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The Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound provide scenic and thematic bookends for a troubling examination of what ails our nation’s waterways in “Poisoned Waters,” a two-hour documentary airing Tuesday night on PBS’ “Frontline.” Pardon the plug, but it really is TV worth watching.
Veteran journalist Hedrick Smith takes viewers along as he explores the threats to those two iconic water bodies and how their problems are shared across the country. He interviews watermen who lament the loss of the bay’s seafood abundance and tracks the Chesapeake’s “dead zone” back to its biggest source – the proliferation of chicken houses (and manure) across the Delmarva Peninsula. He also examines the perils to the Chesapeake and to Puget Sound from growth and development, as well as from the multiplicity of untested and potentially harmful chemicals that wind up in our waters.
It’s a complicated picture, and one that requires explanation. The documentary starts out a bit slowly, with a series of talking-head inteviews. Normally, TV’s impact comes from showing, rather than telling. But the comments are clear and compelling, as is Smith’s narration, and they build momentum as the story unfolds showing how the Chesapeake and Puget are “indicators” of a larger national problem.
To place the bay and the sound in historical context, Smith briefly recalls the beginning of the modern environmental movement, when burning rivers and vanishing bald eagles drew 20 million Americans into the streets on the first Earth Day in 1970 to demand an end to pollution. President Richard M. Nixon responded by creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and Congress adopted the Clean Water Act over Nixon’s veto. (He apparently didn’t want “Eh-pa,” as he called it, to get too tough with his corporate buddies).
The Clean Water Act called for all the nation’s waters to be fishable and swimmable by 1983. It lead to crackdowns on factories, sewage plants and other industrial polluters, and many if not most have cleaned up. But as the documentary makes clear, the legacy of that pollution lives on in the sediments on the bottom of Puget Sound and other water ways. PCBs and other long-lasting chemicals make their way into the aquatic food chain, contaminating the fish we eat and possibly even poisoning the Puget Sound’s iconic killer whales.
The people that Smith interviews on camera about the bay will be familiar to anyone who’s read The Baltimore Sun. Most prominent of them is eloquent author Tom Horton, former bay columnist and longtime reporter for the paper (and, personal disclosure, a friend). But Smith also gives air time to Jim Perdue and the spokesman for the Delmarva poultry industry, who defend their long and – until recently – successful resistance to government regulation of polluted farm runoff.
Interestingly, the failure of the state and federal governments to crack down on farm runoff may finally be ending. EPA lately has taken a tougher line on requiring chicken farms to get pollution discharge permits, prompting hundreds of growers on the Shore to reluctantly bow to regulation. Smith mentions that development in passing – it probably happened too late in the documentary’s final editing to devote much more to it, and to be fair, it’s not clear yet if it will really change anything.
Farm runoff notwithstanding, though much of the most visible pollution has been cleaned up, there are new and largely invisible threats. Smith follows government fisheries biologists as they study fish kills and mutations in the Virginia headwaters of the Potomac River. Those are problems that experts believe may be linked to the soup of hormones and chemicals getting into the water from consumer products like medicines, soaps, toothpaste and household cleaners.
The documentary closes by looking at how sprawl is destroying the natural buffers protecting our waters, and how efforts to curb it run up against cherished traditions (and legal principles) of private property rights. It’s interesting to hear how King County, Wash., which includes Seattle and its suburbs, has been dragged into court by rural property owners angered over their inability to develop their land under a 1994 “critical areas” ordinance – not unlike Maryland’s Critical Area law adopted 20 years earlier. Resolving such collisions between development and clean water are essential to saving the bay, sound and everything in between.
Smith returns East to look at how Northern Virginia illustrates the worst and best of the growth issue. Tysons Corner stars as the poster child for sprawl, while Arlington bows as a model of “smart growth,” with development clustered around Metro subway stops. Though transit-oriented development is catching on, sprawl and the attendant stormwater runoff are a growing threat to fish and water quality everywhere.
The documentary closes by arguing that the fate of the nation’s waters depends on engaging the public. It harks back to those earlier scenes of mass protests on that first Earth Day, but the engagement called for today is about getting everyone to take responsibility for their contribution to the overall problem, not merely pointing fingers at others.
“It’s about the way we all live,” says Jay Manning, head of Washington state’s department of ecology. “And unfortunately, we are all polluters. I am; you are; all of us are.”
Something to ponder on the eve of another Earth Day.