All of those who love the peace and quiet, clean water, clean air, and abundant wildlife in the Vermont back-country are applauding the decision by Vermont Agency of Natural Resources officials to reverse course on an agency rule that would have allowed ATV clubs to crisscross and fragment Vermont state lands with ATV trails.  This decision should help protect state forests and wildlife preserves from often-destructive, high-impact motorized activity and maintain Vermont’s longstanding tradition of sound public land management.

ATVs are powerful machines that can churn up sensitive wetlands, destroy wildlife habitat, and create noise, air, and water pollution in sensitive forest environments

Since the previous administration of Governor James Douglas moved forward with this flawed rule that would have opened all state lands to ATV trail construction, CLF has been working with a coalition of organizations and concerned citizens to prevent the rule from taking effect.  CLF offered testimony that helped sway a legislative committee to unanimously object to the rule.  When the Douglas Administration moved forward with the rule over legislative objection, CLF filed a lawsuit challenging the rule’s validity.  In the Agency’s press release announcing the decision to abandon the ATV rule, Secretary Markowitz specifically referenced CLF’s lawsuit as a factor in the decision not to move forward:

“Markowitz said ‘in 2009, [Vermont's] Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules voted unanimously to object to the ATV rule. They strongly believed that ANR did not have the power to adopt the regulation. Because we cannot point to clear authority to adopt this rule, the regulation is vulnerable to legal attack, with little likelihood of prevailing in court.’ The rule has been challenged in the Washington County Superior Court by the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). Markowitz states, ‘it does not make sense to try to defend the ATV rule in court given that LCAR has already determined that no authority to adopt the rule exists.’ 

CLF knows that this important victory is not the end of the struggle to protect our public lands from being overrun with ATVs. The ATV clubs are well-organized and well-funded by manufacturers who push hard to open up public lands to ATV use so that they can expand the recreational market for these gas-guzzling machines.  Agency officials are also hinting that some limited access might be granted in the future. With your support, we will keep working to keep our forests free of the pollution and habitat fragmentation that ATVs bring in their wake.

Camp Brook

The very severe damage in Vermont caused by Tropical Storm Irene led to an impressive and encouraging recovery effort both by state government and residents, many of whom volunteered to help their neighbors salvage and rebuild.

Unfortunately, however, the storm – the second flood of historic proportions in the state this year – also seems to have washed away much of what we have learned about the dangers of digging gravel from streams and rivers.

In recent weeks there have been dozens of excavators and bulldozers in rivers across the state digging gravel, channelizing streams and armoring banks with stone, not only at great ecological cost, but – particularly in the many cases in which a true emergency did not exist – greatly increasing the risk of future flood damage.

Meanwhile, the state, by not setting and enforcing clear limits on that work in the rivers, has done little – at least so far – to prevent the damage.

Knowledge gained by the scientific study of these river systems, also known as fluvial geomorphology, leaves little doubt that increasing the speed of water by turning streams that meander over rocky beds into straight chutes with little structure not only destroys vital habitat for fish and other creatures, it also increases the potential destructive power of floods. It was advances in this physics-based science which led to significant limitations on gravel removal from Vermont rivers during the last two decades.

Rock River

However, the recent flooding (and statements by Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin) has given new life to an outdated and inaccurate idea that removing gravel from the rivers is what prevented flooding in the past. This notion ignores the fact that restricting rivers into a man-made channel, cutting off the access to flood plains and jarring mature streams back into instability the risk of flood damage is significantly increased, particularly for neighbors downstream.

More on this subject can be found in a Burlington Free Press column here and in a Vermont Public Radio news story here.

Yesterday, National Public Radio reported on a severe toxic algae bloom that is plaguing a popular lake in Oklahoma.

The algae in Oklahoma was spurred by familiar factors – lower water levels in the lake due to higher  water consumption by people, hotter conditions and low rainfall attributable to climate change, and nutrient pollution swept into the lake by stormwater runoff from the surrounding land area.

What was new was to hear public officials acknowledge that the lack of clean water is hurting the local economy and impacting people’s health.

As NPR Reported:

“ Across the state, the lack of water has even cut into tourism. Low water levels in northeast Oklahoma’s Grand Lake resulted in a spike of toxic levels of blue-green algae.

Gov. Mary Fallin says this hit just as visitors were arriving for July 4 celebrations.

It took a toll on businesses and tourism at the lake itself,” Fallin says. ‘Some of the businesses I talked to at Grand Lake told me they saw a 50 percent drop in the number of people who were coming into their businesses.’”

