Citizens Group Holds Seminar on Future of Chesapeake Bay

Laurie Savage
Maryland Correspondent

JARRETTSVILLE, Md. — The Peach Bottom Concerned Citizens Group, Inc., says coming together in numbers is the best way to advocate for a better environment and local food systems.

“It’s about building support. Grassroots is very, very important,” said Maria Payan of the PBCCG. She said the group formed to fight a 4,400-head swine concentrated animal feeding operation that was proposed near the Pennsylvania township.

The PBCCG works to keep farming viable, preserve natural resources for future generations and protect communities by promoting socially responsible agriculture.

Citizens from Maryland and Pennsylvania were invited to join a discussion at the PBCCG-sponsored seminar, “The Chesapeake Bay: Our Bay, Our Food Production, Our Responsibility,” held Saturday, Nov. 7, at Jarrettsville Gardens.

Payan said voluntary, collaborative efforts by area states to clean up and restore the Chesapeake Bay have failed, and the bay remains in a dismal state. Steps now need to be taken to enforce the cleanup effort.

“EPA is not doing their job,” said Tommy Landers, a policy advocate for Environment Maryland who spoke at the seminar. President Obama recently signed an executive order to transfer leadership of the Chesapeake Bay to a federal level.

“Now is our chance, we need to get involved,” Landers said.

Payan pointed to agriculture as well as development as the culprits of polluting the bay.

“We know the cause and the cure, the question is do we have the political will?” Payan said.

Maryland Delegate H. Wayne Norman, Jr., (R-35A) serves on the Environmental Matters Committee and said his group is charged with critical areas.

“The environment is our main concern,” he said.

Everyone wants to blame farmers, but he pointed a finger at development, noting the green lawns he sees around Annapolis.

The delegate hopes to put in a bill this legislative session declaring a moratorium on taking female crabs from the bay.

Another environmental menace is sewage sludge, according to Norman. Some was applied to pasture ground at Susquehanna State Park near Havre de Grace. People who picnic at the park should be informed about the sludge application, he said.

“There’s not much science in Annapolis, there’s not much science in Harrisburg and there’s not much science in New York,” Norman said. “It’s who puts on the best case.”

He encouraged the group to stay abreast of bills, their sponsors and hearing schedules. Don’t hesitate to contact lawmakers.

“They love to hear from you,” he said.

Seminar attendees were asked to sign letters supporting Senate Bill 1816, The Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act, a bill some farm organizations such as the Maryland Farm Bureau and Virginia State Dairymen’s Association say will put family farms out of business.

The group gathered at the seminar encouraged Norman to look into a Carroll County farm that entered into agriculture preservation in the late 1980s and is running a commercial business advertising for trash and sludge removal from several states away.

The farm does not pay industrial or commercial taxes while making several million dollars a year on preserved ag land, several Carroll County residents in attendance said.

Darree Sicher, president of the United Sludge-Free Alliance, a volunteer group dedicated to gathering information on sewage sludge, said there are numerous permitted sludge sites in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

“It’s no wonder that the Chesapeake Bay is having pollution issues,” she said.

Sludge is everything that goes down the drain and is not a fertilizer but toxic waste, according to Sicher. Farmers who use sludge on their fields are probably not given all the available information on its hazards, she said. They are led to believe that sewage sludge is natural.

“Lead is natural, and we don’t eat that. Arsenic is natural, and we don’t eat that,” Sicher said.

The Environmental Protection Agency only requires testing for nine elements in sludge, which is not tested for hormones, pharmaceuticals, H1N1 and other threats, according to Sicher.

“You put it on the land, the plants are going to take it up and that’s why we need to care about it,” she said, adding that dollars need to be directed to finding alternatives to land application.

Brady Russell, the Eastern Pennsylvania director of Clean Water Action, said his group focuses on getting people together around issues about which they care, such as water quality.

“Don’t buy in too readily that we have to wait until people start getting sick” before taking action, he said.

He related the story of a small group of women in central Minnesota who about 10 years ago fought against concentrated animal feeding operations moving into their area.

The women waited until the county fair and papered cars with fliers. The three numbers given on the fliers were inundated with calls of support.

They took air samples and started attending county commissioner meetings.

Not only did they endorse commissioner candidates who could help them, they let other citizens know whom they endorsed and why, later managing to turn over the board.

The group secured land use and setback rules as well as a ban on open-air manure pits.

Russell gave the following three organizing strategies:

• Form a mobilized constituency and function as a group,
• Fight for a specific issue, and
• Target a person who can help you get what you want.

Michael Helfrich, a Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper, said chemicals in the water act like hormones, which cause intersex or sexual mutations in fish.

Lesions and gill deformations are symptoms of the problem, not problems in and of themselves.

He called the affected fish “transvestites who are okay with it because of all the Prozac in the water.”

Helfrich said more than 400 endocrine disruptors have been documented, and 10s of thousands of chemicals are not yet tested. Endocrine disrupting compounds have been found in some form in every water sample taken.

“Every bit of poison goes into the female’s ovaries,” Helfrich said. “Where are our next generations coming from?”

Major fish kills have occurred in waterways in the area that account for 87 percent of the water going into the bay, he said. Most of the waterways, he said, including the Susquehanna, Potomac and James rivers, lie in heavily agrarian areas.