Transcripts For WMPT Frontline 20090924 : comparemela.com

Transcripts For WMPT Frontline 20090924



>> this program is supported by disney. >> wherever there is life, there are stories of unbelievable adventure. this earth day, three families take an extraordinary journey across our planet. "earth"-- rated g. only in theaters. >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. with major funding from the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. and additional funding for frontline and for "poisoned waters" from the park foundation. committed to raising public awareness. major funding for "poisoned waters" was provided by the seattle foundation. your gift, your community. the russell family foundation. the wallace genetic foundation. the morris and gwendolyn caferts foundation. the key campbell foundjror the environment. the merrill family foundation. with additional funding from: the abell foundation the bullitt foundation the rauch foundation. and by the following: >> narrator: puget sound. chesapeake bay. they are america's great coastal estuaries and they are in peril. >> i would put puget sound in the intensive care unit. the situation is critical. >> the chesapeake bay is like the canary in the coal mine. it is an indicator of what we are now learning to expect in any body of water across the planet. >> narrator: three decades after the clean water act, frontline takes a hard look at why america has failed for so long to clean up the nation's waterways. >> agriculture is by far the largest source of pollution to the all of the waters in the country. >we're not talking about little ma and pa on the farm anymore. we're talking about industrial production. it is industrial waste. >> narrator: and how contaminated waters threaten not only wildlife... >> you have frogs with six legs, male frogs with ovaries. >> narrator: ...but ultimately threaten our own health as well. >> the same things that are killing the animals will kill people, too. >> narrator: in a two hour special report, frontline correspondent hedrick smith uncovers the danger to the nation's waterways. tracking new threats. r)vyou are living in washington, dc, would you drink water coming out of the potomac? >> probably not. ihallenges. >> this is sick.@ >> this is sick. it's like a cancer. it's growing. >> narrator: and discovering the ultimate problem. >> it's about the way we all live, and unfortunately, we are all polluters. i am, you are, and all of us are. >> narrator: tonight, frontline investigates what's poisoning america's waters. >> hedrick smith: chesapeake bay at dawn. one of those magical moments when you feel at peace and in harmony with nature. for me, the chesapeake is a special place, an extraordinary natural treasure. over the past 30 years, i've spent a lot of time on the bay-- sailing, hiking, swimming, crabbing. i love the water-- its calm, its beauty, its majesty, and i'm fascinated by its meandering shorelines. in the early morning light the bay can look so pure and pristine, but that's deceiving. i know that like most of america's waterways, chesapeake bay is in trouble despite years of trying to save it, and that worries me. i wanted a firsthand look, and so i headed out on the water with larry simns, a waterman who's been commercially fishing the bay for 60 years. >> in its peak time, if you drained the bay, the crabs and the fish and oysters and everything would probably be ten foot deep on the bottom all over the whole bay. >> smith: over the past several decades, simns has watched the good times of bountiful harvests slip away. about like your home waters here. >> yeah. yeah. >> smith: and what is the chesapeake bay like today for a watermen? >> the only thing that we have in abundance that we had back then was the striped bass, the rockfish. other than that, everything else is diminished. two million bushel a year. now, we catch 100,000 bushel. i never, ever dreamed that i wouldn't be catching shad anymore, i wouldn't be catching yellow perch anymore, i wouldn't be catching tarpon anymore. i never, ever dreamed that that would come to an end. >> smith: simns took me to the old fishing town of rock hall, where watermen were bringing in the day's crab catch. crabs have long been the trademark of chesapeake bay, but the catch now is down more than 50% from 25 years ago. so how was the catch today? >> well, it dropped off a little bit today. >> smith: dropped off. so what are you... coming in with a six, seven, eight bushels? >> nine altogether. >> smith: nine bushels? ten years ago, how many would you have caught on an average day? >> be about 30. >> smith: about 30 bushels, about three times as many. >> yeah. >> smith: how do you feel about the bay and what's happened to it? >> i think it's a tragedy. i think... a little upset that my children can't enjoy this way of life that i cherish, you know? >> in rock hall harbor, all that used to be processing houses for striped bass, for