Oregon non-point source pollution project funding

I got the following by virtue of being a subscriber to news releases from Oregon DEQ. This announcement comes out every year and I'm always interested in what the funding priorities are, not that they change much. Interesting to note that, projects in the Eastern Region of Oregon will focus on reducing nitrate loading from non-point sources of pollution that affect source water of public water systems, i.e. centralized water treatment systems. If you have your own well, you are out of luck in terms of the state helping your or your region out with non-point source pollution that affects your drinking water. I suppose the rationale is the typical "get the biggest bang for your buck" reason of helping the maximum number of persons possible (i.e. the concentrated populations using public water supplies, but it does seem to smack a bit of environmental inequity.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is requesting project proposals from government agencies, tribal nations and nonprofit organizations to address non-point sources of pollution affecting the state’s coastal, river, lake, drinking water and groundwater resources.

For more information, please see the news release:

http://www.deq.state.or.us/news/prDisplay.asp?docID=3483

World Toilet Day 2010!

Did you know that November 19 is World Toilet Day?

World Toilet Day is designed to acknowledge the life-saving power of the toilet and appreciate the toilets in our lives. Believe it or not, more people on earth have cell phones than have access to a toilet! Which may be a sad commentary on where our priorities are - but maybe this is a call to use that ubiquitous communication device to get the word out.

Not long ago, New York, London, and Paris were centers of infectious disease, facing the same water problems that cities like Mumbai, Lagos, and Rio de Janeiro face today. Life expectancy was low and child death rates were as high then as they are now in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. It was sweeping reforms in water and sanitation that enabled human progress to leap forward.

This also ties into my post a couple days ago about the Paul Simon Water for the World Act that you can learn about here.

Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection and a big cause of water pollution. This means people must relieve themselves in open streets, fields, or dangerous back alleys. In India alone, the number of people who practice open defecation is double the population of the U.S. You can imagine how this affects health not only because of direct contact with diseases from sewage but also from pollution of water supplies used for drinking, cooking and washing. And, it is sad to say, but there are still people in the United States that are not hooked to a sewer system or septic system that will help protect water quality or their health.

The purpose of World Toilet Day is to raise a stink about this lack of sanitation that causes not only embarrassment, concerns for safety, and lack of dignity, but preventable disease, illness, and all too often, death.

Water.org is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization committed to providing safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries. Learn more by visiting their website at www.water.org.

Water for the World Act Needs Your Help

Thank you, Waterdoc:

The Sen. Paul Simon Water for the World Act unanimously passed the U.S. Senate (S. 624) last September. It now is in the House of Representatives (H.R. 2030), where the hope is that it will be passed during the current lame duck session of Congress. Most observers give the bill little chance of passage when the 112th Congress convenes in January 2011. So it's now, or perhaps never.

The bill would provide clean water and sanitation to 100M people.

Here is more information from Water Advocates:

Now is the most important time to contact your member of the House of Representatives to ask them to pass the Water for the World Act. The bill has already passed the Senate. We have an opportunity with one last push from all of you to make this work. Your member of the House of Representatives needs to hear from you during the lame duck Session, which begins on November 15 and may end in early December.

This lifesaving legislation would go a long way toward ending the world's largest health crisis - the diseases caused by the lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation. It would also give the United States an important leadership role in providing access to water, sanitation and hygiene for millions of the world's poorest people.

All House offices can be called through 202-225-3121, or more directly by getting their office numbers from www.house.gov. Even better, send them a short email: Go to www.house.gov to go to the Representative's site where they provide an email contact form (and sometimes an actual email address).

Friend, filmmaker, and hydrophilanthropist Jim Thebaut, whose visage has graced these pages a number of times, has prepared a brief video to promote the bill. It features former Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), former Senate minority leader; Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR); Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL); and Patti Simon, the Senator's widow. Frist, Blumenauer, and Durbin played instrumental roles in getting the bill to where it is today, and Simon championed the cause as well.

Here is the link to Jim's video on You Tube (you will need Adobe Flash Player 10 to view it); you can also view a Quick Time 7 version on Jim's WWW site.

I would appreciate it if you would contact your representative and request that she or he vote for the bill, H.R. 2030. Thank you!



“This important legislation complements the efforts of US nonprofit development organizations, philanthropies, corporations, faith communities and civic groups, and could profoundly improve millions of lives.” -- David Douglas, President, Water Advocates

Earth Overshoot Day 2010: a full month earlier than EOD 2009

Earth Overshoot Day is when we are living beyond our means from an ecological and resource standpoint - and we still have over a quarter of the year to go...

http://www.royte.com/blog/?p=749

Dodo Award

And we wonder why we have such a good reputation world-wide...

