Environment: A Watershed Moment

Diane Easley lives in Nelson County, population 14,000, just south of Charlottesville, Virginia. Big pieces of land were once used to grow tobacco here, but all that remains of this agricultural heritage is some dairy farming and a small lumber industry. The growth industries here now include a ski resort, second homes, and speculation on land ready to accommodate more second homes. It is a prototypical exurb in transition. Charlottesville has been creeping closer for a decade. And if fears of living in a nearby target city like Washington, D.C., intensify following another 9/11, Nelson County’s permanent population could double overnight. Already, the population in some parts of the county is growing at ten percent per year.

To retain the area’s tony charm-and its water quality-Easley and other residents are trying desperately to keep sprawl at bay.

The construction of new roads and bridges has led to soil erosion and siltation of rivers and streams, and an informal survey of groundwater tables revealed some potential contamination in shallow wells. The equation is simple and common: more houses and roads create more impervious surfaces and human uses; these in turn increase the rate and amount of polluted runoff into rivers and streams, deteriorating the water quality.

Just a few years ago, the forty-something Easley was not by her own account an environmental activist. She was not even especially political. But when the University of Virginia received a “small watershed” grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop a pilot program in her area, she started showing up at meetings. She has since taken charge and expanded what was a 5-person citizen task force into an 80-person organization, the Friends of the Rockfish Watershed, and is now spearheading a campaign to make water quality a top priority in Nelson County.

The campaign represents a change in the way people respond to clean water issues. While much of the modern environmental movement is built on lawsuits and top-down enforcement of federal and state statutes and permitting programs, Easley and groups like hers, known as community watershed organizations, take a more collaborative, bottom-up approach. Their strategy, essentially, is to mobilize individual citizens to participate more directly in the lawmaking process. “We’re extremely local and governed by what people that live here want,” Easley says.

More than 2,000 groups adopting similar approaches have materialized across the country, and many more are in various stages of formation. Through these organizations, some half million people participate in activities that range from tree planting and river bank clean-ups to canoe and kayak trips to public education in schools and parks. In recent years, these watershed groups have taken on a more political bent. A changing legal landscape has raised their profile, and they’ve become more vocal in city, county, and state legislatures by participating in a collaborative form of decision-making called watershed management planning.

Easley and her Friends of the Rockfish Watershed, for instance, have built informational kiosks in local parks and tried to raise general awareness of the issues surrounding water quality by sponsoring events and programs. But they have also sat at the negotiating table with county officials, local business interests, individual farmers, scientists, and engineers to draft a “watershed management plan” for 258 square miles of land that drains into the James River at Howardsville. Like many such plans, it employs clustered zoning-bunching together new developments on small parcels of land in order to preserve parts of the natural landscape in large open spaces-in conjunction with conservation easements-covenants that forbid any future building on these open spaces. These practices help to preserve vital habitats and maintain agricultural uses. The management plan would also, for the first time, regulate area stormwater-drainage systems and require buffer zones free from development along stream banks. Finally, the plan encourages local monitoring of water quality by citizens groups.

The local county government has responded by incorporating various elements of the draft into its Comprehensive Plan and its zoning ordinances. Easley and her group have thus managed to infuse water quality concerns into local politics without having to sue anyone. 

The Challenge of Urban Watershed Management

Easley’s success with the cooperative watershed planning model of regulation may not translate to all locales, however. Watershed management planning in a metropolis is a different beast than in exurban or small city environments. The politics are more complex, and environmental concerns compete against a slew of other social problems for top billing. The city of Baltimore, for instance, “has a horrible history of trashing the environment,” says Richard Hersey, executive director of the Herring Run Watershed Association. “It’s the legacy of our industrial background, these contaminated lands and waters. Up until three years ago [and the election of Mayor Martin O’Malley] we couldn’t even get the environment onto a list of city’s critical urban ills.”

But watershed management planning also represents a potentially fresh angle from which to approach urban environmental problems. According to Hersey, watershed management planning is integrally connected with open space preservation, “brownfield” (industrial site) redevelopment, and remediation of Superfund sites. He believes that an adequate citywide plan in Baltimore could help retire 200 to 600 acres from the development market, and integrate that land with restored streams returning to the river’s headwaters.

Baltimore is divided into three watersheds-Herring Run, Jones Falls, and Gwynns Falls. As with many urban rivers and streams, much of the water is buried under the city’s infrastructure, making it difficult to access, never mind manage, says Christel Marie Cothran, program director at the Jones Falls Watershed Association. And even if Baltimore could map out a vision for the city’s watersheds, integrating it into zoning ordinances and comprehensive plans would prove difficult. “I don’t really know where the system breaks down, but I think it breaks down everywhere in Baltimore,” says Hersey.

Jurisdictional boundaries that have no relation to watershed boundaries pose particular difficulties. Surrounding Baltimore County has developed a watershed management plan, and has been acknowledged as one of the most aggressive counties in the state in pursuing its design. The plan, however, does not include anything inside the Baltimore city line. The city, in turn, has looked at its three primary watersheds and wants to develop plans for each. Predictably enough, the city and county are acting on different sets of facts, and for any number of institutional reasons have difficulty communicating, although they have at least signed an agreement to cooperate on the issue.

