THE BERT & PEGGY DUPONT LECTURE: AN AMERICAN BIRD AND AN AMERICA SEA: MERGING THE INSIGHTS OF HISTORY AND ECOLOGY

On October 4, 1972, Edmund Muskie stood before his Senate colleagues and with grave disenchantment said, “Our planet is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence.” Muskie was referring to the fouling of the nation’s waters, “where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes.” The “cancer of water pollution,” he maintained, “had thrived on our half-hearted attempts to control it; and like any other disease, it can kill us.” He was right. If a cosmic villain were to contrive a wicked method for destroying a civilization, sabotaging clean water sources was as good as any. The sad truth in this case was that the villain was civilization itself (1).

At the time Muskie uttered those words, the rivers, lakes, streams, and coastal waters of the contiguous states were ailing. The Potomac River skirting George Washington’s Mount Vernon, wandering through Washington, DC, and supplying Muskie and his colleagues with drinking water received 15 million gallons of untreated human waste every day. That flowing historic water represented the norm. Barely one-third of the nation’s waters were safe for swimming and fishing. In Muskie’s home state, bacterial overload and oil pollution had forced authorities to keep major parts of Upper Penobscot Bay, one of Maine’s most important fisheries, closed to shell fishing since 1966. Over in Ohio, the Cuyahoga River, fueled by industrial waste, burst into flames in 1969, as it had in 1952, 1948, 1941, 1936, 1922, 1912, 1887, 1883, and 1868, thirteen times that year. The Cuyahoga flowed into Lake Erie, which beginning in the late 1940s had experienced summertime cynobacterial blooms and dead zones, largely the result of wastewater and agricultural runoff. Among other impacts, the blooms released toxins that decimated the mayfly population, a major food source for fish and birds.

Across the continent in California, the cosmic villain’s strategy to wreck civilization seemed to have been working. The California Assembly Committee on Water Pollution reported in the 1940s that water-borne diseases were not just degrading fishing and recreational waters; it warned that the state was on the verge of exhausting clean water supplies. California’s coastal waters weren’t faring any better. Since the 1940s, Montrose Chemical Corporation had dumped 1,800 tons of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT)- and PCB-laced refuse into the Los Angeles wastewater system, which had an outfall into the ocean. The company also deep-sixed ultimately 500,000 drums of the same off Santa Catalina Island, creating an underwater toxic dump site that wasn’t discovered until 2010. As a result, white pelicans and bald eagles, which had favored Santa Catalina Island as a nesting place, had disappeared from the region (2).

Back across the country to the southeast, DDT had for years flowed down the Mississippi River from agricultural regions of the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. A pulp paper mill in Panama City brought an end to commercial oystering in East Bay. A cellulose plant on the Fenholloway River in north Florida had been streaming dioxin waste down to the Gulf since the 1940s, when the state designated the Fenholloway an industrial river. When estuaries died so too did livelihoods connected with them. If you walked into an industrial plant and sabotaged its machinery, you would be arrested. But if that plant sabotaged a working man’s or woman’s fishing ground, or a bird’s, no one ended up in handcuffs, court, and jail. In the next decade, half of the top 30 counties in the country on the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly issued Toxics Release Inventory had disposal connections to the Gulf. Calhoun County on Galveston Bay was the nation’s leader in land-based toxic emissions. Mobile County, Alabama, flanking the entire west side of the 32-mile-long Mobile Bay, had the unfortunate distinction of ranking second in the country for cancer-hazardous releases. These findings were revealed after federal policy in the 1980s required industries to report their discharges. Before then, a regulatory mandate wasn’t necessary for determining what polluters were doing to the water. The state of wildlife populations were good indicators of its ecological health (3).

Along parts of the northern Gulf coast in the 1960s, the brown pelican, once a common sight, went missing. Bald eagles were no longer nesting on the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or western-most Florida coast, all of which had been prime territory for them. They were absent from the entire state of Mississippi and Alabama. The first person, Charles Broley, to link the decline of bald eagles to DDT was a retired Canadian banker who lived in Florida and had been banding eaglets on the Florida Gulf coast since 1938. Twenty years later, after seeing the nesting population plummet, he published an article in Audubon that pointed to DDT as the culprit. Four years later in Chapter 8 of Silent Spring, titled “And No Birds Sing,” Rachel Carson cited Broley’s findings. He also recognized that habitat loss had a role in nest declines. Bald eagles belong to the sea eagle genus, and while they will feed on birds and land animals, they prefer fish and typically build their nests within a few hundred yards of water. Developers could be prosecuted under the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 for direct harm to bald eagles or their nests. Yet, for decades, the construction and real estate industries faced few restrictions on dredge-and-fill projects that destroyed estuarine environments, which supported the bald eagle. By 1963, the nesting population in the lower 48 states fell to an all-time low of 487 pairs, pushing the species to the brink of extinction (4).

