Letter from the Chair
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Surf, the Sound and the Sea of Toxic Green

Pete Seeger says that if you put a frog in cold water and slowly bring it to a boil the frog will sit calmly and simmer. In contrast, a frog tossed into a boiling pot will energetically try to escape. Our communities, are like that frog, sitting silently as our waterways slowly turn green and suffocate under a blanket of algal slime. A constant supply of nutrients, pouring into our waters from fertilizers, animal waste and inadequately treated sewage is killing our waterways. It’s a problem that we know how to solve. We simply need to keep our waste out of our water. But public officials at all levels of government are sitting on their hands. A survey of Waterkeepers around the U.S. shows nutrient pollution to be the single most widely shared water quality problem of any that we face. But it is rarely given the attention it deserves, even as the problem grows worse and worse.

Almost anyone who spent time this summer around the water has seen the results of nutrient pollution. Where you used to wade in, look down and see your feet, you now just see a sickly green. You’ve seen waters choked with algae. Fish circle at the surface, gulping for oxygen. Algae coat stream beds, displacing fish like trout that depend on a clear rocky bottom for spawning. And lakes, bays and coasts, where nutrients collect, are choked with massive algal blooms. When the algae die, they decompose, stealing life-giving oxygen from the water and turning once productive waterways — like the Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico and Long Island Sound — into lifeless underwater dead zones. Nutrient pollution causes pfiesteria and other diseases that now effect waterways all over the nation, killing fish by the millions. “Sky of blue, sea of green,” sing the Beatles, but this green is not natural, it is quite toxic and deadly.

We are literally exterminating life in our waterways. Long Island Sound, like coastal waterways around the world, is one example of how we are turning up the heat. Prior to 1987, the changes in Long Island Sound’s ecology were dramatic but so gradual that people just accepted them. Like the frog tossed in cold water, no one noticed the slow but lethal environmental changes. In the summer of 1987, Long Island Sound finally succumbed. Its eastern half died. Scientists found zero dissolved oxygen in the water. The fin fish left the area or perished. The barnacles, crustaceans, clams, quahogs and lobsters died. For the first time, people who lived around the sound experienced more or less a universal consciousness that something important was being lost. In truth, those losses began long ago.

The first European explorers to see Long Island Sound described a region of mythical productivity. They smelled aromas from Long Island’s flowers before sighting land and found 400 bird species, most of which are gone today. Henry Hudson’s Lieutenant Robert Juett described rivers choked with salmon (probably striped bass) and mullet. Giant dolphin pods schooled in the East River and New York Harbor. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of Long Island’s most faithful chroniclers in recalling its legendary abundance, suggested that the sound appeared to the first Dutch sailor as the “fresh green breast of the new world” compelling him to hold his breath in “an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Two hundred years after contact, the European invasion had little impact on the estuary’s extraordinary productivity. During the 18th century enough lobster still washed ashore each night from natural die-offs to fertilize the coastal farms of Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts. Inmates protesting endless servings of Long Island Sound lobster rioted in New England prisons. New Yorkers ate more oyster than any other kind of meat, the product of a bivalve — now extinct — called the East River oyster, whose 11-inch shell housed seven pounds of succulent flesh.

The 19th century’s Industrial Revolution’s impacts were noticeable but still lacked the drama needed to cause an outcry. The dolphins disappeared during the Civil War but entire communities continued to thrive on the sound’s terrapin, ducks, striped bass, blue fish, clams and other estuarine bounties. Waterfront market hunters and fishermen prospered.

By the 1920s, the terrapin, duck and lobster populations were in decline and periodic algae blooms clouded waters, once gin-clear. Somewhat less exuberant, Fitzgerald christened his contemporary Long Island Sound, “that great wet barnyard,” acknowledging its modern function as the primary waste receptacle for the enormous human population now crowding its shores. But even in Fitzgerald’s time, life filled the sound supporting its thriving commercial and recreational fisheries.

In the three decades before 1987, the pace of change accelerated becoming noteworthy even in the memory of a single generation. I grew up on Cape Cod, which is part of the hydrology of Long Island Sound. For a brief time, my family had a home in Glen Cove on Long Island. There were fishes that I knew as a boy that are gone today; among them the smelt, once so numerous they could be scooped with a bucket. Long Island Sound’s flounder catch dropped from 40 million pounds in 1982 to a million pounds in 1987. The oyster catch sank from 3 million bushels annually to 15,000. The blue crabs and razor clams abundant in every bay and mudflat when I was a boy — disappeared altogether.

The year 1988 began the first economic downturn in United States history during which New York City’s unemployed could not go to the shores of Long Island Sound and reliably catch a fish for the family dinner table. The fish were mostly gone. Shellfish beds were closed. Chemicals and bacteria had poisoned the clams and oysters. After 350 years of putting food on our tables and enriching our culture, commercial fishermen left their profession in droves seeking other occupations — hanging sheetrock or tiling roofs and turning their backs on the sound.

Clearly there are serious economic impacts when we lose an estuary like Long Island Sound. Diminished fisheries are only part of the annual $6 billion dollar water-based income losses to the Long Island Sound region caused by pollution. The cultural and historical losses are equally disturbing. Long Island Sound has a special role. It gives New Yorkers, prisoners of asphalt and steel, their best opportunity to retouch the land and water. When we destroy this resource, we lose our sense of the seasons and the tides and the life cycles of the fishes and our sense of the earth and our place on it.

In her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson sounded the clarion call against pesticides and toxins in our environment. And in the early 1970s, Congress passed laws limiting or banning pesticides that were killing our birds. Today, Waterkeepers are working to awaken an equal response to stop the extermination of our waters from nutrient pollution. We must enforce and strengthen standards for waste treatment systems, make agricultural polluters (mostly industrial meat factories) accountable for their waste and stop the other sources from dumping their nutrients into our waters. Practically all our nation’s waterways are at risk of suffocation. Many waterways are already feeling the heat. It’s time for us to man the barricades against this overwhelming threat to our environment, security and our way of life. w