Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
Here’s hoping that yesterday’s double rainbow signals an end to the very wet June that gardeners have enjoyed at the expense of beach bums.
While all the rain might be good for gardeners, it’s bad news for beach bums. After a very wet week in the Ocean State, seven of our best beaches are currently closed for swimming.
“It’s not unusual to see elevated bacteria counts after heavy rain, which explains this week’s closures to swimming,” said Dara Chadwick, the spokeswoman for the state Health Department.
She directed me to this really cool interactive map where you can see for yourself which beaches are closed. From north to south, they are: Barrington Beach, Conimicut Point, City Park, Oakland, Goddard Park, North Kingstown and Narragansett town beaches. (note: some inaccuracies on map)
So why do we get bacteria in the Bay after wet weather?
Rhode Island doesn’t have to worry about big factories dumping pollutants directly into the Bay anymore, but it does still suffer from what’s called “non-point source pollution.” All sorts of lawn fertilizers, oils and other environmental toxins – even pet poop – gets washed from our roads and lawns into Narragansett Bay. When we get a lot of rain, the Bay becomes too polluted to swim in; all that bacteria can make us pretty sick.
If the bacteria level gets too high, the effects become catastrophic for the native species, rather than just inconvenient for human recreation – as happened in the infamous 2003 Greenwich Bay fish kill.
Rep. Teresa Tanzi introduced a bill this year that would lower non-point source pollution by phasing out septic tanks in Rhode Island.
Save The Bay spokesman Peter Hanney said, “This is important because cesspools – simple drums in the ground with no treatment of waste – pollute ground and surface water, well and drinking water supplies, and beaches where people swim.”
This is the most isolated beach in the Ocean State:
It’s more than a mile and a half from anything other than salt water, in any direction, and there are no roads you can take to get there and there aren’t even any footpaths once you get here. The only way to get here other than a boat is to swim.
This beautifully lonely beach on the back side of this protected cove on tiny uninhabited island Hope Island in the middle of Narragansett Bay.
Hope Island is smaller than a football field and equally as far from Quonset Point as it is from Prudence Island. There’s nothing on it, other than some coastal vegetation and birds. Lots of birds. It’s as thik with gulls and egrets and ibises and heron as anywhere else in the state is with people.
Preferring the company of the former on weekends, I took my kayak over from a public beach in the Quonset/Davisville neighborhood Sunday morning, having always wondered about that all-too-inviting swimming hole on its southern side.
Legend has it there’s an old abandoned farm site on the northern side of the island that no one knows too much about and, like almost every rock that stays dry at high tide in Narragansett Bay, there was once a military presence on it.
These days it’s not only uninhabited, people aren’t even allowed there from April through mid-August. I found this out from the North Kingstown harbormaster who paid me a visit after I had breakfast and a swim at this beach.
Along with Dyer, Patience and parts of Prudence, Hope Island is a part of the federally protected, and monitored, Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. Hope Island is the only island in the Reserve to be seasonally restricted to people, maybe the only publicly-owned island in Narragansett Bay. With good reason. It may be small, but it’s one of the most important nesting grounds for wading birds in the state.
Just listen to all the birds in this video from the eastern side of the island.
In the winter, it’s a really popular spot for the seals. Rocky, deep water and no humans; what more could a seal want. And you wouldn’t know it from these two pictures, but it’s known as hot spot for stripers in the summer. I think this is around where they say some of the last lobsters in the Bay are left.
In both pictures, that’s Jamestown straight ahead, and you can see the bridges on either side of the land mass.
And this is the beach where I returned to the mainland…
Never underestimate the ability of the corporate media to come up with a ridiculous reason for why common sense environmentalism should be ignored. The latest example: plastic bag bans make people sick.
“Rhode Island’s leaders have a new Public Enemy No. 1: plastic bags,” proclaims WPRI blogger Ted Nesi. “But is this bit of feel-good policymaking actually bad for public health?”
In reverse order: No, plastic bag bans don’t make people sick – anymore than anything else used for food storage and not cleaned properly. No, this isn’t feel good policy – it will actually go a long way to cleaning up Narragansett Bay and help the aquatic ecosystem thrive. And, no, RI doesn’t have a new public enemy – the enemy is still the corporate forces that prevent the public from having a rational debate about anything that doesn’t line their wallets.