Ultimately, the success of watershed management planning depends on community buy-in, and there are quite simply many differing interests in Baltimore that may prove contentious-at least 8 universities, 8 golf courses, and 26 private schools, for instance, as well as all of the building owners, homeowners, and tenants. “We are trying to work with them to think about ways to change land use practices,” Cothran says. Her group has been trying to promote the use of rain barrels-to collect rainwater and prevent it from overwhelming the stormwater system-and bayscaping, which uses native plants in gardens and yards to reduce the amount of pesticide and fertilizer likely to enter waterways.

New Front Lines for Clean Water

Watershed groups have become more prominent in the last half-decade because they are particularly well-adapted for solving a set of problems that environmental law is now addressing after decades of neglect. Since the 1972 Clean Water Act, the United States has most successfully reduced pollution from “point” sources-the ends of sewage and industrial pipes. But more than half of all the nation’s water pollution comes from “nonpoint” sources, such as urban and agricultural runoff and discharge from storm sewers, construction sites, and logging operations. Pollution from these sources accounts for nearly all the sediment deposition and the vast majority of nitrogen and phosphorous reaching the nation’s waters. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and many states have reported that nonpoint source pollution is the primary reason a high percentage of the nation’s waters remain unswimmable and unfishable. Yet, because the problem is so diffuse and difficult to regulate, it remains largely outside the reach of federal and state authorities.

But many cities now have no choice but to deal with it. The Clean Water Act’s monstrously-named Phase II National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Stormwater Program requires operators of municipal storm sewers in urbanized areas with populations under 100,000 to start controlling polluted stormwater runoff, most of which can be attributed to nonpoint source pollution. The patterns of urban and suburban sprawl that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s increased the number of local governments subject to the regulations even while they made the nonpoint problem worse. “The 1990s were a crazy time for development,” says John Rozum, the national network coordinator for Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO), a confederation of programs that educate local decision-makers on the connection between land use and water quality. “You had people buying all these houses, developing all this stuff. Now we’re looking at it, and thinking, is this really how we want to be?”

The problem is particularly acute around the Chesapeake Bay, which does not meet the federal clean water standards-in regulatory lingo, the region is a “non-attainment area.” The EPA has given the Chesapeake Bay Program, an agency shared by the Bay’s watershed states of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, until 2010 to clean it up. If the Bay Program fails, the feds will force the states to significantly tighten their regulation of both point and nonpoint pollution sources. The states are loath to take on this Total Maximum Daily Load program. They would have to calculate how much pollution each water body that feeds into the Bay could absorb and then divvy that load among all the players who need or want to discharge into it. The process would be technically challenging and politically terrifying. Under the auspices of the Bay Program, the states are making great efforts to clean up the Bay and avoid regulating daily loads. Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania have each committed to work with local governments, community groups, and watershed organizations to develop and implement watershed management plans in two-thirds of the Bay watershed by the year 2010.

The Chesapeake Bay states have taken different approaches to meeting their commitments, but watershed groups play a role throughout the region. In Maryland and Virginia, watershed management planning is mostly done at the county level, with some participation from state agencies, community watershed organizations, and individual landowners. By contrast, in Pennsylvania watershed management planning is an entirely grassroots affair, where community watershed organizations develop plans with little government oversight. Despite their prominence, the groups have a strained relationship with Bay Program staff. Paul Sturm of the Maryland-based Center for Watershed Protection says that Bay Program personnel’s “perception of local ‘friends of’ groups is that they are limited in scope and competence.” The disdain works both ways: “The Bay Program people are ... often perceived as people that live in ivory towers and are asserting their values into local communities,” says Steve Talley, watershed coordinator at the Canaan Valley Institute, a nonprofit group that works in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

An Undefined Future Role

Watershed management planning and other collaborative approaches to environmental decision-making are now being championed not only by progressives and liberal pragmatists, but also by Interior Secretary Gail Norton and other proponents of deregulation and private rights. Ambiguities in the current watershed planning process have temporarily brought together forces that want very different outcomes from the process. It remains uncertain, for instance, whether these plans create the enforceable regulations that environmentalists want or merely encourage the voluntary efforts by businesses and citizens that conservatives often promote. It also remains unclear just who is beholden to them, and what impact they actually have.

How these watershed planning processes turn out will determine whether this new trend becomes primarily an educational tool, or a new kind of political force for the environmental movement. The Canaan Valley Institute’s Talley thinks of watershed management planning in broad, educational terms. “The fundamental essence of watershed management planning,” he says, “is really nothing more than an effort to get local folks to differently value natural resource conservation.” Tom Schueler, executive director of the Maryland-based Center for Watershed Protection, stakes out the alternative perspective; he derides what he calls “pleasant structures"-voluntary programs that spur citizen participation-and thinks that watershed activists need to push full force into local legislatures, and into the law, as the Friends of the Rockfish have. “A lot of people just want to get people to talk and think that’s going to be enough,” Shueler says. “I think we need to raise a little hell.”