NC pastor: People are leaving church — because of churches
Kate Murphy
The author is pastor of The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte.
Earlier this week Gallup released polling data showing that less than 50% of Americans report belonging to a faith community. Back in 1970, when Gallup first began tracking this data, more than 70% of Americans belonged to religious communities. As a pastor, when I heard this news, I thought of a little known passage in the 10th chapter of the book of Ezekiel when the prophet watches in horror as the Glory of God leaves the temple.
That’s not the standard response to news like this. The party line is to blame “this generation” for being less faithful, or “the media” for corrupting hearts or “the government” for taking prayer out of school. Once we’ve finished blaming those outside our communities, we turn to those inside and pressure them to give more, work more, sacrifice more to reverse the trend. But I don’t think any of that is a faithful response.
Because, while church membership is declining, people are still as hungry for the things of God as they ever have been. People are still seeking justice, forgiveness, hope, love and belonging. People are still desperate for mercy, for meaning, for second chances. People are still seeking the Holy, and the Holy One is still seeking people. So the problem isn’t with those outside the church, and it certainly isn’t with God. The problem — and it is a problem — is with us. The problem is that most of the church in America looks more like America than the body of Christ.
The church makes the news for all the wrong reasons — seminary leaders who passionately denounce Critical Race Theory but are silent about the white supremacy that forms their curriculum and institutions. Pastors who care more about not being called racist than learning how to meaningfully participate in racial reconciliation. Christians who care more about defending their right to buy a weapon than advocating to end police brutality.
Jesus — whose parents had to flee to a foreign country to save his life — has followers who advocate to close the borders to desperate refugees. Christians shouldn’t be outraged about 666 pairs of so-called ‘Satan Shoes’ but completely resigned to voter disenfranchisement, the school-to-prison pipeline, the resegregation of public schools, the opioid crisis or the epidemic of mass shootings. And speaking of Little Nas X, believers should be horrified by his ‘Call Me By Your Name’ video — not because of the raunchy imagery but because we managed to convince a young boy that he was more likely to find love in Hell than inside the body of Christ.
I love the church. But I love Jesus more, and the church has done a terrible job being faithful to the way of Jesus. When we who love the church see these numbers, we shouldn’t kid ourselves. People aren’t rejecting Jesus — they are turning away from churches that represent him badly. Churches that are full of programs instead of prayer, full of doctrine but empty of mercy. Turning away from church that lies is the first step towards the truth.
Which brings me back to the prophet Ezekiel — who was called by God to prophesy judgment, not against outsiders, but against the egregious unfaithfulness of his fellow believers. In Ezekiel’s day, people loved the rituals of worship more than the God they worshiped, people loved their religious identity more than the shalom of God. And so, in anguish, God leaves their sacred building behind. But God never abandoned the people.
On the cross, Jesus cried out “it is finished.” Injustice is finished, greed and poverty are finished, hatred is finished, violence, enmity and alienation are finished. All of those old powers are condemned and crucified. On the cross, the righteousness of God’s self-giving love was unleashed to infect all the earth with holiness. Resurrection life has come. And the church, the true body of Christ full of his Spirit–the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-generational, full of love, generosity, healing, transformation, forgiveness, joy and mutual flourishing, real church welcomes all.
Local congregations may or may not be about the new thing God is doing. When they are — they are irresistible. When they are not, well, God may leave our buildings — but God will not stop being God.
What the church needs is not more members, but more Jesus — not revival but repentance. What we should fear is not people who refuse to belong to churches, but churches who refuse to belong to Jesus.
Russia, China Team Up to Peddle Insane U.S. COVID Lab Theory
Russian and Chinese officials are spreading conspiracy theories about alleged bio-labs “under U.S. control” along their borders—implying that COVID is an American-made virus
Julia Davis – April 09, 2021
The Cold War could be coming back with a vengeance, and the U.S.’s top adversaries are dusting off some old-school Soviet tactics.
Russian and Chinese government officials have recently teamed up to publicly accuse the U.S. of creating biological weapons near their borders and suggesting that Americans are responsible for creating COVID-19.
Speaking to the Russian daily newspaper Kommersant on Thursday, Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s Security Council secretary, said: “I suggest that you pay attention to the fact that biological laboratories under U.S. control are growing by leaps and bounds all over the world. And—by a strange coincidence—mainly near the Russian and Chinese borders.”
Patrushev, who formerly served as director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)—the main successor organization to the Soviet KGB—added that “outbreaks of diseases uncharacteristic of these regions” have been recorded in areas adjacent to these alleged bio-labs. He then openly accused the U.S. of developing biological weapons in those facilities.
Like clockwork, Russian state media echoed and disseminated Patrushev’s accusations against the U.S. But this time, they were accompanied by an official statement from China’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Lijian Zhao, who tweeted: “The US bio-military activities are not transparent, safe or justified. In Ukraine alone, the US has set up 16 bio-labs. Why does the US need so many labs all over the world? What activities are carried out in those labs, including the one in Fort Detrick?”
Zhao voiced the same accusations during an official press briefing, where he identified Russia as his source on the matter. “I noticed that Russia recently asked the US again about their military and biological activities in Fort Detrick and in Ukraine,” said Zhao. “Other countries also expressed similar concerns.”
The unsubstantiated allegations against the U.S. and Ukraine have come at a particularly convenient time for Putin, who has recently intensified Kremlin efforts to absorb the Donbas region. In February of this year, the Russian president ominously promised that “[The Kremlin] will never turn [its] back on Donbas, no matter what.”
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-funded RT and Sputnik, doubled down on promoting Russia’s takeover of Eastern Ukraine, with repeated urges for “Mother Russia” to “take Donbas home.” By presenting Ukraine as a national security threat to Russia, and alleging its involvement in the manufacturing of deadly bio-weapons, the Kremlin is able further justify its increasingly aggressive posture towards its highly coveted neighboring territory
Just as Trump had aided an outbreak of violence against Asian-Americans by calling COVID-19 the “China virus” and spreading unsubstantiated claims that the virus was made in a Wuhan lab, opponents of the U.S. have strived to cultivate that type of hostility against America on a global scale. Both Russia and China stand to benefit from pinning the blame for the pandemic on the U.S., and if Ukraine can be theoretically implicated, too—all the better for the Kremlin.
It’s not the first time Russia claims that the U.S. is creating and disseminating deadly diseases around the world. In 1992, Russia perpetuated a KGB disinformation campaign that falsely alleged that the virus that caused AIDS was the product of biological weapons experiments conducted by the U.S. During the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Russian propaganda outlets spread conspiracy theories that the virus had been created by the U.S. in collaboration with Great Britain and South Africa.
There is another common denominator to these disinformation tactics: In addition to accusing the U.S. of engaging in worldwide biological warfare, the Kremlin is simultaneously positioning itself as a lone savior.
