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EDITORIAL: Our Lifestyle Kills Oceans: Long Island's Water Hazards Are As Ubiquitous As Parking Lots and Fertilizer

Posted on: Monday, 5 June 2006, 09:01 CDT

By Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Jun. 5--The painful paradox of our oceans is this: At the same time science is demonstrating the heart-health value of seafood, the waters that produce it are becoming unhealthier. The cause of this pollution is not some distant "they." It's all of us. If we don't get a handle on it, we'll continue to threaten this valuable protein source and hurt those who make a living from the sea, including many of our neighbors.

Some of the culprits are the farms near rivers that drain into the Mississippi, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The nitrogen fertilizers ride the river to the Gulf, where they feed a process that kills the water's oxygen supply and disrupts the food chain. The dead zone grows and shrinks, but it's often as big as New Jersey or Massachusetts.

Closer to home, we need only look as far as our lawns and our roads to see some of the poisons we are sending into Long Island's waters.

Government has done a decent job of cutting the pollution that flows from the end of pipes at sewage treatment plants. In fact, New York City, despite a continuing problem of raw sewage overflows after rain, has made commitments to the removal of nitrogen from sewage. Some environmentalists now call the city a technological leader.

Now the big problem is farms, roads, parking lots and the like. If animal wastes and oil residue can't filter into the soil, storms wash them into streams, which dump them into the bays and the ocean. The National Research Council estimated the flow of oil through this process equals 10.9 million gallons - the size of the Exxon Valdez spill - every eight months.

All around us, we see a proliferation of surfaces impervious to water, such as the roads in housing developments and the parking lots around malls and industrial parks. The Pew Oceans Commission cites an estimate that a 1-acre parking lot produces 16 times as much runoff as a 1-acre meadow. As soon as the amount of impervious surface in a watershed passes 10 percent, marine species begin to decline.

On Long Island, the nitrogen in the fertilizers on our lawns is a big part of the problem. We also witness daily one of the gravest dangers to the ocean: its hypnotic allure. People love to live along the coast, and that construction is killing habitat, particularly coastal wetlands that are nurseries for the fish that we like to catch and eat.

Here are a few ways we can preserve ocean health:

When the current farm subsidy bill expires next year and Congress debates a new one, lawmakers should shape it to give farmers incentives to use less fertilizer, not more.

New York and Connecticut should pass legislation sharply curtailing the use of fertilizers for lawns.

Local governments should emulate Suffolk County, which is launching an exemplary list of projects for filtering the pollution out of storm-water runoff. New York's Department of State is also doing good work in this area.

Eliminating cheap flood insurance isn't politically viable, but the federal government should significantly reduce its availability. That will discourage further construction in coastal places where we ought not to build.

Government must halt the spread of invasive species, like the sea squirt, the blob that is eating Long Island Sound and giving Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) a poster enemy as he co-sponsors a National Aquatic Invasive Species Act.

The state should broaden efforts to curtail airborne nitrogen from auto emissions and power plants, major sources of excess nitrogen deposits in the ocean.

The State Legislature should ask voters to approve a ballot proposition that would create an agency similar to the California Coastal Commission, to set standards and help local communities make sure that their coastal land-use decisions protect wetlands, bays and water quality.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

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