A greater peril to coastal waters around the U.S. Gulf was poorly treated wastewater. Virtually every Gulfside municipality pumped raw sewage into coastal waters daily, and facilities hundreds of miles upstream were sending the same down rivers to the Gulf. Eight water-treatment plants in Alabama discharged untreated waste into the Escambia River, which flowed down to Pensacola’s Escambia Bay, which as a result lost 95% of its seagrass beds (or more precisely submerged aquatic vegetation). Over in Galveston Bay, 95% of the seagrass beds had also succumbed. Tampa Bay lost 85% and Mobile Bay 70%—declines reflected in the local bald eagle populations, as well as the populations of another once prominent fishing raptor, ospreys. Muskie branded America’s rivers as “sewers to the sea.” They had been exactly that since the country’s founding (5).

For Americans, filthy water wasn’t only about wildlife. It was about public health and their quality of life. Muskie and the Senate Public Works Committee hoped to restore America’s waters by bringing before Congress amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1956. Collectively, the amendments would become known as the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA). The Senate favored them by a vote of 74 to 0 and the House by 366 to 11. Two weeks later, President Richard Nixon, who had generally supported environmental legislation, vetoed the impending bill, maintaining that the nation could not afford the proposed $18 billion the law committed in grants to municipalities between 1973 and 1975. Muskie and his congressional colleagues argued that the country could not afford to live without clean water. River pollution was responsible for $12 million in private property damages annually. The shellfish industry across the country was on the verge of collapse, and the overall economic damages were incalculable. “Can we afford clean water?” Muskie asked his colleagues. “Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make life possible on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed waters of our Nation.” On the afternoon after Nixon’s veto, Congress overrode his actions with a decisive bipartisan vote, 52 to 12 in the Senate and 247 to 23 in the House (6).

Congress set ambitious goals with the 1972 Clean Water Act: eliminate toxic discharges; restore all U.S. waters to a condition safe enough for drinking, swimming, and fishing by 1983; and end every form of polluted discharge by 1985. To date, none of these goals have been met, and quality-impaired water continues to stream across America. Nevertheless, the CWA was one of the most important and life-changing measures of postwar America.

Pursuing a provision of the new law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established wastewater standards for industry and water-quality criteria for surface waters (groundwater was not covered by the CWA). Ultimately, the federal government awarded $650 billion in grants for improvements in municipal wastewater-treatment facilities. Between 1972 and 2001, water unsafe for fishing fell by 12%, and housing values in the vicinity of cleaned-up water rose 25%. As of 2018, investment in clean water had exceeded $1 trillion. Many studies have concluded that economic benefits have not justified the cost of the Clean Water Act (7).

But clean water is life itself, as Muskie said in his 1972 speech. How do you put a dollar sign on that? Furthermore, that $1 trillion should be reconceptualized, not as an expenditure for clean water but as the expenditure for polluting water in the past and present. Attaching the price tag to clean water also implicates the country’s demand for living in a clean environment.

The first Earth Day, in April 1970, made that demand loud and clear when 20 million people participated in cleanup and tree-planting campaigns and protest marches across the country. A major shift in the public’s environmental sensibilities was afoot. That shift inspired the formation of waterkeeper, riverkeeper, and baykeeper groups and other conservation organizations dedicated to the restoration and protection of specific bodies of water around the country.

The EPA set up the National Estuary Program (NEP) in 1987 under the auspices of the CWA to work with local governments and groups to resuscitate the estuarine environments of bays. NEPs around the Gulf were established for the Galveston, Tampa, Sarasota, and Mobile bays. Their purpose was and is to develop nonbinding, nonregulatory comprehensive conservation and best-practices plans for large-scale restoration initiatives, shoreline protections, invasive species eradication, and pollution abatement. Among the restoration initiatives was seagrass replanting (8).