oysters, for clams, for everything we was harvesting. >> smith: so a lot of people in the fish and crab and oyster business went out of business? >> yeah. >> you're talking about billions of dollars of economic impact with oysters, crabs, shad, striped bass. the define in the fisheries has just been dramatic. i wouldn't have thought even ten or 15 years ago that we would literally lose oysters as a commercial fishery. we have. it's... it's done. >> smith: watermen are seeing the symptoms of decline, but the deeper problem, i learned, is that the very dynamics of the bay's ecosystem are being fundamentally altered by human impact. the bay is acutely vulnerable because its watershed is so large-- 11,000 miles of shoreline, and it drains big rivers from six states. >> in all of north america, it's the largest estuary. we're talking a sixth of the east coast from cooperstown, new york, out into west virginia, almost down to north carolina. >> smith: it is the receptacle of an enormous volume of water in a uniquely shallow basin. its average depth is only 21 feet, making the bay an ecological hothouse. >> it's fabulously productive, but also exquisitely vulnerable to land use because it has a huge drainage basin. so you have, you know, the classic place for trying to determine whether humans and nature can coexist. >> smith: one problem for chesapeake bay is that humans have drastically over-fished the resources, especially crabs. but scientists have also tied the dramatic decline in fisheries here to manmade pollution and a growing phenomenon called dead zones. >> dead zones happen when too much fertilizer-- nitrogen, phosphorous-- comes in. it grows lots of excess algae. the algae die, decompose, suck up the oxygen from the deeper waters, which aquatic life needs to live. >> smith: this is what a healthy oxygen-rich bay bottom looks like-- full of lush grasses where fish and crabs can grow. a dead zone is completely different-- barren and empty. >> the bottom of the bay, when there is an algae bloom or when you have a dead zone, is as dead as the face of the moon. there is absolutely no oxygen ip these dead zones, and nothing can live that requires oxygen for survival. >> smith: crabs can't make it? fish can't make... >> crabs can't make it. oysters can't make it. fish that get caught in the dead zone will literally die if they can't get out of the dead zone. they'll float up to the surface, their bellies will explode, and you'll see fish kills throughout the chesapeake bay. >> smith: in the heat of summer, dead zones now occupy as much as 40% of the main stem of the chesapeake bay. but it's not just a bay-wide problem, it's worldwide. all across the planet, dead zones have been doubling in frequency and size every decade. there's one in the gulf of mexico the size of the state of massachusetts. pollution is not just creating dead zones. it's playing havoc with human health and recreation. >> and those health advisories at sandy point are still in effect, and will be... >> smith: every year, more beaches have to close periodically because of pollution. >> people are urged to avoid direct contact with the water... >> the unfortunate reality is that people get sick from contact with water every single day, and we have information suggesting that that problem is getting worse today than it was ten years ago. and this is a result of a number of different contaminants being in the water that ultimately can make people sick. >> today we're at a point at which this system called the chesapeake bay may be on the verge of ceasing to function in its most basic capacities. and what do i mean by that? providing a place for people to swim, recreation. providing a source of seafood-- shellfish, finfish, oysters, crabs, underwater grasses which support the crab population. and being a system that is absolutely wonderful to look at, 7'óeal pride to theto be a region. we are at the verge where all of those functions of the chesapeake bay that wew could be lost to the next generation, unless wet dramatic and fundamentalwon today. >> smith: what leaves the bay's defenders distraught is not only its perilous condition, but the public's evident loss of interest and the failure of federal and state governments to stick to their repeated promises over the past 25 years to clean up the bay. >> there has been so much investment in science and in modeling and in monitoring. we know today precisely what is necessary to save the chesapeake, and now it's very clear it comes down to the question of political will. >> you know there's a tendency to blame it on lack of political will. well, hell, who elects the politicians and who re-elects them? last time i looked, it was us. we ran out of excuses for delaying many, many years ago around the chesapeake. we can afford it.l]o we don't necessarily want to pay for it, but we can afford it. so i have to say that collectively we don't care enough. >> smith: there was a time when we, as a