As the CLF Scoop reported earlier this summer, U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe got sick after swimming amid the toxic blue-green algae in Grand Lake, and pinned his own illness on the algae.  Inhofe is known as one of the staunchest anti-environmentalists in Congress, and has opposed regulation to address climate change.  The Senator himself reportedly admitted the irony, suggesting that “the environment was fighting back.”

CLF hasn’t been sitting on the sidelines like some.  We’re fighting back against the sources of toxic algae blooms in New England – polluted stormwater runoff, inadequate management of sewage, and carbon dioxide emissions that accelerate climate change.  Reversing the devastating toxic algae blooms that regularly shut down bays along Cape Cod, Lake Champlain, New Hampshire’s Great Bay, Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, and elsewhere throughout the region is a top priority for CLF.

Unfortunately, it has taken a crisis to convince some elected officials what CLF has known for years.  Clean water generates economic growth, health, and tourism, while creating outdoor spaces that nurture our spirit.

Cynthia Liebman is a staff attorney at CLF Massachusetts. (Photo credit: Leslie Boudreau)

The most expensive stormwater runoff problem to fix is the one that’s not addressed. That’s the first point CLF Massachusetts Staff Attorney Cynthia Liebman makes in this smart letter to the editor published yesterday in the MetroWest Daily News. The letter is in response to the paper’s July 26 article stating that officials in the town of Milford, MA are considering suing EPA over the costs of EPA’s proposed regulations to clean up toxic stormwater runoff.

“Toxic algae blooms and other symptoms of pollution from paved areas undermine the clean water and recreational opportunities that make our towns desirable places to live, visit, and do business,” she writes. “EPA’s new pollution control program in the communities that discharge into the Charles River and its feeder streams provides more equitable cost sharing than the status quo.” More >

Former MWRA Executive Director Paul Levy (who has worn a lot of really interesting hats in his career) provides, in CommonWealth Magazine, this really interesting take on the Boston Harbor cleanup and lessons learned from that experience can inform decisions about the slow motion implosion of the transit system of Greater Boston.  Very important reading that nicely complements the good words and insights of Peter Shelley on this blog about the Harbor cleanup.

Big questions that hang in the area include:

• Noting that the cleanup has massively improved the harbor – if we did it all over again, would we employ a “big pipe and big plant” solution to the sewage and stormwater problem in Boston or use more local and distributed methods?
• What lessons learned from these case studies can be applied to the electricity system?
• What role does the existence of the massive highway system that spans the nation (and if you want to read a fascinating description of the creation of that system check out “The Big Roads” by Earl Swift) have on our other infrastructure planning and decision making?

Any thoughts on these questions?  The comments section below awaits.

 It’s July 4^th – as you head out to your favorite swimming spot, consider this…

While New England is home to many clean, scenic beaches, the sad truth is that hundreds of beach closures occurred in 2010 across the New England states.  Check out NRDC’s new report, Testing the Waters to see where your state ranked, and how clean your favorite beach was last year. (Spoiler alert: if you’re in Maine, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, there’s room for improvement).

Why are these problems so pervasive?  Polluted stormwater runoff and sewage overflows are the major culprits – making beach closures more likely after it rains.  In Massachusetts, 79% percent of ocean beach standards violations happened within 24 hours after a rainstorm, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.  

The solutions are not cheap – to tackle this set of problems problem will require a sustained commitment to fixing and improving underground sewer pipes, enlarging wastewater treatment plants, and installing green stormwater treatment to capture and clean runoff from roads and parking lots.  

The cost of doing nothing is also significant.  The US EPA estimated that in one year, 86,000 people lost a chance to swim because of beach closures in areas affected by stormwater pollution.

Clean water is essential to a thriving New England.  That is why CLF is applying legal leverage to improve management of sewage and stormwater runoff across the region.  We’re working toward a day when the pollution that causes beach closures will be a thing of the past, and swimmers will have their pick of beautiful New England beaches – whether or not it’s recently rained.

Peter Shelley, CLF senior counsel. Photo credit: Evgenia Eliseeva

Twenty-eight years ago, we at CLF said we were going to take Boston Harbor back from the state polluters for the benefit of the children at the beach, the economic opportunities around a clean harbor and the future of Massachusetts. No one at CLF even suspected that this was to be a $4.5 billion, generational effort, let alone that billions more would be needed to rebuild metropolitan Boston’s water distribution system. Last week, the final major capital project from the original litigation to create that cleaner harbor was completed, producing feelings of great satisfaction as well as nostalgia. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that CLF entered on behalf of our members so long ago. Our supporters have been patient beyond recognition.

