Fall 2014 Newsletter
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OF NORTHEAST WISCONSIN j C ELEBRATING 29 YEARS OF WORKING TO PROTECT PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN N ORTHEAST W ISCONSIN i FALL 2014 What’s Happening to Our Waters? A look at local water concerns in Wisconsin and the efforts to keep them safe. River back in the 1980s, when the Clean Water Action Council was formed. At that time, CWAC leaders and other environmentalists were demanding enforcement of the Federal Clean Water Act (CWA), which governed the point source pollution coming from industries along the river. Again, corporate interests were profiting from what they were doing in their factories while doing significant and lasting damage to the Fox River and Green Bay ecosystem. While you will read in this issue about how more PCBs have been removed from the river, it must be remembered that their impact on the fishery has already lasted half a century, and will likely last a century more. The CWA and its provisions for citizen enforcement resulted in a tremendous reduction of point source pollution, such as effluent from factories and sewage “Water is the most critical resource issue treatment plants. However, it did little to control of our lifetime and our children’s lifetime. agriculture’s contribution to bodies of water such as The health of our waters is the principal Lake Winnebago, Green Bay, and Lake Michigan (called nonpoint source pollution). Today, most experts agree measure of how we live on the land.” that 70% or more of the phosphorus coming to these ~ Luna Leopold waters is from agriculture. Yet these waters provide drinking water to millions of people. Locally, the City An Introduction by CWAC President Dean Hoegger of Oshkosh obtains its water from Lake Winnebago. Leopold’s message resonated at a recent hearing of Marinette draws its water from Green Bay. Water for the Kewaunee County Land and Water Conservation the cities of Green Bay and Manitowoc comes from Lake Committee meeting, held to take public comment on Michigan. As you read about what happened in Toledo, the county’s Public Health and Groundwater Protection you will have to ask if the same could happen here. Ordinance. One after another, citizens spoke about You will also read in this issue that concerned how the protection of their groundwater should take citizens throughout northeast Wisconsin are educating precedence over the profits of corporate interests. In their neighbors and engaging their elected and appointed this case, owners of the 16 concentrated animal feeding officials in an effort to protect our most critical resource: operations in the county. With more than a half-billion water. We must protect it for today and for our children gallons of liquid manure spread over 80% of the county, tomorrow. it is no wonder that nearly 30% of the county’s well water tests indicated the water was unsafe for drinking. “Anything else you’re interested in is not going It is no wonder there was a great sense of urgency in to happen if you can’t breathe the air and those voices advocating for the safety of their water to drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. protect the health of their families. Do something. ~ Carl Sagan The message is not unlike that of the many voices rallying around the protection and cleanup of the Fox Clean Water Action Council News j 1 What the Waters Tell Us of those cattle are housed on 15 CAFO’s. In terms of By Gordon Stevenson organic pollution potential, the cattle of Kewaunee County The Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland, Ohio, is equivalent to 750,000 people. Milwaukee’s human in 1969. Three years later, the Clean Water Act of 1972 was population is 600,000 people and they have a sewage passed. Forty-five years after the Cuyahoga River burned, treatment plant. Yet the waste from the cattle of Kewaunee the citizens of Toledo could not drink the water from County goes untreated. Lake Erie that they had depended on for decades. Toxins While Wisconsin has a handful of largely voluntary from a bloom of blue-green algae, driven by agricultural programs that seek to control agricultural runoff to our runoff, were the problem. We have three water quality water resources, those have not been effective. The permit crises ongoing right now in this state that are on par with program for CAFO’s is the single state-administered the Ohio events: the Dead Zone in Green Bay, the nitrate- environmental regulatory program that applies to contaminated groundwater of the Central Sands, and agriculture. It is proving to be ineffective as well. There is the nitrate and pathogen-contaminated groundwater of another program called Livestock Siting that purports to Kewaunee County. protect the environment from livestock operations. Most Like what happened in Lake Erie, phosphorus-enriched any livestock operation can comply with Livestock