In the Chesapeake Bay, “oysters lay as thick as stones and posed a hazard to navigation.”
—Captain John Smith, 1608
If you measure every wrinkle and crenellation around the rim of the Chesapeake Bay, the shoreline runs ten thousand miles long. By comparison, the California coast extends eight thousand miles, and the coast of Maine runs for just thirty-five hundred miles. The Chesapeake is constantly refreshed by two large rivers, the Potomac and Susquehanna, and by a vast watershed that drains an area stretching across 64,299 square miles, including the District of Columbia and parts of six states—West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. With protected inlets, a shallow depth that averages only twenty-one feet, and a biologically rich mixture of fresh and salt water, the bay is known for having one of the most prolific fish, oyster, and crab populations in the world.
But the bay’s fantastic natural bounty and prime location ultimately worked against it. By the start of the twenty-first century, the region had become heavily populated and polluted, and the bay’s aquatic life was spiraling into a steep decline. The Chesapeake’s malaise is not unique, but it is extreme. Because it is such an ideal natural fishery, biologists point to the bay as a paradigm of how an ecosystem can be affected by many different types of pollution, in many ways, which accumulate over many years.
Fish, sensitive to changes in their environment, are excellent “indicator species” that reflect the overall health of a water system. The World Wide Fund for Nature reports that fish populations in rivers and lakes have dropped by 30 percent since 1970. This is a bigger loss than that of animals in savannas, temperate forests, jungles, or any other substantial ecosystem. Just as the health of the Chesapeake’s fisheries is a clear indicator of the overall health of the bay’s aquasystem, so the state of the bay is a proxy for what is happening to other water supplies and the creatures who rely on them. We know there is a grave problem with the water in Chesapeake Bay; the question is how and why this happened, and what to do about it.
In the spring of 2002, huge shoals of dead fish, primarily smallmouth bass, suddenly floated to the surface of the South Branch of the Potomac River, in West Virginia, about two hundred miles upstream from Washington, DC. Fishermen noticed that many of the bass had painful-looking lesions along their sides. They alerted the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR), which asked the US Geological Survey to investigate.
That summer, a USGS fish pathologist named Dr. Vicki Blazer led a team of scientists to collect fish in the river and to search for clues to what was happening to them. Out on the South Branch of the Potomac, Blazer found that the best fish to study were moribund bass—fish that were sick and on the verge of death but not yet dead. To collect bass humanely, DNR scientists working with Blazer first stunned them with an electro-shock in the river, which caused the fish to float to the surface, where they were collected and put into buckets of water dosed with an anesthetic. Working quickly, the biologists observed the outside of the fish, noting any lesions or other abnormalities. They took blood samples, and samples of the mucus that coats the fish’s skin and scales. The mucus is the fish’s first layer of defense against infection. If the flora in the mucus is normal, it will inhibit pathogens; if the flora is abnormal, it is a sign that the fish’s health is compromised.
“Before big fish kills, we’ve seen a change in the mucous flora,” Blazer explained. “It indicates contaminants in the water.”
The fish were dissected in the field. Biologists noted whether a fish’s liver looked too pale, the spleen was too big, or whether parasites were in the tissues.
Back at her lab in Kearneysville, West Virginia, Blazer and her colleagues examined bass tissues in thin slices under a microscope. They discovered that some bass had bacterial lesions, others had fungal lesions, and some were afflicted by parasites. The lesions had no single cause, suggesting that the fish were immunosuppressed, meaning their immune systems weren’t working properly.
Then came the shocker. When they sliced open the testes of the bass and examined them under the microscope, Blazer and her colleagues discovered clusters of immature eggs nestled where only sperm should be. This condition, not apparent to the naked eye, is known as intersex, or TO, which stands for “testicular oocytes,” or testis-ova.
This abnormality had been reported in Western Europe (“intersexual” fish were first reported in Europe in 1923 and in Britain in the 1940s), and it had cropped up sporadically in heavily populated regions of the United States. But this was the first time intersex fish had been identified in the Potomac, where they were found in unusually large clusters in the sparsely populated region along the South Branch. “TO is a clear sign of ecological damage in the bay’s water,” Blazer said. “It’s really strange.”
In the spring and summer of 2003 and 2004, her team discovered more intersex bass on the Upper Potomac, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and along the Shenandoah River. “There was a gradation,” said Blazer. “The South Branch, which is fairly sparsely populated, did not have as heavy a prevalence of intersex and fish kills as the Shenandoah did, which is more heavily populated and has more agriculture.”
In 2005, Blazer found that over 80 percent of the male smallmouth she had trapped in the Potomac, the Shenandoah, the Monocacy, and in Conococheague Creek were affected by intersex, including every single male bass at four of her six test sites. Since then, intermittent fish kills have occurred around the watershed, but “feminized” bass have continued to appear year after year, most often in the spring pre-spawn period.
Intersex occurs in fish species around the world: white perch in the Great Lakes, white suckers in Colorado, spottail shiners in the St. Lawrence River, shovelnose sturgeon in the Mississippi, sharp-tooth catfish in South Africa, three-spine stickleback in Germany, barbel in Italy, and roach fish in Britain. There have also been reports of panthers with atrophied testicles; intersex alligators, mice, and frogs; seals with suppressed immune systems; and female polar bears that have developed penislike stumps. (In a condition known as imposex, which is an abbreviation for “the imposition of male sex characteristics on female organisms,” female snails and other invertebrates have, on rare occasions, developed male organs.)