It is safe to say that it was worth the wait and the investment. Today, Boston Harbor is swimmable and fishable. Boston now has a world-class water and sewer authority and a new National Park celebrating the Boston Harbor Islands. Billions of dollars were invested in real estate, producing thousands of jobs around the harbor in the process, and Boston Harbor now also has its own watchdog—Save The Harbor/Save The Bay, a group CLF helped form to carry our vigilance forward. While CLF was just the point of the spear that made all this happen, there is no question that we were the point of that spear.

So many of the people who made this a success story are now gone. At the top of that list would have to be Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Paul G. Garrity and Federal Judge A. David Mazzone, neither of whom lived to see the final realization of their judicial efforts. Judge Garrity singlehandedly faced down the Massachusetts Legislature and refused to budge until they released their control of the sewer and water system by creating the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA). In the process, he may have issued the only city-wide building ban in Boston history. Judge Mazzone was the harbor cleanup program. He loved this harbor and threw his keen intellect, his brilliant strategic skills and his wonderful sense of humor—not to mention a couple of unbelievably good law clerks—into the challenge that was thrown before his court. Also in that list has to be Sam Hoar, a long time friend of CLF’s who died in 2004. Sam selflessly volunteered himself and some of the best lawyers at Goodwin, Procter & Hoar to help CLF survive the relentless legal briefing of the early days.

Among those who have moved on to other things are Doug Foy, Paul Levy, Doug MacDonald and Dick Fox. Doug Foy is gone only in the sense that he is no longer CEO of CLF. He needs no special introduction to the CLF family. His vision never faltered when he had made up his mind that something had to happen with Boston Harbor. Paul Levy and Doug MacDonald both performed project management miracles to bring one of the biggest and most complicated public works projects in Massachusetts history online both on schedule and on budget.  They, of course, were just the tip of the iceberg of the extraordinary staff at the MWRA. As for Dick Fox, lead engineer for CDM, the project design and construction lead, I’ll never forget the moment in open court when Judge Mazzone leaned his long frame forward, fixed Dick Fox in his eyes and said: “I’m going to hold you to your promises here.” Dick not only didn’t flinch; he responded “I expect you to.” This may have been a court-supervised cleanup, but make no mistake—it was a cleanup that happened because of the personal integrity commitment of lots of folks like Dick Fox.

Great credit also has to be extended to Diane Dumanowski, one of the finest reporters ever at the Boston Globe and one of the best environmental reporters in the country. Her series in the Globe on the collapse of the Metropolitan District Commission sewerage system, backed up by strong editorials from Globe columnist Ian Menzies, was the spark that ignited Doug Foy into action. Finally, no story about the Boston Harbor cleanup would be complete without mentioning Bill Golden, then solicitor for the City of Quincy, whose fateful jog on the feces-strewn Wollaston Beach in 1982 made him mad as hell and got the whole ball rolling.

CLF is not done with Boston Harbor, however. All the tributaries coming into Boston Harbor still suffer from significant pollution discharges from multiple public and private sources. These discharges expose Massachusetts residents to disease, damage the environment, and frustrate new economic opportunities. With the same energy we brought to the battle for Boston Harbor, we are hard at work fighting those upstream pollution sources with a terrific coalition of community groups and partner conservation non-profits. We look forward to similar moments of great accomplishment and satisfaction in the future when we can finally say that this great harbor’s entire watershed has a clean bill of health.

At the ceremony marking the completion of the Stormwater Storage Tunnel under South Boston Mayor Menino of Boston connected a couple of important dots and made a powerful case for how environmental protection and economic development and prosperity are allied efforts that support each other – not competing values where one must lose for the other to win.

The Mayor noted that the previous day he had been at the groundbreaking for the Vertex Pharmaceuticals headquarters at Fan Pier and stated his firm belief that a cutting edge, growing and successful business like Vertex would not be willing to make a long term commitment to the Boston waterfront if the hard work of cleaning up the harbor had not been undertaken and executed.  The Mayor was recalling the bad old days of raw sewage pouring and how the cleanup has changed Boston’s harbor from a liability into a major economic and social asset.

Obviously, we here at CLF completely agree with Mayor Menino on this essential point.

CLF has long believed that cleaning up Boston Harbor was an essential element in building a great city.  That belief, along with our commitment to addressing the ecological health of the Harbor and the larger marine and coastal environment has fueled our work on our (still pending !) lawsuit filed in 1983 and all the related activities that have swirled around that long running legal saga.

