You know that one running theme of this column is that we can fight corporate power and building democracy by taking care of our own neighborhoods, right? Then hang on tight and don’t think I’m going all green on you here ... Yeah, it’s Earth Day Month, and we’re going to talk about water quality.
I’d never worried too much about water quality. Here in mid-MO, we are riddled with creeks, springs, and ditches, the truly wet kind and the intermittents. Our state has 110,000 miles of creeks — far more than we can expect any state agency to monitor. And we have springs that bubble continually plus those that emerge from the side of a hill, run for a while, then disappear for a year or more. We are rich with water.
But quantity isn’t the same as quality and, in the grasping-at-straws way that our neighborhood has worked to keep our way of life in the face of Big Ag, we are forming a Stream Team.
It doesn’t hurt that one of our community members is a founder of Missouri Stream Teams. Joe Bachant is legendary in the field and has lived to see his creation spawn many imitators and at least one international effort to train volunteers to assess water. The international group, Waterkeeper Alliance, in their words, “provides a way for communities to stand up to anyone who threatens this right — from law-breaking corporate polluters to irresponsible governments. On ov er 244 waterways, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon to the Ganges ...”
Our local interest stems from the discovery last October of black goo in the creek that runs into the national forest to our south. Some horseback riders found it and sure enough it had come from the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO, that adjoins the federal land. After the report to the Department of Natural Resources, the owner pushed it on down the creek and was fined a stiff penalty, but how it got there is still a mystery. Did his lagoon overflow? Was the dam breached? Was the pumping system faulty? We will probably never know, but the incident made us aware.
I had always peered into the creeks that run under our bridges and assumed that if I saw fish, the creeks are alive. If there aren’t fish, the creeks are dead. Most of them, assessed in this way, I assumed to be dead.
But it turns out there’s a lot more to it. There are itty bitty creatures that indicate whether the water is good, kinda good or just barely hanging on. And those little creatures cling to rocks, bury themselves in sand or grab on to roots. You can’t really see them unless you go for it.
The vitality of streams is important. As EPA administrator Gina McCarthy recently told the National Farmers Union, “First, one in three Americans get their drinking water from streams and wetlands that lack clear protection from pollution today. Second, our economy — from manufacturing and brewing to farming and ranching — can’t function without clean water. And third, the species we depend on and the places we love for recreation can’t survive without it.”
In our Stream Team class, which was a solid 8 hours long, we learned the techniques for using a kicknet to catch the critters and forceps and ice cube trays to pull them off the net to be counted. These are critters that you can see with your naked eyes... I mean, with your naked bifocals. Mayfly nymphs and gilled snails, for example, are sensitive to pollution and found in good water. Midge Fly larva and pouch snails, on the other hand, can survive in any quality of water. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff in between. I was embarrassed I had never noticed these critters before.
Who else was in the class? Trout fishermen who, I confess, had always looked a little silly to me in their hip waders and deep concentration, turned out to know what to look for before they joined us. So that silly sport has some benefit, environmentally.
And there were teachers who wanted to take their classes to the creeks. And scout leaders and family groups that wanted something fun and beneficial to do together. There was a church group. And, like our neighborhood, there were groups watching industry get away with some bad stuff. It turns out that Stream Teams and Waterkeepers are making some inroads against the big polluters.
Now we’re all excited about our first attempts at evaluating our streams. We’re putting aside a lot of time, because I know it will take us forever at first. But we’ll get more efficient with practice.
So, see, going green isn’t just an individual effort, like recycling and turning off the lights. It can give us a whole new way to practice democracy, starting with our neighbors. Happy Earth Day!
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2015
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