In September 2009, the USGS released the most comprehensive study of intersex yet, which revealed that it affects species across the country—in the Columbia, Colorado, Mississippi, Rio Grande, Apalachicola, Savannah, Chattahoochee, and Gila Rivers, among others. The only basin in which researchers did not find at least one intersex fish was the remote Yukon, in Alaska, where there are few people. Of the sixteen fish species biologists examined at 111 sites, intersex was most common in bass: a third of all male smallmouth bass and a fifth of all male largemouth bass were found to be intersex.
What could cause male bass to develop eggs? In the scientific literature, effluents from wastewater treatment plants in England, and runoff from paper mills in Canada, have been the primary focus of research. But when Blazer tested fish and water chemistry upstream and downstream of treatment plants on the Monocacy River and Conococheague Creek—both tributaries of the Potomac—“there was no significant difference between the two,” she said, indicating that something else was to blame. She noticed “these were all heavy agricultural areas. More and more I began to think agricultural runoff was driving this.”
A broad spectrum of man-made compounds is suspected of contributing to intersex, but a prime suspect is high levels of estrogen in the water. Natural estrogens are sex hormones, which help to modulate animals’ immune response. Synthetic estrogens come from pharmaceuticals such as birth-control pills, or agricultural runoff loaded with pesticides, or industrial runoff laced with plastics. Also, a group of compounds are known as estrogen mimics, the chemical structure of which allows them to act like estrogen. These range from herbicides to personal-care products such as antibacterial soap and even perfume. Indeed, so many chemicals show varying degrees of estrogenic activity that methods to identify them are still being developed.
Estrogen is a normal hormone, but when high levels of it or estrogen mimics are present, scientists believe that they bind to estrogen receptors on numerous cells within the body and disrupt the endocrine system. That system of glands controls the release of hormones and is a key regulator of growth, development, metabolism, and tissue health. If the endocrine system is disrupted, an animal can suffer lesions, cancer, and numerous health problems in its reproductive, immune, and nervous systems.
In 2007, in an effort to understand intersex better, a Canadian scientist named Karen Kidd added a small amount of ethinyl estradiol, one of the active ingredients in birth control pills, to an experimental lake in Canada. It caused the feminization of most of the male fathead minnows in the lake. Over a number of generations, Kidd showed, the minnows were not able to reproduce successfully, and the population was nearly wiped out. “That was really scary,” Blazer recalled. In a 2009 study, Kidd found that once she stopped dosing the lake with estrogen, the fathead minnow population rebounded.
“The issue is, if these chemicals are affecting the endocrine systems of fish, which are basically the same as the endocrine system of humans, then couldn’t we face some of the same negative health effects as fish?” Blazer wondered. “I think the answer is yes, we could.”
A growing body of evidence suggests that certain man-made chemicals released into the water and the air have led to a surge in serious health issues, such as breast cancer, leukemia, asthma, neurodevelopmental disorders, and physiological changes. According to Dr. Philip Landrigan, the chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, in New York, the risk that a fifty-year-old white woman will develop breast cancer has spiked from 1 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2009 (although some of this increase is likely due to better detection). Similarly, childhood leukemia is increasing by 1 percent a year, while asthma rates have trebled since 1980, and obesity and diabetes are on the rise.
It is well documented that Western women are beginning puberty earlier and going through menopause later. In 1800, American girls had their first period at age seventeen. By 1900, that had dropped to fourteen. By 2000, it was twelve. Studies have linked early puberty to exposure to PCBs, industrial chemicals, and pesticides. Although the evidence is not conclusive, doctors are particularly concerned about the role of endocrine disruptors, which may fool the body into undergoing hormonal changes early.
Endocrine disruptors are found in many everyday items, including cleaning products, pesticides, flooring, air fresheners, and plastics (especially plastic containers numbered 3, 6, and 7, which are associated with potentially harmful toxins).
Beyond early puberty, the incidence of intersex humans may, in fact, be on the rise. In 2000, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biology professor at Brown University, conducted the leading study on the frequency of intersexuality and found that 1.7 percent of the population develops in a way that deviates from the standard definition of male or female. Based on this figure, intersexuality is far more common than Down syndrome or albinism. The issue was thrust into the spotlight in 2009, when an eighteen-year-old South African track star named Caster Semenya won the women’s world 800-meter title by a wide margin—over two seconds—at the World Championships in Athletics in Berlin. After her win, competitors questioned Semenya’s gender: she has a husky voice and a muscular body, and her rivals complained, “She’s not a woman; she’s a man.” After an eleven-month absence and much debate, Semenya was allowed to race again in 2010. At the same Berlin track she won the 800 meters again. Another outcry ensued, and her competitors demanded that officials define what constitutes an acceptable biological baseline for female athletes.
Fish are most susceptible to endocrine disruption when they are still in their eggs in river sediments or are very young and still undergoing sexual differentiation. If human babies are exposed to endocrine disruptors when they are at a similar stage of development—in utero, or when they are very young—then they, too, could theoretically suffer immunosuppression or possibly intersex.