Nesi uses a post by National Journal editor, American Enterprise Institute fellow and arch conservative Ramesh Ponnuru to show that reusable bags might be dangerous. The scare tactic says that people are getting sick because they are using unwashed reusable bags to cargo raw meat and fish. Nevermind that Ponnuru is a climate change denier who authors articles with headlines such as “Why Republicans Should Ignore Obama” and “Why a Debt-Ceiling Fight Is Good for the Country,” it’s just a ridiculous argument to make. It’s the same logic that says we shouldn’t ban guns because some people get struck by lightening.
In fact, the Washington Post’s WonkBlog did a piece on the study’s illogical conclusions. It says the study is “certainly suggestive. But according to Tomás Aragón, an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley and health officer for the city of San Francisco, these graphs don’t prove nearly as much as you might think.”
In a memo (pdf) released earlier this week, Aragón explained that this is an example of the “ecological fallacy.” In order to establish a link between the bag ban and illnesses, the authors would have to show that the same people who are using reusable bags are also the ones getting sick. This study doesn’t do that. Aragón also points out that emergency-room data can be very incomplete—under an alternate measure, there’s been no rise in E. coli at all.
Aragón also offers an alternative hypothesis for the recent rise in deaths related to intestinal infections. A large portion of the cases in San Francisco involve C. difficile enterocolitis, a disease that’s often coded as food-borne illness in hospitals. And this disease has become more common in lots of places since 2005, all around the United States, Canada, and Europe (for yet-unexplained reasons). “The increase in San Francisco,” he notes, “probably reflects this international increase.”
After a long weekend of work, I took some time today to reacquaint myself with Greenwich Cove. In the morning, I went down to the old town dump, now called Scalloptown Park. Then in the afternoon I headed over to Goddard Park on the other side of the Cove. Here are some of the pictures I took and tweets I sent out while there.
Go ProJo! The newspaper’s editorial board makes a great point this morning in advocating for passage of two bonds that would clean up local drinking water and Narragansett Bay. “Rhode Island’s environment — beautiful in much of the state — is one of its great comparative economic and social advantages, and plays a key role in maintaining the public’s health.”
Their editorial comes the morning after Save The Bay and the Rhode Island Shellfishermen’s Association held a joint press event to talk about the importance of Narragansett Bay to the state and its economy.
Progressives ask Chafee to repeal voter ID law … about time.
Ian Donnis points out that not one Rhode Island Republican running for Congress has ever held elected office before.
Obama fans: If the media is scaring you into thinking that the presidential campaign is all of a sudden a horse race, keep in mind that the electoral math still strongly favors the incumbent. Watch this short video to see how much easier the path to victory is for Obama than Romney.
Speaking of presidential politics, don’t forget that Green Party candidate Jill Stein will be in Providence today at 4pm.
David Cicilline needs to court suburban voters, says Ed Fitzpatrick.
Patrick Laverty, who spends a lot of time on Twitter trying to refute progressive logic, blogged something on Anchor Rising he clearly wasn’t entirely comfortable with: “When I’m on the same side of an issue as Bob Plain and opposite from WPRO’s Matt Allen, it really makes me wonder if I’ve been replaced by aliens or something.” Allen, for some strange reason, doesn’t think third-party candidates should be invited to debates.
Today in 1975, Saturday Night Live debuts. Progressive comedian George Carlin hosted.
If you haven’t seen SNL’s take on the first POTUS debate, it’s pretty funny and well-worth a watch:
With September 11th just around the corner, it is time for RI Primary voters to make up their mind. I’m sure you have been sitting up half the night wondering which candidate has the strongest voice for our environment. Look no further.
Clean Water Action is proud to announce that, after vetting the candidates who seek the green stamp of approval, we have a list of those that we believe to be valuable allies. Whether your concerns are about sustainable funding for public transportation, keeping the ban on incineration in place, preserving and extending the life of our landfill, investing in water infrastructure or, more simply, protecting the beauty of Narragansett Bay and our endless coastline, consider these candidates when going to the poll next week.