“[Russia] saved Africa from Ebola,” Olga Skabeeva of Russia’s state-TV’s 60 Minutes proudly declared last month. While attempting to discredit COVID-19 vaccines created by Western countries, Russian state media outlets have frequently praised “Sputnik V” as the world’s best coronavirus vaccine, even as troubling information about the Russian-made vaccine continues to emerge.
To overcome the suspension of disbelief and promote the idea that the U.S. is capable of the worst kind of abuses against humanity, Russian propagandists are now resorting to an all-too-familiar dehumanization tactic: painting America as a super-villain.
“[Americans] don’t even have the word “soulfulness” in the English language,” RT’s Margarita Simonyan recently proclaimed on Russian television. “We’re soulful. They’re not like us.”
Sea level rise is killing trees along the Atlantic coast, creating ‘ghost forests’ that are visible from space
Emily Ury, Ph.D. Candidate, Duke University April 6, 2021
Ghost forest panorama in coastal North Carolina.Emily Ury, CC BY-ND
Trekking out to my research sites near North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, I slog through knee-deep water on a section of trail that is completely submerged. Permanent flooding has become commonplace on this low-lying peninsula, nestled behind North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The trees growing in the water are small and stunted. Many are dead.
Throughout coastal North Carolina, evidence of forest die-off is everywhere. Nearly every roadside ditch I pass while driving around the region is lined with dead or dying trees.
As an ecologist studying wetland response to sea level rise, I know this flooding is evidence that climate change is altering landscapes along the Atlantic coast. It’s emblematic of environmental changes that also threaten wildlife, ecosystems, and local farms and forestry businesses.
Like all living organisms, trees die. But what is happening here is not normal. Large patches of trees are dying simultaneously, and saplings aren’t growing to take their place. And it’s not just a local issue: Seawater is raising salt levels in coastal woodlands along the entire Atlantic Coastal Plain, from Maine to Florida. Huge swaths of contiguous forest are dying. They’re now known in the scientific community as “ghost forests.”
The insidious role of salt
Sea level rise driven by climate change is making wetlands wetter in many parts of the world. It’s also making them saltier.
In 2016 I began working in a forested North Carolina wetland to study the effect of salt on its plants and soils. Every couple of months, I suit up in heavy rubber waders and a mesh shirt for protection from biting insects, and haul over 100 pounds of salt and other equipment out along the flooded trail to my research site. We are salting an area about the size of a tennis court, seeking to mimic the effects of sea level rise.
After two years of effort, the salt didn’t seem to be affecting the plants or soil processes that we were monitoring. I realized that instead of waiting around for our experimental salt to slowly kill these trees, the question I needed to answer was how many trees had already died, and how much more wetland area was vulnerable. To find answers, I had to go to sites where the trees were already dead.
Rising seas are inundating North Carolina’s coast, and saltwater is seeping into wetland soils. Salts move through groundwater during phases when freshwater is depleted, such as during droughts. Saltwater also moves through canals and ditches, penetrating inland with help from wind and high tides. Dead trees with pale trunks, devoid of leaves and limbs, are a telltale sign of high salt levels in the soil. A 2019 report called them “wooden tombstones.”
As the trees die, more salt-tolerant shrubs and grasses move in to take their place. In a newly published study that I coauthored with Emily Bernhardt and Justin Wright at Duke University and Xi Yang at the University of Virginia, we show that in North Carolina this shift has been dramatic.
To understand where and how quickly these forests are changing, I needed a bird’s-eye perspective. This perspective comes from satellites like NASA’s Earth Observing System, which are important sources of scientific and environmental data.
Satellite image of coastal North Carolina
Since 1972, Landsat satellites, jointly operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, have captured continuous images of Earth’s land surface that reveal both natural and human-induced change. We used Landsat images to quantify changes in coastal vegetation since 1984 and referenced high-resolution Google Earth images to spot ghost forests. Computer analysis helped identify similar patches of dead trees across the entire landscape.
Google Earth image with road dividing healthy and dead forests.
The results were shocking. We found that more than 10% of forested wetland within the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge was lost over the past 35 years. This is federally protected land, with no other human activity that could be killing off the forest.
Rapid sea level rise seems to be outpacing the ability of these forests to adapt to wetter, saltier conditions. Extreme weather events, fueled by climate change, are causing further damage from heavy storms, more frequent hurricanes and drought.
We found that the largest annual loss of forest cover within our study area occurred in 2012, following a period of extreme drought, forest fires and storm surges from Hurricane Irene in August 2011. This triple whammy seemed to have been a tipping point that caused mass tree die-offs across the region.
Salt water intrusion is rapidly killing North Carolina coastal forests.
Should scientists fight the transition or assist it?
As global sea levels continue to rise, coastal woodlands from the Gulf of Mexico to the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere around the world could also suffer major losses from saltwater intrusion. Many people in the conservation community are rethinking land management approaches and exploring more adaptive strategies, such as facilitating forests’ inevitable transition into salt marshes or other coastal landscapes.
For example, in North Carolina the Nature Conservancy is carrying out some adaptive management approaches, such as creating “living shorelines” made from plants, sand and rock to provide natural buffering from storm surges.
A more radical approach would be to introduce marsh plants that are salt-tolerant in threatened zones. This strategy is controversial because it goes against the desire to try to preserve ecosystems exactly as they are.
But if forests are dying anyway, having a salt marsh is a far better outcome than allowing a wetland to be reduced to open water. While open water isn’t inherently bad, it does not provide the many ecological benefits that a salt marsh affords. Proactive management may prolong the lifespan of coastal wetlands, enabling them to continue storing carbon, providing habitat, enhancing water quality and protecting productive farm and forest land in coastal regions.
Yellen pushes minimum corporate taxes, ending fossil fuel breaks, to pay for infrastructure
David Lawder April 7, 2021
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday fleshed out the details of a corporate tax hike plan linked to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure investment proposal, aiming to raise $2.5 trillion in new revenues over 15 years by deterring tax avoidance.
Yellen’s plan relies on negotiating a 21% global minimum corporate tax rate with major economies and a separate 15% minimum tax on ‘booked’ income aimed at the largest U.S. corporations. Dozens of big U.S. companies have used complex tax strategies to reduce their federal tax liabilities to zero.
Yellen said that promised boosts in U.S. capital investment by corporations and turbocharged growth failed to materialize after Republican tax legislation in 2017 cut the corporate rate to 21% from 35%.
Instead, the Trump-era cuts halved U.S. corporate tax collections as a share of economic output to 1% from its long-term 2% average, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The average for the 37 OECD member countries is 3.1%.
“Our tax revenues are already at their lowest level in a generation. And as they continue to drop lower we will have less money to invest in roads, bridges, broadband and R&D,” Yellen said.
