John Cronin

Who Declares a Water Crisis?

Copyright 2009, John Cronin

It was said often, at a recent conference on New York State Water Resources, held at Pace University, that  comprehensive protection and management of New York's waters would finally come when a crisis forced the issue.  The daylong event was sponsored by Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies, Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, and the Center for Environmental Legal Studies at Pace Law School.

During the last afternoon panel, an audience member asked, "Who is in charge of declaring a crisis?"  No one had a satisfactory answer.  And when the question was turned on the audience -- "Who here is willing to declare a crisis?" -- there was a scant show of hands, even after a full day of talks about grim predictions and policy shortfalls in health, supply, infrastructure, ecological management and environmental protection. 

The path to a crisis is a  greater mystery than a crisis that has already been proclaimed.  Hindsight is like that.  Drought, decaying infrastructure, declining fish populations, and shortages in future water supply are slow-motion crises.  Their eventual, official recognition, usually comes in the form of a declaration of emergency or, worse, a court order.  It is spurred by some formula of public opinion, media attention, dire circumstances and government findings -- a long process that nonetheless leaves policymakers playing a panicky game of catch-up.

But the conference proceedings begged a question familiar to all those who deal in national security and preparedness -- aren't we already in a crisis if we are unprepared for an impending emergency?  The OED tells us that a crisis is "a time of intense difficulty or danger."  The word finds its origins in the Greek keinein, which means to separate or decide, and which  is also the source of the word "critic," or kritikos -- able to make judgments.  Noah's crisis, for example, came when he was charged with building an ark and gathering his passengers  . . .  before the flood arrived. 

Imagine No Pollution

The Future, and the Failed Clean Water Act

Copyright 2009, John Cronin

The Clean Water Act has failed.  It is time for a new law.

There is a mistaken, popular belief that the central purpose of the 1972 Clean Water Act is to bring to justice the bad guys who are polluting the nation’s waters.

The Clean Water Act was written to create a global market place based on American innovation that would end pollution in our lifetime, and “restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.” 

But a list of the Clean Water Act's failed policies reads like an indictment of the law itself.

The first policy goal on the first page of the Clean Water Act is the elimination of the discharge of pollutants by 1985.

The law also sets a goal of making the nation’s waters fit for sports and recreation, and for fish and wildlife by July 1983.

It calls for management plans to end pollution from runoff, protect watersheds, and enhance water resources, in keeping with the 1983 and 1985 goals.

It requires the cessation of toxic discharges in toxic amounts.

It establishes a sweeping domestic and foreign policy on water designed to protect life and health here and abroad.

Indeed, the enormity of the Clean Water Act’s failure can be measured in lives.  The law directs the Secretary of State to assist other nations in eradicating their water problems to “at least the same extent as the United States does under its laws.”  But since the Clean Water Act was enacted, an estimated 70 - 100 million people, mostly children in the developing world, have died from diseases related to water pollution.  The Pacific Institute estimates that between 36 million and 70 million will die by 2020.

The Pale Blue Dot

The narration for the above video is taken from the book Pale Blue Dot by the late Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. It is Dr. Sagan's voice. I chose the images.  The featured photo is by Stephen Codrington.

The Planetary Society explains that the book's title "was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size."

See this post for more on Dr. Sagan, Ann Druyan and the Voyager mission.

Cry Out for Kenya

Drought, Politics, Climate Change and Corruption Decimate the Horn of Africa

As Rivers Dry Up, Children, Livestock & Crops Die

The number of Kenyans in urgent need of food aid has jumped by more than 50 per cent to nearly 4 million, according to official figures, as the country is hit by mass hunger as well as shortages of power and water. The immediate cause of the three-fold crisis is a prolonged drought, but critics of Kenya's dysfunctional coalition government blame it for failing to mitigate the drought's effects, in spite of clear warning signs.   Kenya Coalition under Fire as Drought Leaves 4m Starving -- Financial Times

Crisis in the Fertile Crescent

The War of Water in Iraq

Copyright 2009, John Cronin

The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers: the arms that embrace the Fertile Crescent, once an ecological paradise of such grandeur the Book of Genesis placed it in Eden; here was "the cradle of civilization," the seminal lesson in world-history we all learned as schoolchildren.   Today, in the shadow of the Iraq War, the once magnificent "land between two rivers" has become a war zone in its own right - a terminal nightmare of bombings, water diversions, marshland drainage, habitat destruction, and the persecution and relocation of the Ma'dan people, the "Marsh Arabs."