This is such new science that little hard evidence exists to link the incidence of intersexuality in fish to that in humans. For now, it remains an intriguing question.
“For me that is the issue,” Vicki Blazer said. “Are we exposing our children to those sorts of chemicals when they are most susceptible? And if we are, what are the effects?”
A river is like a urinary tract. To Bob Hirsch, this is not a joke, it is a statement of fact. As he explains it, doctors study a patient’s urine to find out what is happening in a person’s body. Similarly, he said, “River water is the urine of the landscape. And we in the hydrologic community look up and down our rivers to see what’s in them in terms of sediments, chemistry, pollution—in other words, to understand what’s really happening to the quality of our water.” With a grin he added, “I guess you could call people like me ‘the nation’s urologists.’ “
When I met him in 2008, Dr. Robert M. Hirsch was fifty-nine years old and, as chief hydrologist of the US Geological Survey, arguably the US government’s leading water expert. (He has since voluntarily stepped down from that leadership role to return to his first love, hydrologic research for the USGS.) With a lithe bulk, receding dark hair, and a bushy gray beard, Hirsch’s fuzzy robustness lends him the aspect of an old-time scientist-explorer. It’s easy to picture him in a sepia-toned photograph standing next to the legendary one-armed bearded scientist-explorer John Wesley Powell—the second director of the USGS, and one of Hirsch’s heroes.
The USGS, generally known as the Survey, was founded in 1879 to “classify the public lands.” The only scientific bureau in the Department of the Interior, USGS had some ten thousand employees by 2009. It plays a leading role in studying the nation’s waters but also has a broad portfolio that covers biology, geology, and geography. I noticed a pronounced esprit de corps among USGSers; many of them are lifers, and even those who have moved on to other things continue to proselytize on the agency’s behalf.
On this warm June morning, Hirsch stood ankle-deep in the brown swirl of Muddy Creek, a slim, lazy watercourse in Mount Clinton, Virginia, at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. The Blue Ridge Mountains rose to the east, the Alleghenies to the west; the verdant, gently rolling hills were planted with neat rows of corn; animals wandered around small barnyards. There were no belching smokestacks, traffic-clogged highways, putrid hog-waste lagoons, or noxious mounds of garbage here. It was difficult to believe that the most toxic thing for miles was the bucolic stream we were standing in.
In 1996, Muddy Creek failed Virginia’s fecal coliform water-quality standard, violated the nitrate public-drinking-water standard, and had excessive levels of phosphorus and sediments. It was placed on Virginia’s List of Impaired Waters. A more recent report found Muddy Creek to be suffused with “elevated nitrogen concentrations” and “fecal bacteria.” Locally, it has been called “the most contaminated stream in Virginia.”
Muddy Creek is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The creek flows into the Shenandoah River, which merges with the Potomac, which empties into the bay. As the water moves downstream, it picks up nutrients and toxins until it hits the Chesapeake’s ecosystem with the impact of an aquatic bomb.
“See that? That’s a typical indicator of excessive nutrients,” Hirsch said, bending to point out strands of bright green algae growing along the sides of Muddy Creek. “Hypoxia—the depletion of dissolved oxygen in the water, which occurs when the algae die—associated with agricultural runoff is a major water-quality issue. Not only here but around the world.”
Scientists have been studying the water quality of streams like this one in the Chesapeake Bay watershed since the 1980s, when they began to notice large algae blooms, which blot out sunlight and suck up oxygen in the water, killing all other aquatic life. This excessive plant growth is called eutrophication, and it is a growing concern worldwide. It leaves behind vast swaths of lifeless water, commonly referred to as dead zones. “We’ve come to realize that eutrophication is one of the most important questions facing the hydrologic community today,” Hirsch mused in a deep baritone. “Scientists have studied it for fifty years and have a pretty good handle on its causes and effects. Typically, it’s caused by some combination of excessive nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. But even with this knowledge, it remains a difficult problem to solve.”
But clearly, the problems of big, conspicuous places such as Chesapeake Bay begin in small, seemingly innocuous places such as Muddy Creek.
Since the 1990s, the quality of Muddy Creek has significantly improved, thanks to a concerted effort by farmers, and state and federal assistance. While its fecal coliform count has decreased by 44 percent, Muddy Creek is still listed as “slightly impaired” and is likely to remain that way.
One likely source of the creek’s contamination was staring me in the face. On the opposite bank, a cluster of horses whisked their tails and eyed us curiously from behind a fence. Up the hill a herd of black cows wallowed in a cool mudhole; as they relieved themselves into a ditch, the runoff carried their manure straight downhill into the creek. Across the road, a herd of goats scampered across a field, scattering manure bomblets as they went. A tractor snorted in the distance.
Almost every vista in the Shenandoah Valley includes a farmhouse, and appended to virtually every one was at least one—but more often two, three, or a half dozen—long, low, windowless sheds. Undistinguished beige structures, they housed chickens or turkeys.
The Shenandoah Valley has nine hundred poultry farms, and in 2000 they held 265 million broiler chickens, 25.5 million turkeys, and 824 million eggs. A giant bronze turkey statue, mounted on a stone base, declares Rockingham County, a two-hour drive from downtown Washington, DC, to be Virginia’s “turkey capital.” At the same time, Rockingham’s farmland is increasingly being plowed under for new highways, developments, and big-box stores. Each of these is equipped with hard roads, roofs, and parking lots, which hasten storm-water runoff.