The bulk of U.S. tax collections https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-taxes-revenue-explainer/explainer-the-4-trillion-u-s-government-relies-on-individual-taxpayers-idUSKBN26J30F are deducted from the regular paychecks of individual wage earners, but Biden has pledged not to raise any taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.
The Treasury plan seeks to end provisions in the 2017 tax cuts that Democrats say provide continued incentives for companies to shift investments, intellectual property and profits to lower-tax countries.
Its biggest target is revamping the 2017 tax act’s first stab at a minimum tax, the 10.5% Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income tax (GILTI). Treasury would eliminate a U.S. deduction for the first 10% of income from foreign assets and raise the GILTI minimum rate to 21%.
GILTI, which acts as a kind of “top-up” tax to offset lower rates in other countries, would be applied on a country-by-country basis, rather than a global average rate, which Democrats say encourages some use of tax havens. This change alone could raise $500 billion in revenue over a decade, Treasury said.
Treasury would also replace a separate 10% Base Erosion and Anti-abuse Tax (BEAT), aimed at preventing shifting profits to entities in tax havens, with a new 21% tax that aims to deny deductions on income from countries that do not agree to a global minimum tax. It is rebranding this as the SHIELD tax, for “Stopping Harmful Inversions and Ending Low-Tax Developments.”
A Treasury official told reporters that this new tax would act as an incentive for countries to agree to a global minimum tax by denying companies the benefits of using tax havens.
FOSSIL FUEL BREAKS
The Treasury plan also would eliminate a range of tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, a move it said would raise revenues by $35 billion over 10 years. It will replace these with new clean energy tax incentives including for electric vehicles and efficient electric appliances.
Treasury also is proposing a new 15% alternative minimum tax for large corporations, based on booked income reported to shareholders, to ensure that they cannot use complex tax avoidance schemes to pay no taxes.
Treasury said it estimates that some 45 corporations would have seen an average $300 million additional annual tax liability under the proposed minimum, raising some $13.5 billion in new revenues.
(Reporting by David Lawder, David Shepardson, Jarrett Renshaw and Tim Gardner; Editing by Heather Timmons, Andrea Ricci and Chizu Nomiyama)
Opinion: Building an interstate system to move electricity could cost $50 billion — or less than what the Texas freeze and power outages cost users
James D. McCalley April 5, 2021
A macrogrid would make it easier and cheaper to move power across the five North American power grids
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Many kinds of extreme events can disrupt electricity service, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, extreme heat, extreme cold and extended droughts. Major disasters can leave thousands of people in the dark. The Texas deep freeze in February knocked out 40% of the state’s electric generating capacity.
During such events, unaffected regions may have power to spare. For example, during the February blackouts in Texas, utilities were generating electricity from hydropower in the Pacific Northwest, natural gas in the Northeast, wind on the northern Plains and solar power in the Southwest.
Today it’s not possible to move electricity seamlessly from one end of the U.S. to the other. But over the past decade, researchers at national laboratories and universities have been working closely with industry engineers to design an interstate electricity system that can. And President Biden’s infrastructure plan would move in this direction by allocating billions of dollars to build high-voltage transmission lines that can “move cheaper, cleaner electricity to where it is needed most.”
My engineering research focuses on electric power systems. At Iowa State University we have worked to quantify the benefits that macrogrids can bring to the U.S. These high-capacity transmission systems interconnect energy resources and areas of high electricity demand, known as load centers, across large geographic regions.
A national highway system for electricity
Dwight Eisenhower had been thinking about a national interstate highway system for decades before he was inaugurated as president in 1953. Eisenhower argued that such a system was “as necessary to defense as it is to our national economy and personal safety.”
Congress agreed and passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which authorized the federal government to pay 90% of the cost of this $114 billion system, with states covering the rest.
Eisenhower was worried about evacuating cities in the event of nuclear war. The security argument for a macrogrid focuses on extreme events that disrupt the power grid. And the economic argument centers on moving wind, solar and hydro power from areas where they are plentiful to areas with high power demand.
A macrogrid would use different peak demand periods to reduce electricity costs.
Today the North American power grid is actually five grids, also known as interconnections. Two large ones, the Eastern and Western Interconnects, cover most of the lower 48 states and large swaths of Canada, while three smaller grids serve Texas, Alaska and northern Quebec. Each of these grids uses alternating current, or AC, to move electricity from generators to customers.
The Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnects are linked by high-voltage direct current, or HVDC, lines that make it possible to transmit power between them. These facilities are aging and can only transfer small quantities of electricity between grids. One way to think of a macrogrid is as an overlay that pulls together the existing U.S. grids and makes it easier to move power between them.
Sharing power across regions
President Biden has proposed sweeping action to achieve a clean energy transition in the U.S., including making electric power carbon-free by 2035. This will require adding a lot of new renewable generating capacity over the next 15 years.
What Biden’s First 100 Days Mean For You and Your Money
How will the new stimulus package affect the economy? Understand how today’s market dynamics, tax policies and more impact you with real-time news and analysis from MarketWatch. Our instant market data and insights will help you take action immediately—no matter your investing experience.
Wind and solar costs have fallen dramatically in recent years. Today power from new, large-scale wind or solar plants is cheaper than electricity from existing coal plants. Yet renewables provide only about 21% of U.S. electricity.
A macrogrid would reduce the cost of electricity from new wind and solar plants in two ways. First, it would enable high-quality renewable power – mainly Midwestern wind and Southern solar, and potentially Canadian hydropower – to supply coastal load centers. It is cheaper to build transmission systems that can move this power over long distances than to generate it from lower-quality, weaker sun and wind resources closer to cities.
Second, a macrogrid would make it possible to share energy production and grid services between regions. This strategy takes advantage of time differences due to time zones and the fact that electricity demand tends to peak at certain times of day, such as when people arrive home in the evening. And electricity prices rise and fall during the day with demand.
For example, at 3 p.m. Pacific Time, power demand is relatively low on the West Coast, which means the cost of that electricity is also low. Excess Western electricity could be used to supply demand on the East Coast, which peaks daily simultaneous with this 3 p.m. West coast “low” which occurs at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Four hours later, when the West Coast hits its 7 p.m. Pacific Time daily peak, it would be 10 p.m. on the East Coast, which would have extra generation to share westward.
Capacity sharing also works because annual peak power demand occurs at different times of year for different regions. Each region is required to have access to enough generation capacity to meet its annual peak load, with some margin to cover generation failures. A macrogrid would enable regions to share excess generating capacity when it’s not needed locally.
This strategy provides benefits even when annual peaks in two regions differ by only a few days. When they differ by weeks or months, the payoff can be large. For example, power demand in the Pacific Northwest typically peaks in winter, so the region could borrow capacity from the Southwest and Midwest, where demand peaks in summer, and vice versa.
