Florida Chamber of Commerce: we can't afford to clean our pollution of your waters ... by gimleteye

Recently, the St. Pete Times wrote an editorial blasting the business interests that are obstructing the US EPA from enforcing against pollution of Florida's waters that makes The Miami Herald editorial page, a desert in comparison. The editorial, reprinted below, is along the lines that I wrote recently, "Florida is floating in a sea of pollution." This weekend, I saw this phenomenon first-hand; through an airplane window and then on a small boat out of Key West: the blighted, shallow water environment-- wrecked by algae blooms and pollution.

This photo shows is layers of polluted water converging and moving through the Keys. The photo was taken, roughly, between Islamorada and Marathon, on the Atlantic side. But the ugly water is everywhere.

Shot from a few thousand feet in the air, I matched this view a few hours later from a small boat from Key West into the Mud Keys and Snipe Point. It was a magical winter day-- almost without wind and warm, too. At dead low tide there should have been wading birds everywhere, spearing small crabs and shrimp in the exposed bottom. I only saw a few and I knew why. Like so much of the Everglades, the place was barren. That's because there is so little food left; its fragile web has been busted apart by polluted water. To an untrained eye, the water looked fine. But I've watched this stretch of our natural heritage since the 1970's. Everywhere the water had a dense green cast; the sea grass didn't resemble anything like the lush carpet that once blanketed these meadows. For the most part, the blades of seagrass were coated with slime, like a sick tongue. Click, 'read more'.


My friend, a life-time resident of the Keys and avid waterman, told me that bonefish populations had collapsed in the past year. He is a doctor. Several times a week for decades, he puts out of his dock on Sugarloaf Key and heads to the back country. He knows the channels and tides like lines in his palm. We've had this conversation before. My friend still harbors the expectation that hard science will tell him what is happening now; that the jury is still out, that the decline of marine life is a pause in an unfathomable cycle. This is not what I have observed. As young men we both fished the Keys in the 1970's; then, there were moments in the backcountry when life was firing on all eight cyclinders-- a riot of species in water so shallow you could measure its depth from your waist, down. Things began to change very quickly in the 1980's. You didn't have to be a marine scientist to read in the sudden blooms of toxic algae a threat to Florida.

Those who dismissed the threat, then, to Florida's natural heritage are the same who dismiss it now: wealthy sugar barons who farm and dump their pollution into the Everglades that feeds Florida Bay, big cities that continue to use canal systems as sewage drains to dump stormwater filled with chemicals and nutrients, and shills for the builders and land speculators whose business models depend on shifting infrastructure costs to taxpayers while they pocket profits. Today they are fighting tooth and nail in Congress, to strip out the authority of EPA -- surely the most bedraggled of federal agencies-- to regulate fertilizer and phosphorous pollution; a chief culprit in the toxic waters of Florida.

Then, Florida's business leaders didn't give a crap that our nearshore waters were falling apart. They would use hollow arguments: "Science is inconclusive," or, "This is just part of the natural cycle." Or, "What we need is a big hurricane to wash out the dirty water." Today, in the Keys and the rest of Florida they are out of excuses including the worst of all: "Business can self-regulate their pollution better than regulations."

Florida's business leaders don't see how our state's natural resources contribute to the bottom line and how that bottom line is racing us to all become trailer trash. The reason that regulations don't work is that the entire system-- from civil service requirements to measurement metrics-- is designed to fail. It is not that government can't work. It is that the business interests that control government, don't want it to. That's the point of the St. Pete Times editorial, in rebuttal to Gov. elect Scott and the panoply of Republican extremists who are harping on the US EPA for its plan to finally-- FINALLY-- require Florida to impose laws on the kinds of fertilizer and nutrient pollution that is killing our state.

My opinion is: shut down the polluters. Who can doubt the time is long overdue to put the cost in the products they sell? Well, for one, the doubters include the Idiocracy that sees nothing wrong with the Keys water quality turning into garbage. They hold the center stage. They grab public attention with catch phrases like , "How's that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?" They don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about.