Taking Questions on PCBs - Pt. 2

From June 17 - 19  I was the guest blogger on The New York Times' "Taking Questions" feature of its City Room blog.  The topic was "General Electric's project to remove PCBs from the Hudson River."   The Times asked that I respond to 5 reader-submitted questions daily.   Part 2 of the selected questions and my answers follows,  just as it appeared on the The New York Times site:

Where will the dredge material be disposed once it is removed from the river?

— Posted by Dan

A number of posts have asked about the amount and destination of dredged material from the Hudson. Dan’s is the simplest (and he asked first). But I will try to cover all the questions here, so pardon the lengthy answer.

First, the full operation of coordinating, staging and executing the dredging and material processing is impressive. G.E. is mobilizing 17 tugboats, 35 barges and 12 dredges working 24 hours per day, six days a week to remove and process the 400,000 tons of sediment that Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on for Phase 1, which ends in November when weather closes the Champlain Canal.

Despite the world-class collection of heavy equipment, one of the most striking aspects of the operation is its relative quiet. Attention to details, such as “hospital-grade generators,” was an essential part of the project design agreed to by the E.P.A. and G.E. If you visit the dredging project, and I recommend it, don’t expect a cacophonous construction site. (Carpool, and visit Jim’s Broadway Café, or one of the many local establishments.)

Taking Questions on PCBs - Pt. 1

From June 17 - 19  I was the guest blogger on The New York Times' "Taking Questions" feature of its City Room blog.  The topic was "General Electric's project to remove PCBs from the Hudson River."   The Times asked that I respond to 5 reader-submitted questions daily.   Part 1 of the selected questions and my answers follows,  just as it appeared on the The New York Times site:

It seems I’ve known about this PCB problem forever, but I don’t really know the details. I recall that you were quite involved at the beginning of this process, so I’m hoping you will be able to answer my questions: when did the PCB contamination start, how was it discovered, and what have been the steps leading up to this final cleanup?

— Posted by Morna Crites-Moore

The best primer on PCBs and the Hudson can be gleaned from visiting the dedicated PCB web pages of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the General Electric Company. These are not necessarily dueling sites, though they may disagree on some points. You can put together a good regulatory time line as well as the current status of the cleanup from the information they present.

The PCB controversy has a long history. The issue first came to public attention in August 1975 in an article in The New York Times in which Richard Severo reported that the New York State environmental conservation commissioner, Ogden R. Reid, and the health commissioner, Dr. Robert P. Whalen, had issued a public warning to avoid eating striped bass from the Hudson River because of PCB contamination. Mr. Reid cited two General Electric plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls as a likely cause.

A Passionate Advocate for Truth

A Conversation with Andy Revkin, NY Times Environment Reporter

From INSIDEOUT, Jan-Feb '09. Copyright 2008, John Cronin

The Hudson River Valley has yielded some of the great voices of American environmentalism.  Andy Revkin is one.  I speak of American environmentalism not as an ecological ideology, but as a school of critical thought and expression that includes writers, philosophers, artists, advocates, and policy wonks.  Andy fits all of these categories. 

Andy is the environment reporter for the New York Times and the author of the Times blog, Dot Earth, located at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com.  He has covered climate for 20 years and is expert at presenting, in an understandable fashion, the most vexing environmental, social and economic issue in human history.  He brings a deep thinking to his subject, with influences ranging from microbiologist Rene Dubos to Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  He is a sought after speaker and, among his many honors and distinctions, a Guggenheim Fellow.  Regular readers of his stories and blog are treated to a continuing conversation with the world’s foremost thinkers on energy, environment and climate change.