Building transmission saves money
In a study that I published in 2020 with academic and industry colleagues, we showed that without a macrogrid it would cost more than $2.2 trillion from 2024 through 2038 to develop and operate the nation’s electric power system and achieve 50% renewable power generation in 2038. This includes the costs of adding 600 gigawatts of new generating capacity that would be almost entirely wind and solar; operating costs for remaining fossil and nuclear power plants; and building new AC transmission lines to connect new power plants to customers.
However, we calculated that if the U.S. spent $50 billion to develop a macrogrid, the total long-term cost of developing and operating the nation’s electric power system and achieving 50% renewable electricity in 2038 would decrease by more than $50 billion. In other words, by making it possible to share power across regions and deliver high-quality renewable power from remote areas to load centers, the macrogrid would more than pay for itself.
Some observers may worry that a nationally connected grid would be more vulnerable to cascading blackouts than our existing system. In fact, a macrogrid would actually be more reliable because HVDC provides increased grid control capability through its flexible converter stations.
Industry leaders and clean energy advocates are calling for the U.S. to pursue macrogrid development. But North America is lagging behind most of the world in developing interregional power lines to tap low-cost clean energy resources. And if $50 billion seems like a big investment, consider this: It’s also the estimated minimum cost of outages and energy price spikes during the Texas deep freeze.
Shortly after Lydia Chambers had her first child, in 1995, her family moved to a new home in Ohio. “It was this neighborhood with perfect lawns,” recalls Chambers, now 60. In her previous home, when a swath of dandelions appeared shortly after she and her husband moved in, she spent two weeks pulling them out by hand.
In their Ohio home, however, she had no time to take care of the yard. So she hired a service to come and treat it. At the time, she didn’t realize that the chemicals the service used might be dangerous. “Even though I kind of sensed it . . . I didn’t know,” she says.
In her professional life as a hydrogeologist, Chambers was beginning to learn about how long-term, low-dose exposures to dangerous chemicals could lead to cancer and other chronic diseases. This made her increasingly suspicious of the pesticides her landscaping company applied. By 2005, her family had moved to New Jersey and her elementary school-aged kids were playing in the yard constantly. As she did more research, she learned a particularly disturbing fact: One common weed killer, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), was also an ingredient in Agent Orange, a chemical used during the Vietnam War.
“I guess if anything flipped a switch, it was that,” she says. Chambers and her husband finally committed to taking care of their yard with no synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers—even if that meant it sprouted a few weeds. “I was proud that I had a few weeds in my grass,” she says. “It was a symbol I was doing the right thing.”
For many Americans, however, a pristine lawn is the goal, and weed-free grass is big business. American consumers spend about $35 billion per year on lawn and garden products, according to market research firm Mintel. Professional lawn-care services and consumers going the DIY route choose from a variety of pesticides and fertilizers, many with familiar brand names, such as Roundup and Scotts.
The sense of unease that Chambers felt about pesticides is grounded in evidence: A growing body of research has linked many of them, even at low levels, to potential health problems such as cardiovascular disease, says Consumer Reports senior scientist Michael Hansen, PhD, an expert in environmental health.
Also, while synthetic lawn-care products may be helpful to your yard in the short term, they can harm beneficial organisms in soil and won’t lead to a healthy ecosystem in the long run. “You wonder,” asks Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit that advocates for transitioning away from synthetic pesticides, “why are we still using these things?”
Part of the problem is that even when consumers look for alternatives to traditional lawn chemicals, navigating the marketplace can be tricky. Unlike with food, there’s no legal definition of “organic” when it comes to lawn products, so it’s hard to assess the safety of a product that advertises itself as “organic,” “natural,” or “environmentally friendly.”
Still, it’s possible for consumers to move away from conventional lawn care. It just requires a bit of strategy, a few new habits, and some fresh ideas about what your yard should look like.
Health Harms of Lawn Care
On one hand, it’s a minority of lawn owners who hire lawn-care companies or add fertilizers or pesticides to their lawns. In a February 2021 CR nationally representative survey of 1,772 lawn owners, 51 percent said they don’t use any pesticides or fertilizers on their lawns. And according to Peter Groffman, PhD, a professor at the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, who studies ecosystem ecology, “the biggest group of homeowners are what we call passive land managers—they just mow.”
Still, many American homeowners strive for a perfectly uniform, bright green lawn. And according to research by Paul Robbins, PhD, professor and dean at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, many do this in spite of misgivings about the sometimes mysterious chemical inputs involved.
Lawn chemicals pose short- and long-term risks to health, and children are particularly vulnerable. Kids can accidentally ingest pesticides if they get their hands on them. Although acute poisonings are relatively rare, poison control centers still logged around 34,000 cases regarding pesticide exposure among children 5 and younger in 2019, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
The long-term risks of chronic exposure to chemicals on our lawns are much harder to quantify than acute poisonings, but plenty of research has been conducted into how it may affect health. One thing we know: Lawn chemicals don’t just stay on the lawn. Research has demonstrated that pesticides can be tracked inside on shoes and clothes, where they then settle into the dust on floors and other surfaces. There, children, especially young ones who crawl around on the ground and explore the world by putting things in their mouths, are more likely to get these substances into their system.
The prenatal period and early childhood are also times when people are more vulnerable to the risks of these repeated tiny exposures, which may have long-term effects, says Sheela Sathyanarayana, MD, a pediatrician and an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
Still, the specific health effects of cumulative exposure to individual pesticides are difficult to tease out, in part because pesticides are designed to be toxic to living organisms. Scientists don’t typically expose people to them on purpose to find out what happens, as they do with medications. The evidence we do have—based on observational studies and experiments in animals and in cells—is open to interpretation.
Take, for example, the herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup). They were the two most common active ingredients found in home and garden pesticides used in 2012, the last year for which data on national pesticide usage was available from the Environmental Protection Agency. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization that investigates the causes of cancer in humans, classifies 2,4-D as a possible carcinogen and glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.
Still, the science isn’t perfectly clear. The IARC’s classifications of carcinogens only indicate the strength of the evidence showing a given substance’s link to cancer. But chemicals in the same category could pose very different levels of real-world risk. Bayer, glyphosate’s manufacturer, told CR that the IARC’s analyses of carcinogens “do not reflect real-world exposure,” meaning the agency doesn’t say whether the amount of a substance you would typically be exposed to is enough to be dangerous.
The EPA has ruled that there isn’t good enough evidence to say whether 2,4-D causes cancer in humans—and that glyphosate probably doesn’t. The EPA also says that although 2,4-D was indeed an ingredient in Agent Orange, it was a different component, known as dioxin, that was found to cause cancer. And Lindsay Thompson, executive director of the Industry Task Force II on 2,4-D Research Data, told CR that regulators have “consistently found 2,4-D not to have adverse human health impacts” when used as directed on the label.