In the 1800s, farmers in Rockingham County kept simple chicken coops in their backyards. As the population grew, so did the poultry business. In the 1920s, Charles W. Wampler Sr., “the father of the modern turkey industry,” raised the first flock hatched in an incubator and matured in confinement here. By the 1940s and 1950s, large poultry-feed companies began contracting with farmers to share profits from raising birds in exchange for feed. Over time, manufacturers and feed distributors consolidated. Today five large, fully integrated poultry companies, or integrators, process and market poultry in the Shenandoah Valley on a giant scale: Cargill Turkey Products, George’s Foods, Perdue Farms Inc., Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., and Tyson Foods Inc.
Think of this poultry production system as a protein conveyor belt. Integrators produce chicks in large incubators (no hens are involved). When they are hardly a day old, the chicks are shipped on consignment, a thousand at a time. The farmers raise the chicks until they’ve “grown out” into mature birds, which takes six to eight weeks. During that time, the farmers are responsible for the health and feeding of the birds, and the disposal of their waste. The chickens are raised on feed and medications mandated by the integrators. The birds are housed by the tens of thousands—roughly one chicken per three-quarter square foot—in poultry sheds. Standard sheds house 27,200 birds; some hold 42,000. Small poultry operations have one or two sheds; bigger ones have up to ten, fifteen, or even twenty-five sheds. After about seven weeks, the grown chickens are retrieved by the integrators and sent to a plant for processing into plastic-wrapped skinless breasts.
As I learned about the poultry industry, I began to see Rockingham County through a darker lens. What appeared to be small family farms and simple chicken shacks were revealed to be more akin to a stage set for industrial-farming operations. The bright little signs posted by every driveway—Perdue, Tyson, Cargill—are placed there so that the feed trucks know where to deliver their proprietary loads, but they are also heralds of corporate turf.
Each integrator has its own feed recipe, which is fiercely protected as a trade secret and subject to little government oversight. The farmers don’t know what’s in the feed, consumers don’t know what’s in the chicken they eat, and hydrologists don’t know what kinds of chemicals are being washed from chicken manure into waterways.
“Farmers have no rights,” said Carole Morison, who grew over 6.25 million chickens for Perdue, starting in 1986. She finally quit the business in 2008, after Perdue insisted she upgrade her two chicken houses, at a cost of $150,000, and she refused. “There’s no equality between the company and the farmer—those aren’t our chickens, they are theirs. The integrators hold title to them as long as they are alive. But if a chicken dies, which happens, it’s our problem. The only things the farmer owns are the mortgage, the dead chickens, and the manure.”
Once the integrators take a shipment of chickens away, the tenant farmers must “scrape out” their chicken sheds: they shovel the litter—an odoriferous mound of guano mixed with the sawdust or peanut hulls used for bedding—into big piles. Tractors spread the litter across acres of row crops, as fertilizer. This is an ancient, and seemingly holistic, method of farming. But the sheer volume of poultry waste in the Shenandoah Valley has overwhelmed the ability of crops and the soil to absorb it. The inevitable result is that it seeps into local waterways.
According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, Rockingham County has more excess manure on its animal farms than any other county in the nation. This agricultural pollution is immeasurably worsened by the large number of septic systems and “straight pipes” from area homes, which dump human sewage into the ground and eventually into the water table. A 1999 USGS survey found that nitrate concentrations in the Delmarva Peninsula, in Maryland, were among the highest in the country. In 2008, chicken farms there produced an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of manure, which was reportedly more than the annual human waste of New York, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Atlanta combined.
Bill Satterfield, executive director of the Delmarva Poultry Industry, defends the integrators. In a 2009 essay titled “Every Day Is Earth Day for Delmarva’s Chicken Industry,” he wrote, “To single out the broiler industry as ‘the bad guy’ in the Chesapeake Bay region is simplistic and sensationalistic and not based on the facts.” He has said that the poultry industry aggressively reduced nutrient pollutants in the previous decade. Because groundwater moves slowly, the effect of farming practices from thirty or forty years ago “may have allowed nutrients to get into the aquifers.” But, he added, simply because the USGS study found the highest concentrations of nutrients near poultry farms doesn’t necessarily mean the farms are the source.
“I’m not sure what these studies indicate,” he told the PBS news show Frontline. “Is it nutrients from a chicken, from a fox, from Canada geese, from ducks, from cats, from dogs, from humans, from septic systems? … If we’re going to talk scientific data, let’s not jump to conclusions.”
The question of who is legally responsible for the chicken manure is murky. Poultry industry spokesmen, such as Satterfield, maintain that the manure belongs to the growers, who are happy to use it as fertilizer. “The manure is considered a resource, actually,” Jim Perdue, chairman of Perdue Farms Inc., told Frontline. “We’re trying to help [the farmers] understand what the EPA wants … the farmer puts the litter on his land, and that’s a nutrient management plan, and we’re not involved in that, you know? If he puts chemicals on his land, he’s responsible for what he does.”