For next Tuesday’s Statewide Primary, Clean Water Action has endorsed the following candidates:
– David Cicilline (D) – 1st Congressional District
– Chris Blazejewski (D) – House District 2 (Providence)
– Libby Kimzey (D) – House District 8 (Providence)
– Joe Almeida (D) – House District 12 (Providence)
– Art Handy (D) – House District 18 (Cranston)
– Jay O’Grady (D) – House District 46 (Lincoln and Pawtucket)
– Stephen Casey (D) – House District 50 (Woonsocket)
– Gus Uht (D) – House District 52 (Cumberland)
– Gayle Goldin (D) – Senate District 3 (Providence)
– Adam Satchell (D) – Senate District 9 (West Warwick)
– Bob DaSilva (D) – Senate District 14 (East Providence)
– Lewis Pryeor (D) – Senate District 24 (Woonsocketand and North Smithfield)
– Gene Dyzlewski (D) – Senate District 26 (Cranston)
– Laura Pisaturo (D) – Senate District 29 (Warwick)
Clean Water is contacting its members in these districts by going door-to-door, making phone calls, and mailing letters to urge them to vote for environmental candidates. Another round of endorsements will be made for the General Election.
The Journal ran a story Sunday on Rhode Island’s new efforts to deal with coastal erosion. It’s a decent piece, but it understresses a couple of important points and misses a few more.
First, the problem of shore erosion has been and will continue to be intensified by sea level rises pushed by global warming, which, yes, is caused by people. In fact, we might do well to skip the middle man and just say that climate change, like Soylent Green, is people. People are accelerating the erosion of Rhode Island’s shore. That approach would be perhaps uncomfortably blunt, but the ProJo is suspiciously tactful on the matter. Their article mentions rising sea levels and worsening storms as if these phenomena are happening for no reason at all.
Second, it’s important to note that the problem of shore erosion requires collective action. We’re talking about a threat to common property–property no one in Rhode Island can own privately. Sure, private property is in danger, too, but the site of the first damage and of the bulwarks against further damage will be the commonly-owned shore. Towards the end, the article has an interesting thing to say about the different incentives posed by slow erosion and big emergencies, such as hurricanes, but it leaves understated the importance of the property status of Rhode Island’s shore.
Then there a couple of things left entirely unsaid. Most important among them is a question: what does Rhode Island want to do with its life?
The impetus for the ProJo piece are the actions being taken by RI’s Coastal Resources Management Council to combat shore erosion, mainly a $1.3 million study that will lead to a Special Area Management Plan. Much of the article focuses on the technical solutions to shore erosion the study may discover, but more important are the values the study will bring to the fore–the values of the people who live around Narragansett Bay. What do they actually want out of the Bay? What do they want it to do?
Other people, in other places, have expressed quite clear values in their approach to caring for their shores. Last month, North Carolina infamously, madly, risibly drafted a bill that would require the state to ignore accelerated sea level rise in its shore management planning. When this brand of stupidity makes it to the level of a state legislature and becomes formalized in actual legislation, it transforms into something more than stupidity: it’s now a value. North Carolinians prefer posturing against anthropogenic climate change to having a beautiful, healthy shore. It’s a choice.
We’ll see what choices Rhode Islanders make as the CRMC study develops.
The other thing–a very important thing–the ProJo article misses is the strong evidence that SAMPs can work. After the 2003 fish kill in Greenwich Bay, CRMC convened some big meetings to figure out what could be done to prevent such calamities. One of the outcomes was the Greenwich Bay Special Area Management Plan.
This plan called for, among other things, sewer tie-ins for homes by the shore. The problem that needed to be addressed was that nitrates from septic tanks leech into the Bay where they feed huge algae blooms, which, after they blossom, die and decompose. The bacteria that feed on the decomposing algae suck up massive amounts of oxygen, and this process can cause hypoxia, low-oxygen events that asphyxiate fish.
There is evidence that the Greenwich Bay SAMP has cleaned up the Bay. Warwick delivered lots of sewer tie-ins, and, in 2010, DEM and the Department of Health found that a large patch of water in front of Apponaug Cove, a patch of water closed for almost two decades on account of bad fecal coliform bacteria counts, had become clean enough to open for shellfishing.
That’s serious. The bacterial standard for shellfishing is more stringent than that for drinking water. So, by caring for the poor menhaden who died in 2003, the people who live around Narragansett Bay made a thick bed of quahaugs available for commercial harvest in 2010. In mid-December of that year, several hundred guys crammed into the water in front of Apponaug Cove to make a day’s pay digging quahaugs.
The Bay is interconnected. It’s complex. But it can be managed properly. It can be well-kept. The important thing to recognize is, not only can Rhode Islanders’ values be reflected in the actions they take with regard to the Bay, but these values will be reflected, no matter what.