A variety of studies, particularly among agricultural communities exposed to pesticides through their work or by proximity to farms, have linked these and other common lawn chemicals to an increased risk of other health problems, too. These include neurological issues, respiratory irritation, asthma, and liver and kidney damage. One 2015 study even suggests that both 2,4-D and glyphosate could be contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
What’s more, several common lawn pesticides are suspected endocrine disrupters, meaning they might interfere with the body’s hormones. This is thought to occur at very low doses during certain vulnerable phases of life, such as the prenatal period and early childhood. Endocrine disruption may contribute to a range of issues, including diabetes and reproductive and developmental problems.
Still, industry groups maintain that the EPA’s approval of existing lawn pesticides means the chemicals should be safe to use as directed on the label. Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, an association representing pesticide and fertilizer industry players, says the EPA reviews hundreds of studies to arrive at its approval of a pesticide. And Andrew Bray, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Landscape Professionals, says, “We look at EPA as the experts.”
The Limits of Regulation
It can be hard for consumers to know what to make of all this, especially when studies come to contrasting conclusions. After all, if these chemicals posed a real danger, why would they still be on store shelves?
In fact, David Dorman, PhD, a professor of toxicology at NC State College of Veterinary Medicine in Raleigh, N.C., says many dangerous products have been banned in the U.S., including DDT. Modern pesticides, he says, are “so much safer than what was used even 40, 50 years ago. So progress has been made.”
In theory, the EPA’s approach to regulating pesticides is precautionary—it requires manufacturers to demonstrate a chemical’s safety before bringing it to market. But many consumer advocates, including CR’s Hansen, say the EPA’s testing requirements are outdated and don’t reflect the latest in toxicological science. That allows some significant harms of pesticides to go undetected.
The problem, says Laura Vandenberg, PhD, associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is that a clearer understanding of some of the most serious potential effects—such as cancer—may take decades to emerge. In that time, millions of people will have already been exposed unnecessarily, she says.
The EPA told CR that it is in the process of incorporating endocrine disruption into its standard tests for pesticide safety, and that it is implementing a set of new evaluation methods designed to reduce the need for animal testing. The agency says its risk assessment “ensures that when a pesticide is used according to the label, people and the environment are adequately protected.”
Environmental Impact
Lawn chemicals don’t just stay on your lawn or end up in your household dust. They can also sink deep into the soil, float off into the air, and be carried off by stormwater, ultimately causing harm to a range of organisms they were never meant to target.
A major component in conventional lawn care, fertilizer, is a key source of water pollution. The excess nutrients get washed out by rain into local waterways or sink into groundwater.
Once the nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer reach a lake or pond, they can prompt an overgrowth of algae, which eat up the oxygen in the water. That can cause fish to die en masse and sometimes makes water toxic.
Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides may also gradually degrade the health of your soil by diminishing beneficial microbes and fungi. Healthy soil, along with being great for your grass, can help keep carbon out of the atmosphere, an important bulwark against climate change, says soil scientist Asmeret Berhe, PhD, professor of soil biogeochemistry at the University of California, Merced.
What’s a Consumer to Do?
If you’re concerned about the potential health and environmental effects of synthetic lawn chemicals, you might think the answer is choosing organic chemicals instead, or employing a green lawn-care service. But that can be harder than it sounds.
For agriculture, the federal government enforces regulations for food producers that would like to label their food as organic. But no federal laws exist for “organic” lawn-care products or service providers.
Before you hire a provider advertising organic lawn care, ask plenty of questions, says Michele Bakacs, associate professor and county agent with the Rutgers Cooperative Extension in New Jersey. “If the first thing the landscaper talks to you about is the type of product that they’re using, well, that may be a little bit of a warning sign,” she says. Instead, look for a provider that offers a soil test and talks to you about improving the health of your soil, putting the right plant in the right place for your yard and using several types of turfgrass. These are signs of a provider interested in the unique ecology of your yard.
Although uncertainty remains about the extent of the harms of lawn products, reducing risks to people and the environment is easy: Avoid using synthetic lawn chemicals. There are other ways to achieve the same goals that are better for your lawn and for your family (see “How to Rehab Your Yard”).
It can take a bit of a mindset shift, says Joseph R. Heckman, PhD, an extension specialist and professor of soil science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “If you want to have an organic lawn, you have to have a little bit of tolerance for something less than perfect,” he says.
Over the years, the practice of pesticide-free yard care has evolved for Lydia Chambers and her husband. They still live in New Jersey, and Chambers now considers herself an environmental activist. Their latest effort: converting much of their 3-acre property from lawn into meadow. Soon, in place of acres of trimmed turf, they’ll have a spread of native wildflowers and grasses. The meadow will encourage a more diverse ecology in her lawn, she says—and there’s a bonus: “It will be way easier than handling more flower beds.”
Editor’s Note: This article also appeared in the May 2021 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.
‘Allergic reaction to US religious right’ fueling decline of religion, experts say
Adam Gabbatt April 5, 2021
Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Fewer than half of Americans belong to a house of worship, a new stud shows, but religion – and Christianity in particular – continues to have an outsize influence in US politics, especially because it is declining faster among Democrats than Republicans.
Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to a survey by Gallup, down from 70% two decades ago – in part a result of millennials turning away from religion but also, experts say, a reaction to the swirling mix of rightwing politics and Christianity pursued by the Republican party.
The evidence comes as Republicans in some states have pursued extreme “Christian nationalist” policies, attempting to force their version of Christianity on an increasingly uninterested public.
This week the governor of Arkansas signed a law allowing doctors to refuse to treat LGBTQ people on religious grounds, and other states are exploring similar legislation.
Gallup began asking Americans about their church membership in 1937 – and for decades the number was always above 70%. That began to change in 2000, and the number has steadily dropped ever since.
Some of the decline is attributable to changing generations, with about 66% of people born before 1946 are still members of a church, compared with just 36% of millennials.
Among other groups Gallup reported, the decline in church membership stands out among self-identified Democrats and independents. The number of Democratic church members dropped by 25% over the 20-year period, with independents decreasing by 18%. Republican church members declined too, but only by 12%.
David Campbell, professor and chair of the University of Notre Dame’s political science department and co-author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, said a reason for the decline among those groups is political – an “allergic reaction to the religious right”.
“Many Americans – especially young people – see religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically,” Campbell said.
“Since that is not their party, or their politics, they do not want to identify as being religious. Young people are especially allergic to the perception that many – but by no means all – American religions are hostile to LGBTQ rights.”