Nevertheless, Carole Morison, who lives on the Delmarva Peninsula, told me, “Nobody educates farmers about water pollution. I’ve never had anyone come here and say, ‘What we’re doing is not good for the environment.’ Never. Not once.” Rather, Perdue’s representatives would tell her about legislation proposed to limit industry practices and focus only on the negatives. “This law will run you out of business,” they’d say. The only “education” she got, Morison said, was when Perdue gave her the phone number of legislators they wanted her to complain to.
Agribusiness has powerful, well-funded lobbyists and is notoriously resistant to regulation. Poultry farming is just one part of a much larger agribusiness matrix that includes feed and fertilizer companies, irrigation-pipe and tractor makers, CAFOs, and so on. The integrators have warned that if environmental regulations become too tough in Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia, they will move their job-producing, tax-generating operations to more lenient states, such as Kentucky. Thus far, the threat has worked to minimize government oversight.
Leon Billings, a Maryland legislator from 1991 to 2003, said, “ ‘Big Chicken’ … hired the top guns in the lobby community in Annapolis, and they made every effort to prevent us from enacting tough regulations on agriculture.”
Federal regulators such as the EPA have allowed integrators to monitor their own agricultural runoff on what is essentially a voluntary basis, which clearly doesn’t work. Moreover, policing runoff into the Chesapeake has been hampered because Washington, DC, and the six states in the bay’s vast watershed—West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York—have different laws and customs.
“There are laws on the books, but there is no enforcement,” said Carole Morison. “It was very discouraging. The regulations get so watered down and full of loopholes they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”
As the poultry litter and other fertilizers flow into surface and groundwater, they carry heavy loads of nitrogen (fertilizers) and phosphorus (pesticides) with them. With help from rains, snowmelt, and spring flooding, surface and groundwater spread these chemicals far and wide. Or so the theory goes; as Bob Hirsch said, scientists have many clues but don’t yet fully understand the spread of eutrophication.
Nitrogen and phosphorus are basic aspects of the food chain, but scientists suspect that when they mix with water and sunlight—especially in a fecund place such as the Chesapeake Bay—the result is superstimulated algae growth and expanding dead zones.
The buildup of nitrogen, in particular, is emerging as what experts such as Hirsch call “the next global warming.” Nitrogen is an inert gas that makes up about 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere, but it has more reactive forms, one of which is made into fertilizers for food production. Some 90 to 120 million tons of nitrogen are created every year by natural processes, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and lightning strikes. Humans manufacture another 190 million tons a year and also convert nitrogen gas into ammonia, which is turned into fertilizer.
Humans have been applying nitrogen-based fertilizers to cropland since the 1950s, and the effect has been dramatic. They have provided remarkable crop yields that have helped to fuel the Green Revolution and stave off mass famine in places such as India and Mexico. But too much nitrogen can “burn” crops, kill off beneficial microorganisms, and deplete minerals in the soil; and it can lead to cyanosis, the “blue baby” syndrome. Farmers commonly overapply nitrogen fertilizer as a precaution against poor yields and to give their crops an added growth boost.
Carole Morison admits that she and her husband spread so much chicken manure on their fields that the land became oversaturated. When they had soil samples tested for nitrogen and phosphorus, they were told their levels were so high that they didn’t need to fertilize again for another fifteen years. “I bet most of the land on the Delmarva Peninsula is in the same condition,” Morison said. “If we were still raising chickens, what would we do with the extra manure? There’s nowhere to put it.”
A river is the report card for its watershed.
—Alan Levere
Muddy Creek spills into the South Fork of the Shenandoah River, which is where Bob Hirsch and I floated downstream in 2008 as part of a flotilla of dark green canoes filled with scientists. The Shenandoah is a midsize, fairly shallow, and ledgy river, with water colored a light brown, like weak tea. It flows north for 150 miles, from Virginia into West Virginia, and then into the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry.
I canoed with Jeff Kelble, the Shenandoah Riverkeeper, and right away we saw telltale signs of pollution: bright green algae streaming beneath us, clumps of foam on the river’s surface, cows grazing along the water’s edge, a small lumber operation, piles of garbage spilling down eroded banks. “Every spring since 2004 we’ve seen a jump in the number of dead fish, or fish with sores on their skin,” said Kelble. By 2008, the spring fish kills had eliminated an estimated 80 percent of adult smallmouth bass and a number of other species from the river. A task force has found few concrete answers to explain why the Shenandoah, in particular, has been hit so hard, and why the fish kills have targeted just the adults from a few species.
Of all the rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that Vicki Blazer has studied, the Shenandoah has the highest incidence of intersex bass, with testicular oocytes (the immature eggs) found in 80 to 100 percent of male fish trapped in the river. The Shenandoah, Blazer noted pointedly, is surrounded by farmland.
In 2006, the conservation group American Rivers listed the Shenandoah as the “fifth most endangered river in the United States” (after the Pajaro, Upper Yellowstone, Willamette, and Salmon Trout Rivers) due to three factors: an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus; industrial discharge; and a murkiness caused by erosion from livestock, plowed fields, and construction sites that blocks light and burdens aquatic life. Advisories warn against eating the river’s fish, which may be contaminated by mercury, spilled by the DuPont plant in Waynesboro over half a century ago, and by PCBs, which were released by the Avtex Fibers Plant in Front Royal, which was shuttered in 1989.
