the thicket of shrubs and trees heavy with bright green early season buds.

There was quite a party underway at the finish line.  Folks of all ages, from as far away as Vermont, Maine, New York, and New Jersey had come to the water’s edge to celebrate our relationship with the river.  Numerous food vendors were doing a brisk business, as were the folks who rented out canoes and kayaks to those of us in the race who don’t have boats of our own.

After I caught my breath, I began to reflect on the fact that all the fun and commercial activity that the race had generated wouldn’t be possible without a clean river that is safe for swimming, boating, and fishing.

CLF and our partners like Charles River Watershed Association, whose sponsorship of the race is so important to keeping folks connected to the river, have been working for decades to insure that the river continues to be an attraction to the people of our region.  Thanks in large part to various advocacy campaigns, volunteer cleanups, and court cases to enforce the Clean Water Act over the years, EPA now gives the Charles River a “B” grade on its annual report card of water health.  That means the river was safe for boating 82% of the time last year and for swimming 54% of the time.  While that marks a vast improvement of the “D” grade the river received in 1995, more work remains to be done.  Fun events like the Run of the Charles–and the economic activity it generated in the communities the river flows through–are a great reminder of why CLF is committed to clean water work in the Charles and in countless other waters from the coasts to the mountains. 

The Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper, along with the Coastal Conservation Association of NH, Great Bay Trout Unlimited and the NH Coastal Protection Partnership, coauthored the following editorial to The Portsmouth Herald.

A copy of this OpEd was originally published in The Portsmouth Herald. You can find a copy of it online here.

April 13 — To the Editor

The Great Bay estuary is in decline. That’s the inescapable message of the Piscataqua Region Estuary Partnership’s (PREP) most recent (2009) State of the Estuaries report, which tracks the health of the Great Bay and Hampton/Seabrook estuaries.

Of 12 primary indicators of the estuary’s health tracked by PREP, 11 show negative or cautionary trends, including two very troubling negative trends: nitrogen concentrations in Great Bay are increasing, and eelgrass vegetation — the cornerstone of the Great Bay ecosystem, and an important nursery for fish and other marine species — is in sharp decline.

Consistent with findings in the 2009 State of the Estuaries report, the N.H. Department of Environmental Services and Environmental Protection Agency have acknowledged that waters throughout the Great Bay estuary are impaired, meaning that their health is in jeopardy. Based on the overwhelming evidence that immediate action is needed to clean up the estuary, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun issuing draft permits to limit nitrogen pollution from sewage treatment plants affecting the estuary (there are a total of 18 such facilities, 14 of them in New Hampshire; none currently has a nitrogen pollution limit).

In sharp contrast to the need for urgent and meaningful action, however, a small group of municipalities calling themselves the Great Bay Municipal Coalition — Dover, Portsmouth, Exeter, Rochester and Newmarket — persistently have tried to claim “the science is in doubt” and to delay needed improvements to their sewage treatment plants.

In the face of the pollution problems plaguing the estuary, rather than taking meaningful steps to solve the problem, the municipal coalition has engaged in a withering, all-out assault on the N.H. Department of Environmental Services and EPA. Last summer they sought assistance from a New Hampshire member of Congress, resulting in a bill calling for a five-year moratorium on any EPA permitting activity in the Great Bay estuary. Most recently, the municipal coalition filed a lawsuit against the N.H. Department of Environmental Services, challenging — on procedural grounds — the legality of its analysis regarding nitrogen pollution in the estuary.

Members of the municipal coalition have been sure to explain that they care about the Great Bay estuary, and that they want to be part of the solution. They say they’re committed to “immediately” upgrading their sewage treatment plants to reduce nitrogen pollution. But their words ring hollow. In fact they’ve made clear that while they’re willing to “immediately” upgrade their sewage treatment plants to reduce pollution to a certain level, if they’re required to do more they will litigate the validity of their permits, and they’ll do nothing to upgrade their sewage treatment plants while that litigation is pending. Actions speak louder than words, and so far the municipal coalition’s only actions have been to delay what must be done to save the Great Bay estuary.

The Great Bay estuary belongs to us all. The health of its waters is inextricably linked to tourism and the local economy, and to what makes the Seacoast such a special place. We cannot allow the health of Great Bay, Little Bay, the Piscataqua River, and all the waters comprising the estuary to be held hostage. The estuary is approaching a tipping point which, once crossed, will make its recovery all the more expensive, if not impossible. Just ask the folks struggling to reverse the collapse of the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland, alone, is expected to spend — conservatively — $11 billion to clean up the bay.