While President Obama was securing funds from BP to pay for the damage their oil spill is wrecking on families in the Gulf, Republicans apologized... to BP.

Yes, Texas Congressman Joe Barton actually apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward and called it "a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown." That's right - Republicans think the "tragedy" is that BP will have to pay victims of their disaster.

To add insult to injury, Republicans want to put Congressman Barton in charge of the entire Energy and Commerce committee!

Murray Stein, Crusader Against Water Pollution, Dies at 92

 He did some great work.  We've fixed a lot of the big problems that had our streams running with sewage and industrial waste.  Who is our champion for the accumulation of effects from uncounted "nonpoint" pollution sources across our country side?  Who is the champion for the groundwater?

The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: June 4, 2010


Murray Stein, who for more than 20 years led the federal government’s fight against water pollution and did much to overcome the prevailing attitude that the nation’s waterways could serve as sewers, died May 24 at his home in Falls Church, Va. He was 92.

His daughter Judith Sloane confirmed his death.

Mr. Stein, who retired in 1976, was something of a diplomat without portfolio, traveling from state to state with the difficult mission of seeking compliance through steps that avoided penalties or court action. His technique was to preside over hearings at which local officials and corporate executives were confronted with evidence of pollution and then invited or cajoled into adopting remedial programs.

It was not easy. Most polluters were reluctant to cooperate, much less spend millions of dollars to remediate. State officials often challenged the constitutional right of the federal government to intervene.

Mr. Stein usually dealt with resistance through soft-spoken amiability. His standard lines were: “We’re dealing with facts subject to scientific measurement. Once we get agreement on the facts, the solutions will present themselves.”

In 1967, he presided over a conference in Manhattan during which federal and state officials agreed on a 1972 deadline for ending water pollution in the Hudson River.

A year later, he negotiated an agreement in which officials from four states bordering Lake Michigan unanimously approved a program that called for full treatment of all waste, chlorination of effluent to further purify it and a ban on the dumping of all dredging materials into the lake.

Sometimes Mr. Stein pushed for precautionary measures. He was the principal negotiator of an agreement in 1966 in which officials from California and Nevada approved an unusual engineering program to prevent pollution of Lake Tahoe, one of the world’s clearest bodies of water. As federal authority over water-pollution control was reorganized and transferred from one agency to the next between 1955 and 1971, Mr. Stein also made the shifts: from the Public Health Service to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to the Department of the Interior and to the Environmental Protection Agency.

William D. Ruckelshaus, the first E.P.A. administrator, depended on him. In a 2005 profile of Mr. Ruckelshaus, The Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, said, “In the course of his travels, Murray Stein had learned where all the worst water pollution problems were, and when Bill Ruckelshaus wanted to move out with an aggressive enforcement program, Murray could tell him where to begin.”

Born in Brooklyn on Oct. 16, 1917, Mr. Stein was one of two children of Leonard and Mary Newmark Stein. His father was a food distributor to grocery stores, his mother a clerk at Macy’s. Mr. Stein studied at City College of New York for two years before moving to Washington. During World War II, he served as a medic in the Army.

After the war, while completing his bachelor’s degree at George Washington University, and earned his law degree there in 1949.

Mr. Stein’s wife of 65 years, the former Anne Kopelman, died in 2005. Besides his daughter Judith, he is survived by another daughter, Toby Mullvain, and two grandchildren.

Not all of Mr. Stein’s dealings with local officials were amiable.

In 1969, he was aboard a boat inspecting the Passaic River in New Jersey when it ran aground on putrid muck lining the river bottom. The boat was soon freed, but an argument ensued. “This is not a pristine, babbling brook,” a state official told Mr. Stein. “This is an industrial river.”

“Industrial river is a euphemism for open sewer,” Mr. Stein replied, adding that the river was “a disgrace to the United States.”

Coastal wetland protection and British Petroleum

Noticed that the US EPA had a webinar this week on coastal wetland protection.  Kinda ironic timing given the fiasco that BP engineered in the Gulf.   Even more ironic that the guvmint is the one stepping up to get out the booms and all, which are rightfully BP's responsibility.  I'm sure the tea partyers are going to be really upset about that, federal money being spent to protect the environmental and economic wealth of the nation.

Anyway, came across this in my meanderings, which if even half true, gives pause for thought:  http://www.truthout.org/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well59178.  Right here in our own state we have some of those nasty government worker bees that keep trying to hold up progress or cost people, or worse, corporations money - all in the name of following the rules that are on the books.  And these are rules that are actually written down in black and white.  Think about the parliamentary elections in Britain where the rules about succession are established by precedence.  Here is a county that used to dominate half the world and it's standard operating procedures aren't laid out in law.  Is that why BP (British Petroleum) believes it can play fast and loose with common resources? 