And the grass grew. With lawn and business runoff cut by half, Tampa Bay, surrounded by 2.3 million residents in 2000, experienced 100% seagrass regrowth. Sarasota Bay experienced the same success. Some places were slow to restore favorable water conditions. Pensacola, for example, did not replace its antiquated sewage-treatment plant across the bay from its economically dormant downtown until after Hurricane Ivan in 2004 backwashed human feces into streets, cars, and houses. Escambia County subsequently opened a $316 million, zero-discharge plant, and Pensacola Bay came alive again. So too did the city’s downtown (9).

Across the Gulf, as grass came back, fish and birds came back. By 2015, seagrass regrowth in Tampa Bay surpassed its coverage in 1950. Forty thousand pairs of wading and shore birds, representing 25 species, many of them not seen in decades, nested around Tampa Bay. Adding to the mounting evidence of healthy aquatic environments was the return of the bald eagle.

America’s emblematic bird had been listed as a federally endangered species since 1967. Congress reaffirmed its status after passing an updated Endangered Species Act in 1973. The year before was equally pivotal for bald eagles. Congress increased the penalty under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (Congress amended the original 1940 Bald Eagle Protection Act in 1962 to include golden eagles) for harming bald eagles. Lawmakers also added raptors to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the EPA banned the sale of DDT in the United States (10).

Even with all these protections, the fishing raptor’s return would not have happened without the revitalization of its watery habitat that was delivered by the CWA. With the necessary chess pieces of protection and cleanup in place, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and state agencies across the country launched bald eagle restoration programs. The programs included relocating eaglets from places where the nesting population of the species was healthy to those where nesting populations were nonexistent. By 2007, the number of nesting pairs in the contiguous states was approximately 11,000, enough for Fish & Wildlife to remove the bald eagle from the Endangered Species List. In the 2010s, the overall population continent wide quadrupled, reaching 500,000 or more (11).

The successful cleanup of important aquatic habit and the extraordinary comeback of the bald eagle is not to suggest that hotspots have not persisted around the Gulf. The dead zone that has plagued the region around the mouth of the Mississippi River is growing larger, not smaller. Over 300 toxic spills plague Galveston Bay every year. The sugar, cattle, and grass-sod industries in Florida continue to send harmful runoff down the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers to estuarine sounds on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Between 2018 and 2020, Tampa Bay lost 16%, or 6,350 acres, of its seagrass to toxic algae outbreaks, stimulated by lawn runoff, phosphate-industry spills, and overtaxed sewage-treatment plants. Climate change and sea-level rise have exacerbated these assaults (12).

Nitrogen overload, once a troubling culprit of untreated wastewater, is once again a top polluter, now associated with fertilizer runoff from commercial and residential applications. No place understands this more than Mobile Bay. Industrial pollution continues to stress the bay, which is the sixth largest watershed in the lower United States. It drains 65% of Alabama, parts of Georgia and Mississippi, and a speck of Tennessee, which are among the most biologically diverse regions of the continent, with 300 species of birds, 310 species of fish, 68 species of reptiles, 57 species of mammals, 40 species of amphibians, and 15 species of shrimp. Human population growth in Mobile and Baldwin counties (Baldwin had a 75% increase in population and an 89% increase in housing units between 1990–2007) has resulted in more paved roads, parking lots, rooftops, and green lawns in its basin. In 2014, followed by Galveston Bay, it experienced the highest level of nitrogen among Gulf estuaries, mainly from manure and fertilizer. During summers when the Gulf dead zone morphs and curls around to touch Alabama shores, fish fleeing the stuffy bay for offshore waters swim themselves into a choke hold between two threats: a hypoxic bay and a hypoxic sea. There is no escape for the plant life. Adding to that problem is wetland loss around the bay (30% of its saltwater marshes between 1984 and 2019) (13).

If anything, polluting recreational, fishing, scenic, and living areas has shown people how tightly knit their lives are to the natural world. We are part of it, dependent on it, not above it, and need to be a good citizen of it. The bald eagle may still face dangers (primarily lead poisoning from scavenging the gut piles of hunted game), the CWA may have not fully reached its goals, and there may even be backsliding with water quality in parts of the Gulf, but the historical record has shown us possibilities for the future. When we reflect on our environmental past, we tend to focus on the grim and the tragic, but there are plenty of success stories to draw on as we contend with the environmental challenges of the present century. Positive reinforcement, or a stimulus for desired behavior, comes out of those successes.