Research by Campbell shows that a growing number of Americans have turned away from religion as politicians – particularly Republicans – have mixed religion with their politics. Campbell says there has always been an ebb and flow in American adherence to religion, but he thinks the current decline is likely to continue.
“I see no sign that the religious right, and Christian nationalism, is fading. Which in turn suggests that the allergic reaction will continue to be seen – and thus more and more Americans will turn away from religion,” he said.
The number of people who identify as non-religious has grown steadily in recent decades, according to Michele Margolis, associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of From Politics to the Pews. More than 20% of all Americans are classed as “nones”, Margolis said, and more than a third of Americans under 30.
“That means non-identification is going to continue becoming a larger share of population over time as cohort replacement continues to occur,” Margolis said. But she agreed another factor is the rightwing’s infusion of politics with theism.
“As religion has been closed linked with conservative politics, we’ve had Democrats opting out of organized religion, or being less involved, and Republicans opting in,” she said.
Christian nationalists – who believe America was established as, and should remain, a Christian country – have pushed a range of measures to thrust their version of religion into American life.
You virtually have to wear religion on your sleeve in order to be elected
Annie Laurie Gaylor
In states including Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, Republicans have introduced legislation which would variously hack away at LGTBQ rights, reproductive rights, challenge the ability of couples to adopt children, and see religion forced into classrooms.
“Do not make me NOT do what my God tells me I have to do,” said the Republican Montana congressman John Fuller, a supporter of the law.
Alison Gill, vice-president for legal and policy at American Atheists, who authored a report into the creep of Christian extremism in the US, warned that the drop-off in religious adherence in America could actually accelerate that effort, rather than slow it down.
“Surveys of those who identify with Christian nationalist beliefs consistently show that this group feels that they are subject to more discrimination and marginalization than any other group in society, including Islamic people, Black people, atheists, [and] Jewish people,” Gill said.
“They are experiencing their loss of prominence in American culture as an unacceptable attack on their beliefs – and this is driving much of the efforts we are seeing to cling on to power, undermine democracy, and fight for ‘religious freedom’ protections that apply only to them.”
The influence of religion over politics is stark, Gill said.
“America perceives itself to be a predominantly religious society, even if the facts no longer agree. Politicians often feel beholden to pronounce their religious faith – and are attacked for a perceived lack of it,” she said.
While the danger of a rightwing backlash is real, Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said that the Gallup data suggests the US is moving in a positive direction.
“We have this constitutional separation of church and state in America, and our constitution is godless, and it says you can’t have a religious test for public office, and yet you virtually have to wear religion on your sleeve in order to be elected,” Gaylor said.
“There is movement [away from religion], and we’re just delighted to see this. We think it’s great that Americans are finally waking up.”
Every two weeks, Dawn Upton floods her lawn. She treks into her back yard, twists open two valves big as dinner plates, and within minutes is ankle-deep in water.
“You have to have irrigation boots, girl,” she says during a video tour of her property in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. She flips her camera to reveal green grass, then tilts her phone skyward at four towering palm trees. As she walks, she pans across pecan, pomegranate, and citrus trees – lemon, orange, a grapefruit sapling. A tortoise, between 80 and 100lbs, lumbers toward her, chewing. “There’s Simba,” Upton says. “Hey buddy! What is that, Simba? You can’t eat it.” She pats him affectionately on the head.
This lush half-acre is Upton and her husband’s oasis, fed by flood irrigation in the heart of the Sonoran desert.
Upton is among a handful of homeowners – by one accounting, just 1% – of metro Phoenix’s 4.4 million people to receive flood irrigation. The Salt River Project, the area’s largest supplier of such water, delivered almost 60,000 acre-feet of water to that small number of residents in 2019, or 7.5% of the water it delivered that year to all customers combined.
In that same year, the Salt River Project sent 36,003 acre-feet to Phoenix-area schools, parks, golf courses and churches (and 63,500 acre-feet to farmers – another story entirely) to irrigate trees and turf.
To provide scale for that type of usage: one acre-foot of water can sustain three Phoenix-area families for a year. The entire city of Chandler, Arizona, population 261,000, uses 60,000 acre-feet of water annually.
The water, untreated, is cheap. To flood her yard twice a week, except in winter, Upton pays $100 a year to Salt River Project and $350 to her subdivision’s irrigation water delivery district, a special taxation district she helped start. If it were city water, “we could never afford this,” Upton says. “It’d be over $600 a month.”
The total amount of raw water to irrigate lawns and trees in private homes, parks, and schools has changed little in the last 36 years. Some people deem the practice a harmless anomaly. Others defiantly defend it against a backdrop of conservation messaging and intensive planning for climate change, drought, and future water scarcity.
•••
Phoenix has a deep history of environmental injustice. Low-income communities and communities of color suffer disproportionately from Phoenix’s extreme heat, a problem compounded by water access and affordability.
No one appears to have studied how flood irrigation correlates with wealth or race. Research indicates white, wealthier people are more likely to live in grassier, shadier neighborhoods. In one study from 2008, local researchers found that during one heat wave, the temperature discrepancy between a wealthier neighborhood and a poorer one in Phoenix hit 13.5F. Trees and grass accounted for the difference.
Whiter, wealthier people were more likely to have more vegetation, and in turn, cooler climates, the authors found. That study did not examine how greener areas were watered, but any irrigation has costs. “Affluent people ‘buy’ more favorable microclimates,” the researchers concluded.
Cynthia Campbell, water resources advisor for the city of Phoenix, says she understands why wealthy neighborhoods might still have flood irrigation while poorer ones don’t, even if both have legal rights to the water: high-income families can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on water delivery, pipeline repairs, and irrigation-district taxes. For lower-income ones, that kind of spending might not be possible.
Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University (ASU) Morrison Institute, sees “two Phoenixes”. One is water-rich, the other water-poor, she says.
•••
Step away from Phoenix’s suburban sprawl into what little natural desert now remains, and you’ll find yourself in a dense ecosystem. Saguaro cacti stretch 40ft high, and barbed cholla stand alongside outstretched ocotillo plants. In the spring, after winter rains, a faint sage green carpets the desert floor.
Only in recent decades has the landscaping of metro Phoenix begun to resemble the surrounding desert. In 1978, grass dominated 80% of home landscapes. By 2014, that had dwindled to less than 15%, as the popularity of desert landscaping, or xeriscaping, grew. The area receives on average 8in of rainfall a year.
Urban flood irrigation reflects an essential tension in the management of Arizona’s water. On one hand, city and state leaders seek to reassure everyone that the region has sufficient water. Arizona’s economy has long been tied to growth, and leaders don’t want to scare off would-be residents with warnings of scarcity, like the fact that groundwater is over-pumped, that the state is exploring options to desalinate ocean water or brackish groundwater, or that Arizona will likely soon take mandatory cuts to its share of Colorado River water.