We simply can’t afford to keep kicking this can down the road. It’s time for the municipal coalition to start investing in real solutions rather than paying lawyers and outside consultants to thwart needed action. It’s refreshing to see the town of Newington, which will be subject to EPA permitting, embracing the protections required to save Great Bay; and it’s encouraging to see another community, the town of Durham, choose not to follow the municipal coalition down the path of litigation and delay. We all benefit from a clean, healthy Great Bay estuary. Now is the time for action.

Derek Durbin
Chairman, New Hampshire Coastal Protection Partnership

Mitch Kalter
President, Trout Unlimited, Great Bay Chapter

Don Swanson
President, Coastal Conservation Association, N.H. Chapter

Peter Wellenberger
Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper, Conservation Law Foundation

The Three Penny Taproom. Courtesy of adamjackson1984 @ flickr. Creative Commons.

If you like beer, then you can (and should) help support Conservation Law Foundation fulfill our mission of protecting New England’s environment for the benefit of all people. You see, at CLF we use the law, science, and the market to create solutions that preserve our natural resources, build healthy communities, and sustain a vibrant economy. So what’s CLF’s work got to do with beer?

Here’s a few examples:

• You need clean water to make great beer; CLF is fighting to control water pollution and keep water clean throughout Vermont and New England
• Drinking and driving is illegal and dangerous; CLF is working to expand public transportation options and to encourage development in walkable downtowns
• Local beer should have local hops; CLF is working to help local farmers find financing in their communities

And we’ve got plenty more reasons why beer-lovers should become CLF members. That’s why you’re invited to come discuss them over a frosty pint.

What: The generous owners of Montpelier’s Three Penny Taproom are putting the fun back in fundraising by donating a portion of an evening’s bar sales to support CLF’s work in Vermont. Come raise a glass with CLF’s Vermont advocates who will be glad to answer questions about the challenges facing Vermont’s environment and the many solutions CLF’s advocacy is helping to bring about.

When: Tuesday May 15, 2012 from 5:00-7:30 p.m. (and it’s a safe bet that some of the CLF advocates might stick around even later)

Where: Three Penny Taproom, 108 Main St. Montpelier, VT (for directions: http://www.threepennytaproom.com/directions.html)

Why: Because supporting CLF’s mission to protect Vermont’s environment for the benefit of all people has never been this easy or this tasty (did we mention that Three Penny has a delicious daily menu of small plates made with high quality local ingredients?)

If you’ve never been to Three Penny Taproom — designated as one of “America’s 100 Best Beer Bars” by Draft Magazine and winner of the 2011 7 Days Daysie reader survey for “Best Bar” — CLF Night is a great reason to come see what all the buzz is about.

UNH recently presented its new master plan to the larger University community. The plan includes entering into public-private ventures to develop retail and commercial space – stores – on existing agricultural land.

On the UNH web page, it states the school “is at the forefront of the efforts to define new personal, local community, governmental and global activities and policies for protecting and sustaining the Earth and its inhabitants.” It prides itself on being a national leader in sustainability and as a land grant institution it should be in the forefront of promoting local agriculture and protecting water quality.

So why are none of these lofty goals referenced in the master plan? You can read more about the master plan here.

What the University is calling “controlled development,” more closely resembles what I call sprawl. This type of development places much greater pressure on Great Bay and its tributaries from both point and non-point sources – waters that are already impaired from too much nitrogen pollution. In fact, there has been a rapid increase of impervious cover associated with development and sprawl throughout the entire Great Bay watershed. As noted in the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership’s most recent State of the Estuaries Report, the area of impervious surfaces in the watershed increased from 28,710 acres in 1990 to 50,351 acres in 2005 – a rate of over 1,400 acres per year.

The campus already faces huge traffic issues on Main Street and the idea of adding more development to this road makes little sense. Instead, the University should continue to develop its public transportation system to link the campus to existing retail development. We want to support vital downtowns, such as in Dover and Newmarket, not create low-density sprawl that will only compete with and erode these town centers.

And with the exploding interest in local agriculture, and the need for our communities to become more resilient in the face of soaring energy costs and climate change, the University needs to protect all of its agricultural assets, not turn them into parking lots. This includes such areas as Leawood Orchards – currently abandoned but valuable land that could be put back into agricultural production.

Thanks to an overwhelming outcry from the UNH community, the idea of developing the agricultural lands on the north side of Main Street appears to have been taken off the table. The next step should be to set aside all of the remaining UNH agricultural lands and a commitment to protect water quality from further development and sprawl.

–
For more, visit: http://www.clf.org/great-bay-waterkeeper/ You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

More small-scale farms, in more local communities, growing a greater diversity of food in sustainable and humane ways, are key ingredients in CLF’s recipe for a healthy, thriving New England for generations to come.