CLF also put a tremendous amount of time, particularly during the critical 1995 – 2003 period, into fighting to ensure that the development of Fan Pier and the larger area in which it sits (previously known as the South Boston Waterfront, the South Boston Seaport, the Seaport District and most recently the Innovation District) is developed in a smart way. We fought to ensure that development of this “new urban frontier” created access to all the citizens of the region by transit and foot, placing greenspace and great destinations on the waterfront and mixing together the public spaces mandated by law with housing and commercial development.  The development finally unfolding on the waterfront is guided by the infrastructure we fought to have in place and must follow the contours and mandates of the permits and rules that were negotiated.

The imperative of global warming pushes us all to live and work in efficient places where buildings consume as little energy as possible and it is easy and practical to walk to most destinations and there are affordable and available public transit options to many other places we need to go.  Nothing minimizes automobile travel, and the fuel consumption and emissions that come from car usage, like urban living and development.

Cleaning up the harbor and developing the Boston waterfront in a smart, human-scale but dense manner that creates great urban places  does indeed fire up the economic engine of Boston. As both Mayor Menino and EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding noted the other day in South Boston that urban economic engine of Boston powers so much of our region, so when we improve the environment and economy of Boston we are generating value, jobs and prosperity for New England.

The new storage tunnel will result in significantly cleaner water for beachgoers at Carson Beach in South Boston. Photo credit: bostonharborwalk.com

It’s been a busy day for South Boston on several fronts – but the dawning of a new era for a transformed Boston Harbor and the environmentalists, legislators and other officials who have been fighting for a clean harbor for nearly three decades. Today marks the opening of a massive sewage holding tank – called a CSO (combined sewer overflow) storage tunnel -  under South Boston that will store gallons of stormwater that would normally overwhelm the city’s sewer system and cause untreated sewage to be released into Boston Harbor. The change will make the beach “one of the cleanest in America” and bring the rate of beach closures down from eight per summer to one roughly every five years, according to this front page article in today’s Boston Globe.

It’s the gratifying ending to a story in which CLF has played a lead role since the beginning. Twenty-eight years ago, CLF filed one of the key lawsuits ordering that the harbor be cleaned up. Today, CLF’s Peter Shelley is one of the only original lawyers involved in the massive and long-running court case who has seen it through to fruition.  Key participants in this morning’s ribbon cutting ceremony for the new storage tunnel came on to the scene decades after the filing, in 1983, of the still-pending case that still bears the label Conservation Law Foundation vs. Metropolitan District Commission (the now-disbanded state agency that used to oversee the water and sewerage systems of Greater Boston).

The ceremony today reflected back on the long struggle to clean the harbor but, appropriately, also looked to the future.  Frederick Laskey, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), the state authority created to execute on the massive harbor cleanup, spoke eloquently about the collaboration between governments, business the advocacy community and the neighborhoods that was needed to execute on a vision of a cleaner harbor and beaches. Laskey especially noted the courage of the representatives of the many municipalities in the Greater Boston region in accepting the regional nature of the project and the need to spread the cost of creating swimmable beaches and a clean harbor across the whole metropolitan area.

State Senator Jack Hart, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Richard Sullivan (who also serves as Chairman of the MWRA Board) and  Department of Conservation and Recreation Commissioner Edward Lambert echoed Laskey’s remarks, emphasizing the importance of community collaboration and the value of clean beaches.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns, who today presides over CLF v. MDC and the continuing harbor cleanup, discussed the hard work needed to get to this day and offered a tribute to the vision of Judge David Mazzone, who had previously handled the case. In 2004, during his final illness in 2004, Mazzone handed the case over to Judge Stearns, conveying his belief that a CSO tunnel was needed and “could be completed by May 2011” for the cost of less than $250 million (in this morning’s speech, Stearns noted that the project came in right on that schedule and in fact under the initial cost estimate).

EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding spoke about the difficulty of executing on a project of this magnitude and the importance of core environmental laws like the Clean Water Act, which he proudly noted was championed by another Rhode Islander, Senator John Chafee, that provided clear direction regarding our national policy and the need to create clean and swimmable waters.

Thanks to the tenacity of CLF and others, today’s parents don’t have to worry that a day at the beach could make their children sick, and a new generation of kids won’t have beach closings put a damper on their summer days. But our work is nowhere near complete.  Yes, we need to continue to ensure that the right infrastructure, like this CSO structure in South Boston, is in place to treat our stormwater appropriately. But even more importantly we need to build and manage our buildings, our land and our roads in a way that recaptures as much rain water as possible.  We need to treat rain and snow as the precious resources that they are, moving away from a view that these gifts from above are a waste product that needs to be treated and shunted off into the sea. With those notions in mind, Massachusetts will continue to set an example for the region and the nation of the right way to restore a precious community resource and iconic piece of New England’s history.