On the other hand, cities in this bastion of Sunbelt conservatism encourage residents to use water “wisely”.
Avoiding ordinances limiting individual water use, they instead have water-conservation websites, literature on optimizing watering systems, rebate and incentive programs, and workshops encouraging residents to consider low-water desert landscaping and low-flow toilets. They don’t demand that residents use less water, while other US cities do.
The average resident in metro Phoenix, where water prices are among the lowest in the nation, consumed more than 115 gallons of water per day in 2018. That’s down from about 135 in 2005, but still well above the average resident of Tucson (less than 85 gallons), which never had comparable access to water. The 2015 US average consumption was 83 gallons per day.
Large-scale changes to urban flood irrigation would come at a cost – converting to drip or sprinklers is expensive. A common claim is that trees raised on flood irrigation will die without it, but some evidence suggests otherwise. Two studies have found that mature citrus and olive trees, both of which are present in Phoenix, can respond positively when converted from flood to sprinkler, drip, or other irrigation, although they take a few years to adapt.
Meanwhile, Phoenix has an urban heat island problem – concrete and asphalt absorb the sun’s radiation during the day and release it at night, worsening every year – which flood irrigated trees and grass may assuage. Average night-time temperatures today are nearly 9F hotter than they were 50 years ago. Last year, Phoenix broke records with the number of days over 100F; its deadly summer heat can exceed 120F.
It’s just not popular to regulate people’s water use
Advocates of flood irrigation also invoke the desire to maintain the historic character of a neighborhood, Phoenix’s “oasis” feel, and, inevitably, the property values commensurate with both.
Wendy Wonderley moved to Arizona in 1984. Before retiring to Indiana in January, she lived in several Phoenix neighborhoods with flood irrigation, calling them “very pleasant to live in”. She frames flood irrigation as a question of values.
“If you’re going to live here in this desert,” Wonderley explains, “Then you’re going to have to alter some of the attributes of it.”
“If Phoenix as a society decides, ‘Nope, we really want desert vegetation everywhere,’ then that’s that, but it would be a real shame,” she says.
“It’s just not popular to regulate people’s water use,” says Kelli Larson, a professor of geography at ASU who has studied landscape choices and municipal ordinances. In a 2017 paper she co-authored, she found that despite campaigns to urge people to switch to desert landscaping, preferences for lush, grassy landscapes still exist, especially among long-term residents. Many want more grass than they have.
In another study published last year, Larson and her co-authors examined municipal landscaping ordinances in metropolitan areas across the US, including Phoenix. They found that 68% of the two dozen municipalities in greater Phoenix stress water conservation, compared to 87% of municipalities in the Los Angeles area, and that a greater proportion of municipalities in the water-rich Minneapolis-St Paul area (68%) restrict landscape irrigation than do those around Phoenix (56%).
Pending water scarcity in Phoenix, Larson adds, is less about whether it will be available, and more about to whom. “It’s going to become institutionally limited, economically limited, way before it’s going to become actual physical scarcity,” she says.
Tempe, southeast of Phoenix, still operates flood irrigation for about 900 residents and 16 city parks. It recovers just half those costs from users. On a video call, Braden Kay, Tempe’s director of sustainability, explains the city’s support for flood irrigation partly as a need to maintain large trees for cooling. Terry Piekarz, Tempe’s municipal utilities director, who is also on the call, nods. “We’re not saying, ‘Don’t [use water],’” he says, echoing other city officials interviewed for this article. “We’re saying, ‘Use water wisely.’”
•••
Under Arizona’s labyrinthine water laws, transferring water from one place to another is difficult. All water from the Salt River Project must be used on Salt River Project lands – designated a century ago by legal decree. Similar legal and jurisdictional challenges affect Arizona’s share of the Colorado River and its groundwater. Although the effects of ongoing drought and climate change, including less surface water, are prompting calls for greater flexibility in managing water, options remain limited.
For example, if Porter were to decline her own home’s allocation of flood irrigation water – which she has a “complex relationship” with – it can’t be sent to, say, water-stressed North Phoenix, which isn’t legally entitled to it. Instead, when she declines her water, it goes to the municipality where she lives, Phoenix, for treatment and distribution to Salt River Project territory.
Someday, Porter dreams, that could change.
Her wish is that people like her, who have irrigation rights, could one day forgo their own allocation and instead opt into alternative water uses, like watering trees or rehabilitating dry riverbeds.
She has also spoken with Salt River Project about the possibility of installing a tank in her yard to collect flood irrigation water to use in a less water-intensive sprinkler system – an option that is legal but expensive.
As for Dawn Upton, she says she’s aware of living in a desert – she turns off the faucet when brushing her teeth – and sometimes questions whether everything that made flood irrigation possible should’ve been done at such a massive scale at all. But, that can’t be undone. Plus, she adds, “when you look at this lawn, I don’t think I want it any other way”.
Florida county fears “imminent” reservoir collapse
Li Cohen April 4, 2021
Some residents in Manatee County, Florida, were evacuated from their homes over Easter weekend as officials cited fears that a wastewater pond could collapse “at any time.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for the area on Saturday.
County officials said the pond, located at the former Piney Point phosphate processing plant, has a “significant leak,” according to CBS affiliate WTSP-TV. The Manatee County Public Safety Department told people near the plant to evacuate due to an “imminent uncontrolled release of wastewater.”
“A portion of the containment wall at the leak site shifted laterally,” said Manatee Director of Public Safety Jake Saur, “signifying that structural collapse could occur at any time.”
Manatee County Public Safety Department initially sent out emergency evacuation notices on Friday for those who were within half a mile of Piney Point, and by 11 a.m. Saturday, evacuation orders were extended to people within one mile north of the reservoir’s stacks of phosphogypsum — a fertilizer waste product — and those within half a mile to the south of the site. Surrounding stretches of highway were also closed to traffic.
Related: Bacteria on Florida beaches proves deadly
Mandatory evacuations were extended an additional half mile west and one mile southwest of the site on Saturday evening. Manatee County Public Safety Department said that 316 households are within the full evacuation area.
The closure of U.S. 41 will be expanded south from Buckeye Road to Moccasin Wallow Road. Moccasin Wallow Road will be closed west of 38th Avenue East. There are an estimated 316 households in the evacuation area. Those households will all receive an emergency alert to evacuate.
Phosphogypsum is the “radioactive waste” left over from processing phosophate ore into a state that can be used for fertilizer, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
“In addition to high concentrations of radioactive materials, phosphogypsum and processed wastewater can also contain carcinogens and heavy toxic metals,” the Center said in a statement on Saturday. “For every ton of phosphoric acid produced, the fertilizer industry creates 5 tons of radioactive phosphogypsum waste, which is stored in mountainous stacks hundreds of acres wide and hundreds of feet tall.”