Let’s face it, with gas prices topping $4 per gallon and global warming causing deepening droughts across many of the world’s most productive agricultural areas, we just can’t continue to count on being able to get produce, meats, and dairy products shipped to our local supermarkets from factory farms that may be thousands of miles away.

Extended-share CSAs and other community financing tools can be a valuable way to help smaller farms--like the one where these goats live--flourish

Even in Vermont, where agriculture is a key component of our state’s economy and character, there are challenges to realizing an agricultural renaissance.  One of the biggest challenges involves connecting existing and would-be farmers with the financing they need to flourish. With recovery from the credit crunch still slow, banks and other traditional sources of capital may be reluctant to take risks on smaller-scale farming operations (and with so many stories of banks behaving badly, local farmers may also be reluctant to work with banks).

Increasingly, Vermont farmers are turning to friends and neighbors in the communities where they live to raise smaller amounts of capital in unconventional ways.  That’s why I was so excited to participate in a collaboration with farmers, attorneys, accountants, and investment professionals that is aimed at helping publicize and demystify the various community-financing tools that farmers can utilize as they seek to start up and/or grow their farms.

The effort was led by University of Vermont’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which recently published the “Guide to Financing the Community-Supported Farm: Ways for Farms to Acquire Capital Within Communities” (you can download a free copy by clicking here). Among the many community financing tools discussed in the guide are:

• owner-financed sales and land contracts (chapter authored by yours truly)
• cohousing and cooperative land ownership
• equity financing
• extended Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares
• revenue-based financing
• vendor financing
• pre-buys

Though written by Vermonters for a primarily Vermont audience, much of the analysis and many of the case studies in the Guide will be useful to farmers and community food financiers all across New England. Check it out!

Photo courtesy of Putneypics @ flickr. Creative Commons.

A couple of weeks ago I met a young farmer near Rutland, VT who was stunned to be out plowing his fields in the month of March. At that time the fields are usually knee-deep muddy, if not still covered in snow, ice or the slow-melting crust of the long winter. He was stunned:  if he plows and plants now, what’s going to happen next? How will his crops respond? Should he wait, for something more like a “normal” planting season to return?

These are questions that thousands of us gardeners across New England have been struggling with lately, in the wake of an unseasonably warm spell, and a winter that broke records first for early snowfall, and then low overall snowfall and high temperatures. Looking out our windows when the weather warms, we are drawn to one place: the soil – we long to get our hands in the dirt, and smell the wonderful scents of spring. For the farmer I mentioned above, the decision wasn’t just recreational or therapeutic; the crops for the CSA he recently founded with his partner were at risk. He had to plan carefully, not knowing what lies ahead.

In Vermont, where my wife and I have tended our garden for years, you start your seeds on Town Meeting Day and plant on Memorial Day. But this year, that timeline is way off.

Recently, for the first time in 22 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released an updated version of its Plant Hardiness Zone Map. The map charts average winter minimum temperatures, or cold intensity. What this map confirmed in VT is what we have observed anecdotally across New England and the United States: that our world is warming, as this map by the Arbor Day Foundation shows vividly. For the first time in VT, for instance, zone 5b has crept into the southern edges of our state. And the south coast of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts includes zone 7a, which is also found in Northern Alabama. The commentary on the new map carefully avoids concluding the shifts are the results of climate change; most gardeners will draw their own conclusions.

For me, the question of whether or not to plant returned me to a question about my greenhouse. Previous owners of our house built a small, traditional greenhouse that helped with the slow and wet transition from winter to spring, with consistency and in the same place for 15 years. It succumbed to the elements recently, and we decided to try smaller, portable hoop houses over our raised beds. They’re more suitable to highly variable temperatures. Where once a rigid structure suited our weather and our needs, that’s no longer the case. We need to be more flexible. More adaptable.

This winter ranks as the 4th warmest nationally since the late 1880s, when climatologists began keeping records. People still consider Memorial Day as a safe time to plant, but the average last frost day is 10 days prior, as Vern Grubinger, University of Vermont Extension vegetable and berry specialist, said in this Brattelboro Reformer article.

What happens when you plan according to tradition, but the seasonal calendar is out of kilter? What happens when convention no longer suits our contemporary reality? These are questions of adaptation, and they apply to backyard gardens – and also flood zone mapping, transportation, and almost everything we do in the natural world. We have to start building differently, for a different world.

And so I wanted to ask you – CLF members, and members of the public alike – how are you adapting? What have you done with your garden this spring?  Are you anticipating odd weather in the months ahead? How will you respond? Please share your comments here and share your photos with us on our Facebook page.

I look forward to hearing from you. And happy planting.