Take Sarah Palin, for example. Palin clearly loves the outdoors in Alaska. But nature in Alaska is not like anywhere else in the continental United States. There, human impacts are dwarfed by wilderness; or at least seem so. For the time being, Alaska is the last place where nature remains appears intact. It is no wonder that corporate polluters aka The Tea Party have grabbed onto Palin and her blissful ignorance that Alaska stands for everywhere. They did the same with other Alaska politicians who held environmental regulations hostage to "freedom", to stand for the whole nation and to hold the whole nation, hostage.

The economic crash has simply strengthened their hold. Now, the gang is in Tallahassee, promoting Jeb Bush ideologues back into the limelight; Jeb! whose amendments to the 1994 Everglades Forever Act, passed at the urging of Big Sugar in 2003, condemned the Everglades to more years of costly delay and federal litigation that still is not resolved while the waters of Florida degrade into layers of disgust.

The polluters want to keep polluting, and they are taking advantage of this mini-depression and economic crisis to solidify their agenda. They want taxpayers to foot the bill. They want voters to really believe that there is nothing we can do to stop progress that is the addition of all the features of modern life including pollution. We become dumber, sicker, and more and more used to a blighted, toxic landscape. (click 'read more' for the full St. Pete Times editorial)


St. Pete Times OPED: "Rick Scott, Pam Bondi and the rest of Florida's newly elected Republican leadership teamed up the other day for a shameful cause — dirtier streams, lakes and drinking water. The pair joined a host of incoming Republican officeholders to blast the new clean water rules announced this month by the Environmental Protection Agency. These leaders need to get their facts — and their priorities — straight. Polluted water endangers public health, threatens the golden geese of property values and tourism and destroys the very environment that attracts residents here. The state should welcome the new standards and work with polluters to clean up the public's waterways.

The new rules are hardly an example of an activist federal government overstepping its authority. The EPA told the states in 1998 to limit nutrient pollution in surface waters by 2004 or it would do the job for them. But 2004 came and went. Finally, in 2008, environmental groups sued the EPA, calling on the agency to intervene in Florida under the Clean Water Act. Last year, the agency settled the case under the stipulation that it adopt specific pollution standards for Florida waterways. The EPA unveiled those standards — for lakes, river and springs — this month. A separate proposal for coastal waters is due by November 2011.

Florida's political and business leaders decried the move as an unprecedented reach and a costly mandate that could stall Florida's recovery — totally ignoring that the EPA and state had dragged their feet for more than a decade while waterways deteriorated further. Industry groups said the measure could cost agriculture, municipal and industrial wastewater plants and pulp and paper manufacturers $12 billion a year. Barney Bishop, who heads Associated Industries, the powerful business lobby, blamed "radical left-wingers" for imposing regulations that the state might not even need.

Radical left-wingers? These rules were put into motion under the administration of President George W. Bush, after the EPA had worked for a decade with two Republican governors of Florida to write tighter pollution standards. And the standards are not near as draconian or as costly as industrial polluters have claimed. The EPA estimates the rules would affect only a fraction of farmers, plant operators and other polluters. Fewer than half of the wastewater plants and only about one-tenth of farming operations would fall under the plan, according to the EPA. The agency estimates the cleanup would cost between $135 million and $206 million annually. And that's before polluters could take advantage of a variance process that could take entire operations or watersheds off the hook from making any changes at all.

Business groups have done a good job camouflaging the issue as a jobs bill and confusing the point: The public's waterways should no longer be a cheap dumping ground for fertilizer, chemicals, livestock manure, stormwater runoff and septic tanks. Nutrient pollution causes harmful algae blooms, which can kill fish, cause infections, rashes and respiratory problems among swimmers and beach goers and cause huge financial losses in tourism and property values. The state acknowledged in 2008 that nutrient pollution tainted 1,000 miles of rivers, 350,000 acres of lakes and 900 square miles of estuaries in Florida.

The EPA's standards build on what is a Florida solution to a Florida problem. Federal officials have shown good faith by continuing to meet with state regulators and affected industries to ensure that the clean-water standards are reasonable and specific to the local hydrologic conditions. The EPA also stayed the rules for an additional 15 months to give the industry time to prepare. This was after the agency postponed the rules initially at the request of Florida's two U.S. senators, Republican George LeMieux and Democrat Bill Nelson. Florida's political and business leaders need to heed their own call for science, not politics, to drive this process. This is the water that Floridians drink."


[Last modified: Nov 19, 2010 06:47 PM]