Siting; runoff primarily from agriculture has fueled blooms of the bar is low. Its real purpose is to allow CAFO operators algae in Green Bay. The algae dies, sinks to the bottom and to locate most anywhere they like without interference from consumes oxygen. There is now a hypoxic area, or Dead local communities and citizens. Zone, that extends 30 miles into the Bay. Almost nothing Wisconsin dairy farmers currently produce 25 billion can live there because the oxygen has been consumed. pounds of milk annually. Global demand for dairy The data collected strongly suggests that the Dead Zone is products is at an all-time high. The owners of dairy CAFO’s expanding and the fisheries are at risk. Notably, the Fox proudly assert that they want to feed the world. That is River Valley and other areas of northeastern Wisconsin is code for the desire to cash in on an expanding market. The “CAFO Alley.” Brown, Kewaunee, Manitowoc and Fond State of Wisconsin is more than happy to help. The “Dairy du Lac Counties have the highest densities of Concentrated 30 by 20 Initiative to Grow Wisconsin Dairy” is a state grant Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) of anywhere in the state. program with a goal of increasing milk production to 30 The groundwater in the Central Sands is already billion pounds by the year 2020. Wisconsin’s current cattle contaminated with nitrates as a result of excessive population already is equivalent to the organic pollution chemical fertilizers from corn, potatoes and other row crops. potential of the human populations of Tokyo and Mexico Seventeen-26% of the water supply wells in the Central City, the two most populous cities on the planet. If Dairy Sands exceed the nitrate drinking water standard of 10 30 by 20 succeeds, a quarter million more dairy cows will mg/l. In some localized areas of the Central Sands, the rate be on Wisconsin’s landscape. That equals Los Angeles. of nitrate well contamination is 60%. Ingestion of nitrates is Apparently, the marketplace trumps everything else; even a severe human health threat. Nitrates are associated with our health. blue baby syndrome, several forms of cancer and diabetes. Dr. Luna Leopold, son of famed Wisconsin Ironically, since “CAFO Alley” has become so crowded, the conservationist Aldo Leopold, was recognized during Central Sands is the new destination for CAFO’s. his lifetime as one of the nation’s foremost authorities on The concentration of nitrates in the groundwater of the water. He said, “The health of our waters is the principal Central Sands has increased every year since records measure of how we live on the land.” A resolution to the have been kept. With the arrival of CAFO’s, nitrate agricultural water quality problem can begin when our contamination will accelerate. state government, the livestock industry and all the rest Recent news from Kewaunee County is not good. of us recognize that the ability of Wisconsin’s landscapes Thirty percent of the water supply wells are contaminated to yield agricultural products is finite. There is a unique with nitrates and pathogens, half of the wells in the Town of agricultural carrying capacity for each agricultural Lincoln that serve 334 households are contaminated with landscape in this state. The agricultural carrying capacities nitrates and serious disease-causing bacteria. In 2004, a for the watersheds that drain to Green Bay and the lands child in Kewaunee County became gravely ill from E coli that sit on top of the groundwater of the Central Sands and bacteria. CAFO manure had contaminated her family’s Kewaunee County have been exceeded. The health of the well. Campylobacter, one of the pathogens detected in water at those places is telling us how we have lived on the Kewaunee County wells, was responsible for the deaths of land. I hope we are listening. 7 people and illnesses of 2,300 more in Walkerton, Ontario, Over my 30-year career in water quality protection, I after livestock manure contaminated a public water cannot recall a time in Wisconsin when the water quality supply well. Kewaunee County has a human population problems were so severe and so numerous. I cannot recall of 20,500 people and a cattle population of 42,000. Many a time when state government has ignored the needs of its citizens so blatantly. I cannot recall a time when state 2 i Clean Water Action Council News government’s response has been more complicit. We need agriculture and we must have working landscapes. But let when contamination is most likely. According to Davina us not work a landscape so hard that all the fish die; let us Bonness, Kewaunee County Land and Water Conservation not work a landscape so hard that rural residents can’t drink Department Water Quality Specialist, that time period was the water; and let us not work a landscape so hard that selected because that is when the bulk of the groundwater parents fear for the lives of their children.