Breaking the HABit Part I: Fight Evil Where It Grows
This is Part I in a series on the obstacles to HAB education, which explores some of the challenges faced and how to combat them.
Click here to continue to Part II, which looks more closely at HABHRCA and legislating against algal blooms.
Click here to continue to Part III, which delves into HAB news coverage and why you might have never heard of them.
Over half of all residential water in the United States comes from groundwater — that is lakes, streams, and watersheds — and yet the presence of, both toxic and non-toxic, algae blooms can be increasingly felt throughout the country. Indeed, though it may seem that many municipalities have been made unfairly the target of such a plague, the reality is that toxic saltwater algal blooms have been reported in every coastal state, and toxic freshwater blooms have been on the rise across the country for over a decade. In both cases, federal support can be spotty, and national attention can be borderline nonexistent.
One of the biggest, longest, and most destructive blooms ever to hit the United States — the Florida Red Tide — lasted over a year, and drew only peripheral attention from major news outlets, like The New York Times, which published only five articles on the subject in 2018. Some public outlets, such as National Public Radio, maintained semi-consistent coverage until the bloom’s recession in February of 2019, but the story was far from sensational, mainstream news.
In 2018, the story of the Lake Detroit bloom that contaminated municipal water in, and around, Salem, OR was summarily not picked up by any mainstream news station, and once again it was NPR bringing national attention to this serious event. Local coverage for the event was massive, from the Oregonian, to Oregon Public Broadcasting News (the local NPR arm), to the USA Today-affiliated Statesman Journal — but that’s as far as the story spread. Where was the national outcry; where was the scandal? The emergency led to historic legislation, and Oregon became the first state in the country to require that public utilities test for algae toxins, yet the news went largely unreported anywhere across the state border.
The tale is not much better for the monumental blooms that have taken place in Lake Erie. In multiple cases, the recurrent blooms there have been so severe that locals have chosen to enact completely first-of-its-kind legislation with regard to the lake’s heath, and the drinking water residents depend on. So debilitating has the algal invasion been to the lake — and so critically vital is Lake Erie to the surrounding area — that in 2014, as I had previously reported, the town of Toledo, OH virtually shut down due to water contamination. Potable water was scarce, and in some cases, hospitals turned people away and pushed back surgeries. The event became a cautionary tale for outlets like Environmental Working Group, and Civil Eats, an agri-critical news outlet, and citizen responses to the water advisory are being studied by the Center for Disease Control, as part of their HAB-Illness research, but here is woefully where we see federal aid abruptly end.
The National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates under the US Department of Commerce, tracks and forecasts offshore saltwater blooms as pat of their Ecoforecasting and Monitoring network, yet in 2017 their total budget was less than $600 million — just over 1/100h of a percent of the total United States budget. Saltwater blooms have been responsible for serious economical and ecological damage, and yet they represent a small portion of overall blooms. Overwhelmingly, the majority of algae blooms occur in fresh water, and those are the ones that disproportionately threaten humans.
It is absolutely necessary that Congress pass legislation allocating resources and inter-departmental aid to combat HABs, so that it may immediately be put into effect. Likewise, nationally-broadcasting news outlets, such as The New York Times and USA Today, need to pick up and rebroadcast local coverage of HABs as the serious and pressing national environmental concern that they are, the same way any tragic flood or storm would be reported nationwide. We, the citizenry, have the right to accurate, and readily disseminated, information about the dangers we may face.
LEGISLATIVE
Sitting in the House of Representatives, at this moment, is the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act (HABHRCA), a proposed renewal of the original 1994 law. In 2018, the 2004 Amendment to the law — extending its funding and national cooperation — expired and has yet to be renewed, despite two separate attempts by lawmakers to rectify this.
The bills feature bipartisan support, including Representatives from; New York, where New York City is home to the nation’s largest unfiltered water supply, reliant on three watersheds; Florida, which has been plagued by the offshore Red Tide, as well as freshwater blooms in Lake Okeechobee; Ohio, where the Lake Erie blooms have severely impacted local infrastructure and economy; and Oregon, where there occurred one of the largest municipal algal toxin contaminations in the nation. Indeed, even in our divided political climate, sometimes it’s still possible to agree across the aisles on some things.
Though an amendment to continue allocation of funds was proposed in 2017, through the spring of 2018, we, the voting public, were largely more concerned with coverage of the lurid Stormy Daniels scandal, the tragic Parkland shooting, and the horrific policy of family separation at the US-Mexican border. There was little, if any, attention paid to the expiration of HABHRCA, nor was there any paid to the complete inaction on the part of our elect representatives to pass a renewal in a timely fashion.
It is because of this atmosphere of obfuscation that the public is unable to demand action. Congressional subcommittees are required to give neither a timeline as to their deliberations, nor an explanation as to their decision-making. In essence, they have been asked to answer to no one for nearly a year. We, the voting public, must demand their immediate renewal of HABHRCA.
NEWS
National news media corporations bear some of the responsibility for the lack of information surrounding HABs. Where one might argue that local coverage of local events is sufficient, I say that it is woefully, and willfully, ignorant to assume that these blooms will stay local, contained events for long. A threat which is posed to the nation as a whole must be properly treated as such, and it is for that reason that news media, which has such a hold on the American public, has a responsibility to educate that public.
Occurrences of toxic blooms are on the rise, yet coverage has not increased to match. Time and again, blooms that wreak havoc on local communities remain simply that — local stories affecting local communities. In fact, these blooms are quickly becoming much more than simply local issues. In 2015, when a severe bloom stretched over 600 miles of the Ohio River, coverage did indeed make it to The New York Times, but largely did not focus on the bloom as a recurring epidemic, rather as a freak occurrence. The bloom became a talking point, rather than galvanizing force, and faded into the recesses of memory, until the next summer, as always.
It is willfully ignorant to take up the position that these organizations have no pertinent responsibility to the greater public good. The time to demand action is now.
This is Part I in a series on the obstacles to HAB education, which explores some of the challenges faced and how to combat them.
Click here to continue to Part II, which looks more closely at HABHRCA and legislating against algal blooms.
Click here to continue to Part III, which delves into HAB news coverage and why you might have never heard of them.
“About NPR.” NPR, National Public Radio, 12 Feb. 2019, www.npr.org/about
“Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research (CSCOR).” CSCOR: Stressors : Extreme Natural Events : Harmful Algal Blooms: HABHRCA, NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science , web.archive.org/web/20090114015459/http://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/habhrca/. (accessed via Internet Archive)
Buteyko, Vladimir. Harmful Algal Blooms : Impact and Response. Nova Science Publishers, Inc, 2010. EBSCOhost.
Graddy, Sarah. “Investigation: Manure From Unregulated Factory Farms Fuels Lake Erie’s Toxic Algae Blooms.” EWG, 9 Apr. 2019, www.ewg.org/release/investigation-manure-unregulated-factory-farms-fuels-lake-erie-s-toxic-algae-blooms.
“Senate Moves Legislation to Address Harmful Algal Blooms.” American Geosciences Institute, 17 Sept. 2017, www.americangeosciences.org/policy/news-briefs/senate-moves-legislation-to-address-harmful-algal-blooms.
“The Year in Review: Top News Stories of 2018 Month by Month.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 30 Dec. 2018, www.cbsnews.com/news/year-in-review-top-news-stories-of-2018-month-by-month/.
US Department of Commerce, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “NOAA’s National Ocean Service.” NOAA’s National Ocean Service, United States Department of Commerce, 5 June 2018, oceanservice.noaa.gov/welcome.html.