nation, did care enough to demand action: four decades ago when the country was rocked by a series of environmental disasters. >> well, i remember what it was like before earth day. i remember when the cuyahoga river burned with flames that were eight stories high. i remember when... the santa barbara oil spill in 1969, that closed virtually all the beaches in southern california. i remember when they declared lake erie dead. i remember that i couldn't swim# in the hudson or the charles or the potomac when i was growing up. >> smith: we could see the pollution, smell it, even touch it. the problem was in our faces and the public demand for action exploded on earth day. ( angry chanting ) >> in 1970, this accumulation of insults drove 20 million americans out onto the street, 10% of our population, the largest public demonstration in american history. >> there was anger at the state of the world, at the state of your own backrd, whether it be ountain range, whatever it wasr) you related to as the environment. there was anger that we as a country had let it go. and there was a very much of a grassroots rebellion saying this has got to stop. >> it was a big issue. it exploded on the country. it forced the... a republican administration and a president, which had nevsreally... he had never thought about this very much, president nixon. it forced him to deal with it because public... the public said this is intolerable. we've got to do something aboutb it. >> smith: responding to congressional pressure, nixon created the environmental protectic@óvvcy. he picked bill ruckelshaus, a justice department lawyer with a solid republican pedigree, as its first administrator. and ruckleshaus quickly took charge. >> we had to select some big visible polluters, both industrial and municipal, go after them, make sure the public understood we were being responsive to their concerns, and that would energize the agency and get us in a position to do things that needed to be done in order to address the problem. >> smith: congress armed ruckelshaus and the epa with a raft of new environmental laws, like the clean water act, that imposed strict pollution limits and penalties for violators. the act called for america'sóo>- waterways to be fishable and swimmable again by 1983. it had strong bipartisan support in congress, but not, it turns 2x >> when we finally passed the clean water act in the senate and the house, nixon vetoed it. and for the first time in the nixon administration, he had a veto overridden, substantially and significantly. >> smith: and what does that say? nixon was out of step with the conry? nixon didn't care about the problem? >> it was my ijysion-- and i'm a democrat so i've got to be forgiven for that-- but it was my impression that nixon's interest in the environment was strictly political. >> he didn't know much about the environment, and frankly, hei3 wasn't very curious about it. he never asked me ñ2e whole time i was at epa, is the air really dirty? is something wrong with the water? what are we worried about here? he would warn me. he said, "you got to be worried about that ehpa," he called it ehpa. he was the one person in the country that called it ehpa. >> smith: epa. >> epa. he'd call it ehpa. and he said those people over there, now don't get captured by that bureaucracy. >> smith: but with bipartisan backing in congress, ruckelshaus took strong action anyway. he banned ddt, imposed a tight deadline for reducing auto emissions, sued several cities and big steel and chemical companies for polluting the air and water. his tough approach made enemies. >> most of the people running big american manufacturing facilities in those days believed this was all a fad. it was going to go away and...and all they had to do was sort of hunker down until the public opinion subsided, public concern subsided, and it would go away. >> smith: when you went after the big polluters, you sued them, you took them to court. what was the reaction of u.s. steel? >> oh, boy, they didn't like it. i remember going up to see ed cott who was the ceo of u.s. steel and he told me, he said, "you know we don't like you very much," and he said, "we don't... we certainly don't like you" agency." and i said, "well if that's your attitude, then we are probably going to get in a fight over it." >> smith: so you had xenforce the law. you had to be a tough regulator. >> that's right. you had to reassure the public that this was a problem the government was taking seriously. we had to be tough. we had to issue standards and we had to enforce them. >> smith: one of the first big regulatory success stories came right here on the potomac river. >> the potomac river goes up to the mountains of appalachia. it comes past our nation's capital, and then it enters the3 estuary of the chesapeake bay. and what we saw in the potomac river in the l960s was what was seen in many rivers around the country, where it smelled so bad you didn't want to