Kelble was an affable thirty-four-year-old, with dark hair and a boyish face. After graduating from Tufts, he worked as a Shenandoah River fishing guide. The action was so good that he quickly attracted clients from around the world. His wife opened a little B&B. The good fishing lasted for eight years, and then his livelihood began to die off.
In 2004 and 2005, 80 percent of the Shenandoah’s smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish died after developing lesions that looked like cigar burns. Since then, the river’s annual mortality rate for smallmouth bass has fluctuated, and Kelble worries about their “chronic health issues.” Juvenile bass are growing bigger more quickly than ever—reaching twelve inches in about half the time it took before 2004. Some biologists theorize that the fish kills have let fewer big predators and have changed interspecies competition for food.
Scientists from several agencies have conducted water quality studies in the Shenandoah, looking for signs of a virus, bacteria, or man-made contaminants. But if there is one cause of fish deaths, it remains a mystery.
Kelble suspects that arsenic, which occurs naturally but is also present in herbicides and pesticides, is likely to blame. Critics say that much of the inorganic arsenic in the region comes from Roxarsone, a feed additive that the industry claims is used to control intestinal parasites in poultry and promote food safety. “That’s a lie,” said Kelble. “According to the FDA, it’s really used to promote weight gain in chickens and give the meat color.”
Roxarsone contains a relatively harmless form of arsenic. But once chickens excrete it, bacteria break it down and it releases an inorganic form of arsenic, which is an immune-system suppressor in fish and a poison that can lead to nausea and cancer in humans. Scientists like Keeve Nachman at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future have pushed for the banning of Roxarsone from US poultry feed, as the European Union has done.
But the poultry industry strenuously denies that Roxarsone is responsible for fish kills. The Poultry & Egg Institute says “the benefits of Roxarsone … far outweigh the concerns.” Hobey Bauhan, of the Virginia Poultry Federation, said that arsenic levels from chicken litter (11.7 parts per million) fall well below the EPA’s standard for land-applied biosolids (75 parts per million). And Richard Morris, who uses poultry litter to fertilize his fields about a mile west of the Shenandoah River, told Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine that while the litter washes into his pond, it supports plenty of twenty-inch bass. Kelble counters that farm ponds hold largemouth bass, which are resilient; the Shenandoah’s smallmouth bass, however, have been dying in large numbers. Speaking for many farmers, Morris said of the fish kills: “If someone proves it’s poultry litter, which I doubt will happen, then [farmers] and [integrators] will do everything they can to stop it.”
Kelble isn’t persuaded: “This is a business that’s electing to continue introducing a known carcinogen and toxic substance onto the land, and it gets into the water. That is a problem. We need to stand up for the river.”
The Shenandoah feeds into the Potomac—“the Nation’s River”—which wends for 383 miles, from the Appalachian Mountains, through Washington, DC, to Point Lookout, Maryland, where it empties into Chesapeake Bay. Some 5.24 million people live in the Potomac watershed, a number expected to grow another 20 percent, to 6.25 million, by 2020. Intensive development around Washington has led to impermeable roads and buildings, which create “a waterslide for pollutants” into the bay.
The 2002 National Water Quality Inventory noted that of the approximately ten thousand stream miles in the Potomac watershed, more than thirty-eight hundred miles were deemed “threatened” or “impaired.” In 2007, the Potomac Conservancy, noting the persistence of these “disturbing trends,” gave the river a D+ for cleanliness. By 2010, the grade had improved to a C, which represents “moderate ecosystem health.”
Much of the river’s pollution originated with human sewage, and cleaning the Potomac required expensive upgrades to water treatment plants such as the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, just south of the capital. Blue Plains is a massive plant, capable of treating some 370 million to 1.076 billion gallons of sewage a day for the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia. In 1979, Blue Plains underwent a $1 billion upgrade, which added new technologies such as BNR, or biological nutrient removal, which uses bacteria and other organisms to consume sewage. (It was such a success that over a hundred other treatment plants around the bay were also upgraded.)
The clean water laws of the 1970s had clearly defined criteria, with deadlines and enforcement penalties spelled out. But in 1981, Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of deregulation and a massive reduction in funding for the EPA. Under Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, and his EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, regulatory oversight was sharply curtailed, and the EPA relied on industry to voluntarily police itself—in what has been called a “grand experiment.” It was a miserable failure. Around Chesapeake Bay it led to confusion, inaction, and countless missed deadlines.
Today, the loty goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act—to clean up all water pollution by 1985—remain unattained, even in the waters at the feet of the nation’s capital. Groups such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation hold fund-raisers to “Save the Bay” and urge lawmakers to craft meaningful environmental laws. But up to half the pollution flowing into the bay remains essentially unregulated, and the effects on aquatic life have been devastating.
The day in 2008 when we sailed across the bay, from Rock Creek to the Delmarva Peninsula, both in Maryland, it was bright and hot, and the Chesapeake’s water looked syrupy. We were aboard Adventure Bound, a thirty-six-foot sloop, captained by Earl Greene, a cheerful mustachioed raconteur who has sailed all over the world. At the USGS, he works on groundwater hydrology. There was not a whisper of wind, so Captain Greene didn’t bother to hoist the sails. It took Adventure Bound a couple of hours to motor across the bay.