Rhapsody and Scientific Reality

Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality.

Open your eyes,

Look up to the skies and see.... 

 - Freddie Mercury

Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview

When it comes to climate change, some look at the facts presented and see a coming catastrophe, others see a hoax. This difference in interpretation, social scientists say, has more to do with each individual's existing outlook than the facts.


Having read/seen the above, I fear I am teetering on the brink of another "people are stupid" diatribe.  But I will try to resist.  NPR provides a synopsis of research showing how people delude themselves into interpreting facts in such ways as to support their own private world view.  In some ways this world view is not so private because a lot of the biases that lean people towards one interpretation over another are derived from their cultural background.  And cultural background is not limited to whether you are of Polish, or English, or Central American descent, or whether you fly the Confederate flag in your yard.  Cultures are created within businesses, schools, neighborhoods, churches...you name it.

I exchanged blog comments recently with a learned person about the bias in regulatory types toward requiring permits for activities that are, in the bigger scheme of things, relatively benign and that have socially redeeming characteristics.  Ideally, relatively benign actions that are socially redeeming ought to be easy to take.  However, because the topic of discussion (greywater) involved something that is a subset of a regulated substance (sewage) and because of the culture in which regulators grow up (writing permits and enforcing rules), they have a career-long bias towards wanting to actively regulate a population or a series of actions, even when that regulation cannot be practically achieved because they charge fees too low to cover the so-called service.

It calls to mind that old game show, "What's my line?" and makes me wonder if it is actually more effective to have an in depth understanding of an audience's biases than to actually have facts at hand.  Are we really that shallow as a society?  Or should I ask, are we really that shallow as a set of societies?  How do we bridge the cultural biases to promote actual, productive movement on the polarizing issues of the day?

DEQ's failure to regulate - 2

I saw the article over in the Bend Bulletin the other day about a meeting the DEQ* was to hold in Central Oregon on February 4th, 2010.  The headline read:  DEQ to form committee for exploring nitrate issue and solutions.  How classic.  Like so many other actions to improve our society, here is a water protection effort that seems destined to die in committee.  


What I thought was particularly interesting about the article was the timeline that the Bulletin provided for what has happened already in the region.  Nitrates in groundwater are found first in a concentrated area in 1982 and then elsewhere in 1994.  I had to look at that twice and make sure I had my reading glasses on because I was dumbfounded.  That's a total of 28, yes, twenty-eight, years.  The DEQ has documented increasing levels of groundwater contamination in a large (125 square mile area according to the article) area over nearly three decades and they are going to form a committee!?!?


This is an area where one in ten of the wells sampled by the US Geological Survey shows signs of contamination?  Pick your favorite comedian and just imagine what they could do with material like this.  


The sad ending to the article is the series of people saying that it's good to take time to do these things right, that there's no emergency.  No, there is no emergency.  It is obviously too late to save the groundwater, the time for preventing pollution is obviously passed.  I must refer to an earlier post where I talked about delusional people.  This is a region's drinking water supply and yet the environmental protection agency for the state of Oregon is allowing protection actions to be waylaid by rhetoric. 


Three decades is an awfully long time to consider what to do about a groundwater contamination problem.  And to initiate a committee at the end of the three decades to decide what to do next is a pitiful excuse for environmental protection from our state environmental protection agency.  


The thorn is in Oregon DEQ's side for failure to act in accordance with it's own rules.  Duh.


*note the big red blob almost in the middle of the state on the map on this site, this is the region they're talking about in this case.

Water and Martin Luther King

I was re-reading a transcription of Martin Luther King's speech because I was a bit embarrassed that I could only remember the sound bites.  What a tremendous piece of oration.  Despite its dated language it still resonates and serves to highlight how far we are from equality still, over forty-five years later.  There is still racism of the type that spurred King to make this speech, but now we also have covert -isms that perpetuate inequality in often more subtle ways:  the low income housing next to industry that is more or less careful about its emissions, the menial, dirty jobs that no one but the poor are willing to do, the energy efficiency programs that only help folks that have the disposable income to participate.  I also keep getting confronted by environmental issues on a daily basis, especially those related to climate change and pollution in general.  Long, slow developing issues that will have big consequences in a hurry by accounts I see reported in the general science press.  So perhaps you will be as struck as I was by this quote from Martin Luther King:  "We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.  This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."