get anywhere near it, and that odor was in large part created by poorly treated sewage. ailing in a small boat and capsized, you had i my hazardous to your health to come in contact with the water. >> smith: restoring the potomac meant modernizing the sewage treatment plants along the river, like this one called blue plains, just south of washington. blue plains handles the waste or two million people, and it embodies just the kind of pollution targ'njákid%)z water act-- pollution coming out of a pipe. was the biggest single source of pollution to the potomac. >> blue plains was the key wastewater treatment plant that had to be modified if we were really going to make a... a good effort at restoring the water quality in both the river and in the bay. >> smith: the potomac had become overrun with acres of green algae caused by excess nutrientk from human waste, like phosphorous and nitrogen. >> the regulators said, "okay, phosphorus is the problem in the potomac, twore, you people running the wastewater treatment plants will upgrade to remove phosphorus," and it happened in >> smith: but the river didn't improve all that much. it turned out that they needed to remove nitrogen, too, a costly process. but cliff randall found an answer: a new, more economical technology called biological nutrient removal, or bnr. >> the way we treat sewage is we take in the sewage and we feed it to a large mass of bacteria and other microorganisms. and basically they eat the sewage. >> smith: they eat the sewage? >> that's correct. >> smith: munch, munch, munch. >> that's right. >> smith: it took a billion dollars in federal and state funds to modernize blue plains with several new technologies, including bnr, but the effort paid off, and more than 100 sewage treatment plants around the bay adopted bnr technology. how much of these early gains were not only the result of technology, but of a pretty tough regulatory stick from the epa and the state governments?- >> you know, that was a tried- and-true formula. i mean, with sewage treatment-- where we made the biggest gains early on, and continue to make the biggest gains-- you have very clear laws. you have penalties, you have deadlines, you have enforcement, you have inspection. i mean, we know what works. ♪ >> smith: but the 1980s brought a new era, and the political climate on the environment changed. the winds of deregulation were blowing through washington, especially during the reagan years. >> it is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. it is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment. >> there's no question that the reagan administration, in fact, brought to washington a.dq deregulatory agenda. i remember back in the reagan days of seeing memos that would come out from the white house to the chamber of commerce and other big businesses asking them for a list of regulations from which they would want relief. >> smith: environmental regulation was a prime target of the reagan white house for giving relief to american business. >> the reagan administration essentially gutted the epa. they stopped it in its tracks for a period of six, seven years. reagan and his white house appointed people to run the environmental protection agency who were flat out opposed to the mission of the agency and were set to undo that mission. >> smith: the reagan administration not only handcuffed epa on enforcement, it shifted to a new strategy of voluntary compliance, a strategy typified by the reagan epa's new program for chesapeake bay. >> what we created in the chesapeake bay waza grand experiment. it was going to be an alternative to the regulatory approach that had swept the epa, that had swept the federal system. they were going to try to do this in a non-regulatory, cooperative manner. >> smith: the new approach was long on promises and targets, but short on hard deadlines and clear accountability. >> it is a voluntary program. you are never going to effectively deal with a multi- state pollution probw-h a voluntary program. >> smith: the result was the chesapeake bay program repeatedly mis.s targets, leaving unfulfilled the clean water act's promise to radically reduce water pollution. onsequences of how9" deregulation has played out here on the chesapeake bay's eastern shore, where huge factory-scale farms now dominate the landscape, and where half the pollution flowing into the bay-- much of it from agriculture-- remains essentially unregulated. i had come here to meet rick dove, a professional photographer and environmental consultant who under the authority of the clean water act has been gathering information for a potential citizens lawsuit against agricultural polluters. dove took me up on a small plane and gave me a bird's eye view of his detective work in the chesapeake bay watershed. you can actually get a really clear picture up here. it's almost like a diagram up here looking at i

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