It had recently rained, and we sliced through a patch of brownish water—“probably caused by storm-water runoff from construction sites,” said Captain Greene. Bob Hirsch and I sat in the cockpit with a group of scientists, eating blueberry bagels and sipping orange juice.
As the Chesapeake widened before us, the water turned from brown to gray-green. Captain Greene pointed to a patch of reddish algae, called Mahogany Stain, which is the result of overnitrification. The stain kills rockfish (striped bass), often carries coliform bacteria that cause painful sores known as fisherman’s disease, and has led to beach closures. “We’re seeing more and more suspended solids in the water, which block sunlight,” said Greene. “Sea grasses need clear water to photosynthesize in sunlight. But now a lot of those grasses, which provide oxygen and hiding places for little fish, are dying.”
Scott Phillips, a USGS hydrologist, added, “The bay is a pretty tough place, but it’s up against a big enemy. It’s like a fighter that keeps getting knocked down and standing up. But by the seventh knockdown, it might not be able to stand up and recover to the way it was in the 1950s.”
“Welcome to the dead zone,” someone said.
A dead zone is an area where oxygen levels are low, or hypoxic, a condition caused by excess nutrients in the water. Nitrogen and phosphorus are the two primary nutrients for microscopic organisms called phytoplankton. In small quantities phytoplankton are invisible to the eye, but in large numbers they cause algae blooms that cloud the water red, green, yellow, or brown and block sunlight from other underwater plants. When the phytoplankton die, they are eaten by bacteria, which uses up much of the oxygen in the water. Fish and crabs either leave the area or suffocate. Worms and clams emerge from their sedimentary hideaways in an attempt to reach oxygen. Other animals lower their metabolism and simply shut down. Those that can’t move die.
Thus, the excess nutrients mount a double attack: they promote phytoplankton growth, which blocks sunlight and destroys plants and grasses that provide food and habitat for marine creatures; and the bacteria that feed on dying phytoplankton suck away oxygen normally used by fish and crabs. Once every bit of oxygen has been used up, a new suite of bacteria bloom, often producing a strong sulfurous odor.
To Hirsch, the Chesapeake Bay is something like a giant petri dish in which multiple diseases are festering. “Most people don’t understand what’s happening here,” he said. “But they do like [to eat] their rockfish and oysters and crabs. And those creatures are all being affected by the water quality of the bay. It’s in big trouble.”
Rockfish, also known as striped bass, a black-and-white-striped sport fish, are fun to catch and delicious to eat. But in the mid-1980s, the Chesapeake’s rockfish were being overfished, and a moratorium was imposed. By 1995, the population had revived—in what wildlife experts hailed as “a rare triumph”—and the fishing ban was lifted. In 1997, though, pods of dead and diseased rockfish appeared in the bay, forcing beach closings and threatening a fishing industry worth $300 million a year. The rockfish suffered from painful-looking lesions—similar to those on the freshwater bass in local rivers—and from mycobacteriosis, a wasting disease that causes fish to lose weight and is the result of bacteria in the water. (It can cause skin infections in humans.) What sorts of bacteria are causing mycobacteriosis, and how they ended up in the Chesapeake, is the subject of ongoing investigations.
Even more distressing, the Chesapeake oyster, a quintessential part of local culture, is facing catastrophic population declines. Since the Civil War, a large percentage of the oysters eaten in America were the teardrop-shaped Atlantic oysters, Crassostrea virginica, from the Chesapeake. Oysters spawn in the warm season (hence the injunction against eating the bivalves in months that don’t feature an r in their name), by releasing gametes into the water, which fertilize when opposite gametes meet. A female Atlantic oyster can exude ten thousand to 60 million eggs, only a fraction of which will find a mate. This haphazard procreation strategy makes it essential for oysters to be bedded near one another. Once gametes connect and form a larva, it drits and uses cilia to “swim” in tidal currents. When the larva has grown to about three hundred microns, it extends its foot onto a hard, chalky surface and grows into a spat. The zone it prefers is just under the water surface, which holds the maximum amount of oxygen and food particles.
Chesapeake oysters have long been farmed by “watermen,” who used sailboats and long metal tongs or power dredges to rake them off the bottom. Traditionally, the bay was considered a “public fishery,” meaning anyone with a license could harvest oysters from state-owned flats. Catch size and limits were set but not always maintained. This led to overfishing, which wore down the population. Disease further eroded stocks. After years of decline, oysters began to grow too far apart for their gametes to connect regularly, and those larvae that did survive had difficulty finding hard surfaces to grow on. The population began to crash. Today, the watermen’s harvest is estimated at only one-tenth of 1 percent of what it was in 1900.
Few species filter nitrogen from the water as efficiently as oysters. “The oyster is pretty particular about what it eats, but it’s not particular about what it filters,” Bill Goldsboro, a senior scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said. A single oyster can filter about fifty gallons of water per day. A few decades ago, the Chesapeake had enough oysters to filter the entire bay every week. Today, that same task would take the existing population a full year.
