The condition of the Chesapeake Bay (bad, and getting worse) and its tributaries (allmost without exception listed on the EPA's 303d "impaired waters" list) finally exasperated the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and certain Virginia and Maryland officials enough.
Early in January they followed through with their threat to sue the EPA and force it to meet the cleanup goals (set for 2010) that got set ten years ago, after fifteen years of little action. Click the link for the CBF's info pages about their suit.
Inaction, environmental incompetence, the usual Bush Administration story ... and inability to control sprawl by state and local governments in the states that make up the watershed ... greed and so on.
UPDATE: Here's the CBF's list of what they call broken promises.
Address below the fold. Also below the fold, two other sources of information about the cleanup efforts.
It is:
Lisa Jackson, Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20460
It's a travesty that the national capital is on a body of water that can't be cleaned up. It's not as if the causes aren't known. To help force the EPA to finally stop spending money on "studies" and administration, the CBF's Will Baker has circulated an e-mail asking citizens to send a letter -- via snail mail -- to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Please buy a stamp and add your voice.
From Baker's plea, in two e-mails from this week:
... we need to make some NOISE. We need to raise our voices. Or we won't be heard.
Washington, D.C. is at the very center of the Chesapeake watershed. The Potomac and Anacostia rivers are tidal sub-estuaries of the Chesapeake. This is the Nation's Bay, and its condition is a national disgrace. EPA and its federal partners [need to] seize the opportunity and demonstrate leadership.
Please tell Lisa Jackson that there is no better place to show that she and her boss are serious about clean air and clean water.
More than ninety percent of the Bay and tidal tributary rivers that feed it are officially designated as impaired under the Clean Water Act. EPA must institute a strict pollution reduction budget with penalties for non-compliance immediately. In fact, the Clean Water Act requires it.
I challenge all of you who have not written to do so. I would like to report back to all of you by next Wednesday that we have received copies of another 100 letters.
You can e-mail your copy to the CBF - or fax it - contact info is on their site.
I know it is easier to send Ms. Jackson an e-mail, but we have been told she does not have an e-mail address yet. As soon as we get it, we will let you know. In the meantime, hard copy letters are more of an attention grabber anyway.
Thank you very much. We will be heard. We will make a difference. Our children and grandchildren will be proud of us.
You can engage your friends through this link.
I have my disagreements with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, but they don't stop me from supporting its efforts to raise a chorus of citizen voices.
Advocate Interaction
The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay has set up a listserv and blogs for those who are involved in the many remediation efforts around the 64,000-square-mile watershed (encompassing parts of New York and Pennsylvania, all Maryland, Delaware, most of Virginia, of course D.C. and a bit of West VA, I think).
See Chesapeake Watershed Network - e-mail announcements and notifications and 17 blogs. It's a moderated list and subscribers must be approved.
Tom Pelton
Tom was the Baltimore SUN environmental beat reporter until he took a buyout last summer. He's covering the environment for the CBF through a blog the support, and reporting on environmental issues for public radio station WYPR (Baltimore).
Bay Daily is here. And here's a teaser:
'Green' Whiskey and the Debate over Eco-Marketing
Would you knock back more whiskey if you knew it was green? I don’t mean tinted by food coloring, as some bars do with their brew on St. Patrick's day. I mean, perhaps eco-tipplers might plunk down more cash to buy more shots if they knew the distilleries were powered by renewable energy.
An intoxicating report this morning by the Reuters news service describes how a group of liquor manufacturers in England (the makers of Cutty Sark and Chivas Regal, among other products) have received permission to build a power plant fueled by the burning of left-over grain products to generate electricity. The extra juice (the electrons, not the whiskey) would be pumped to local families and businesses – enough to light up about 9,000 households.
The allure of "green" products like this pose perplexing questions for consumers in the Chesapeake Bay region and elsewhere. On one hand, shoppers can encourage good corporate behavior by buying from a booze manufacturer or shirt maker that recycles, uses only organic products, or contributes money to an alternative energy or "carbon neutral" fund. Money drives the market – and we want to drive capitalism toward more responsible use of fossil fuels. ...more...