Restoration efforts have been under way for years but have shown only glimmers of success. Over the summer of 2009, a surprising bit of good news came from the mouth of Virginia’s Great Wicomico River. An experiment that began in 2004, using broad beds of oyster shells that raised oyster seedlings above the sediment, resulted in a promising comeback. The experimental “oyster cities”—comprising 185 million oysters on eighty acres of raised beds, created by the US Army Corps of Engineers—contain the largest reestablished population of native oyster species in the world. Scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science believe the Wicomico could prove a model for revivals elsewhere. The looming question for researchers, though, is disease. In 1996, a healthy spawn of oysters in the river was eventually wiped out by disease. What happens in the next few years will be critical to Crassostrea virginica’s long-term recovery.
With all due respect to the oyster, the blue crab is Chesapeake Bay’s most delectable and famous seafood. But since 1990, the bay’s blue crab stock has dipped 65 percent. While the number of crabs in the bay has always had cyclical ups and downs, it has never before stayed so low for so long. Marine biologists say that the number of spawning crabs dropped to 100 million in 2007 and estimate that if the population dips below 86 million, the blue crab could be doomed.
The declining crab population is due in part to overfishing, but the main culprit remains the dead zones, which scientists estimate rob the bay of some eighty-three thousand tons of fish and other ocean life each year, which is enough to feed half the crabs caught each year. Dead zones usually occur only in the summer, when sunshine and warm water power the algae blooms, but this could change as the effects of global warming spread.
The watermen call dead zones “bad water,” and they compare notes on where algae are blooming and where the crabs go afterward. “In the summer, you’ll pull the [crab] pots up, they’ve got algae and mud all over them. The bad water comes in and coats everything and the crabs can’t stand it,” Paul Kellam, the captain of the Christy, told the Washington Post. His nineteen-year-old deckhand, Randy Plummer, said, “I want to make a living on the water. But there ain’t no future in it. Everybody knows that.”
At the end of our two-hour cruise, Captain Greene berthed Adventure Bound at a marina on the Delmarva Peninsula, in Maryland. In a restored inn overlooking the bay, we were served a sumptuous lunch of crab cakes—the signature dish of the region. They were large and moist, and as we smacked our lips and savored every last crumb, the chef emerged from the kitchen. He beamed as we applauded his work. Then the party began to break up.
Hirsch glanced out at the bay, framed in a window, and pulled the chef aside. “Just out of curiosity,” he asked, “where does your crabmeat come from?”
Without a trace of irony, the chef replied, “Indonesia.”
In 1983, the EPA announced an ambitious cleanup initiative to clean Chesapeake Bay of pollutants by 2000. The program was heralded as a model remediation program, but the result is a case-study of just how difficult pollution control can be. The six states that drain into the bay and Washington, DC, missed their first deadline, so the EPA set a new deadline for 2010. By then, $5 billion had been spent on pollution controls but nitrogen had been cut by only half the required amount and phosphorus levels had risen higher in eight of Chesapeake Bay’s nine major tributaries. The EPA did not punish the states for missing their targets, and while the states did impose tighter regulations on sewage plants, they did not crack down on pollution from farms or city sewers. The Obama administration’s ongoing attempts to force the states to take responsibility for reviving Chesapeake Bay have been met with fierce resistance and apathy. The core problem was the human fear of and resistance to change, which was encouraged by entrenched financial interests and abetted by a lack of political will. The bay states have different fishing regulations, their officials do not coordinate well, and their legislators are reluctant to get tough on small farmers and commercial fishermen (about one thousand watermen ply the bay, and many other jobs depend on them), especially during a recession or in an election year. Environmental groups, such as the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA), have pushed for capping fish catches and lobbied politicians to list oysters as an endangered species. But so far that has not happened.
On September 11, 2009, President Obama declared Chesapeake Bay a “national treasure” and unveiled sweeping plans for the federal government to take over efforts to restore its waters, including proposals to strictly regulate agricultural runoff, curtail development, and protect crab and oyster fisheries. It appeared to be one of the few high-profile victories for the EPA, and its new administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, during Obama’s first year as president. But Washington has a reputation for making bold statements that aren’t translated into meaningful action. Those working to protect the bay know its problems are complex and resistant to quick fixes.
In 2009, a pair of Maryland lawmakers introduced the Chesapeake Clean Water Ecosystem Recovery Act, which would funnel some $2.25 billion over six years into cleaning up the estuary. The bill languished for months, taking a backseat to debates over health care and the war in Afghanistan, until the spring of 2010, when BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill generated wide interest in environmental cleanup programs. The new bill would fund the EPA’s efforts to cut the amount of nitrogen entering the bay by 30 percent by 2025; states that do not meet their goals could lose millions of dollars in Clean Water Act grants, which, in Virginia alone, for example, amount to some $24 million.
But concerns over state and federal debts have undermined the bill, and agricultural and builders’ associations have pushed back. The American Farm Bureau, in particular, has opposed it, saying that provisions of the bill requiring farmers to fence off cattle, cover manure pits, and install vegetation that slows storm-water runoff would be too expensive for its members.
Dick Brame, a CCA fisheries scientist, described the Chesapeake’s ecosystem as “a patient that is dying of arterial bleeding, but he also has cancer. The arterial bleeding in this case is overexploitation of species. The cancer underneath is the continuing decline of water quality. If you can’t stop the bleeding, the cancer doesn’t matter. But if you do, you still have to deal with the cancer.”