Manatee County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh said in a statement Saturday that the “public must heed that notice to avoid harm.”
Officials are on site conducting a controlled release of water, roughly 22,000 gallons a minute.
The water that is currently being pumped out by officials in order to avoid a full collapse is a mix of sea water from a local dredge project, storm water and rain runoff. The water has not been treated.
“The water meets water quality standards for marine waters with the exception of pH, total phosphorus, total nitrogen and total ammonia nitrogen,” the state said in a statement. “It is slightly acidic, but not at a level that is expected to be a concern, nor is it expected to be toxic.”
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried wrote a letter to DeSantis on Saturday urging an emergency session of the Florida cabinet to discuss the situation. She wrote that the leaking water is “contaminated, radioactive wastewater,” and noted that this leak is not the property’s first.
“For more than fifty years, this Central Florida mining operation has caused numerous human health and environmental disasters and incidents,” Fried wrote. “There have been numerous, well-documented failures — which continue today — of the property’s reservoir liner, including leaks, poor welds, holes, cracks and weaknesses that existed prior to purchase by the current owner, HRK Holdings, and exacerbated since.”
Video of a Manatee County Commissioners meeting provided insight into what happened prior to the leak. On Thursday afternoon, Jeff Barath, a representative for HRK Holdings, the company that owns the site, appeared emotionally distressed while briefing the Manatee County Commissioners about the situation.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. He told commissioners he had only slept a few hours that week because he was trying to fix the situation, and through tears, said he first noticed “increased conductivities within the site’s seepage collection system” 10 days prior on March 22. This system, he said, offers drainage around the gypsum stacks.
He said he immediately notified FDEP of his concerns.
“The water was changing around the seepage. We went into a very aggressive monitoring program,” he said, to find out where the seepage was coming from.
They discovered the south side of the stack system had “increased in conductivity” and that the acidity of the water, which is normally around a 4.6, had dropped to about a 3.5, which indicated an issue.
After a few days, the water chemistry had not improved and water flows were increasing from about 120 gallons a minute to more than 400 gallons per minute in less than 48 hours, Barath said. Last Saturday night, the flow rates increased to “rates that I could not even estimate to you,” he said.
Water was filling the stacks so quickly that the ground was starting to rise, Barath said. This “bulging” was temporarily stabilized but then extended hundreds of feet.
Barath submitted a report to the state on March 26, according to the state-run “Protecting Florida Together,” website, which was created by DeSantis to allow more transparency about state water issues.
“I was anticipating that the gypstack itself was destabilizing at a very rapid rate and recommended that we consider an emergency discharge,” he told commissioners. He said he feared that “overpressurizing” the system would result in “complete failure.”
“I’ve spent most of my days and nights constantly monitoring all aspects of this gypstack system and identifying failure points within it,” he said, noting that failure points were happening “constantly, I mean hourly.”
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection said that it ordered the company to “take immediate action” to prevent further leaks. On March 30, the department said that “pipes at the facility are repaired” and controlled discharges were initiated to prevent any pressure buildup.
However, based on Barath’s testimony at the meeting, the situation was far from over. He concluded his address by saying they were doing “everything possible to prevent a true catastrophe.”
On Friday, another leak was detected in the south containment area of the facility. Despite overnight work to attempt to stop this and other leaks, Manatee Director of Public Safety Jake Saur said on Saturday that the situation was “escalating.”
Town’s Water Contaminated With ‘Forever Chemicals’
Lewis Kendall April 2, 2021
On a bitterly cold afternoon earlier this year, the Haw River in North Carolina was running high—its water a bright ocher, thanks to heavy rainfall and snow melt.
Most of the water flowed south, where it would eventually connect with Jordan Lake and the rest of the Cape Fear River Basin, home to the cities of Greensboro, Durham, Fayetteville, and Wilmington, and a major source of drinking water for the eastern half of the state.
But some of it took a sharp turn, pumped up to the local water treatment plant where it was cleaned and filtered before continuing its journey, piped down the road and into a church in downtown Pittsboro, where Jim Vaughn had just finished helping hand out free lunches.
Vaughn, a retired electrical equipment salesman and longtime Pittsboro resident, had found a problem with the water coming out of the church’s tap: contamination with a group of chemicals that are linked to health concerns.
The 76-year-old is part of a collaborative project between the Guardian and Consumer Reports that tested 120 tap water samples from locations across the U.S. for dozens of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a group of roughly 5,000 compounds found in everything from food packaging to nonstick cookware to firefighting foam. The health risks associated with long-term PFAS exposure include cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility, and increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease.
The chemicals have been around for more than 80 years, but it wasn’t until 2016 that the Environmental Protection Agency set an advisory limit for PFAS in drinking water—70 parts per trillion (ppt).
According to the test, the water coming from the Pittsboro church’s tap measured PFAS levels of 80 ppt.
The EPA is under considerable pressure to lower its limits on PFAS. For instance, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group has proposed a total PFAS limit of 1 ppt in drinking water and groundwater.
CR’s scientists say the maximum allowed amount should be 5 ppt for a single PFAS chemical and 10 ppt for two or more. That is in line with the standards for bottled water that an industry group, the International Bottled Water Association, has its members adhere to.
Vaughn, who wears a black cowboy hat with a multicolored feather stuck in the band, wasn’t particularly surprised at the high PFAS result from the Consumer Reports and Guardian testing. His lack of surprise was also likely due to North Carolina’s long history with PFAS. In the early 1970s, the chemical company DuPont began operating a manufacturing facility that discharged PFAS into the Cape Fear River.
“There’s a feeling of helplessness,” Vaughn says. “Is there something we can do about it? Is there something that the town will do about it? Or will we let it ride and try to ignore it?”
Knowingly or unknowingly, he says, communities like Pittsboro are used to getting “dumped on.”
For more than 90 years Duke Energy operated a large coal-fired power plant in the nearby community of Moncure (population 709), right where the Haw and Deep rivers converge to become the Cape Fear. The area is now the site of a coal ash disposal pit, which is being filled with as much as 12 million tons of slag, powder, and other residual byproducts of burning coal. Multiple tests have revealed elevated levels of metals and other contaminants in groundwater near the site.
The PFAS contamination of Cape Fear River has been a source of controversy for years. A 2007 EPA study found evidence of PFAS contamination downstream from the plant and throughout the Cape Fear River Basin, including high concentrations near the Fort Bragg and Pope Field military bases. In 2016, researchers discovered contamination farther downstream, as well as in local drinking water, a revelation that spawned a spat of news coverage.
Since then the state has engaged in a back and forth with the offending companies over the issue. In 2017, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality blocked the DuPont plant (now operated by a DuPont offshoot, The Chemours Company) from discharging into the Cape Fear, and later entered into a consent order requiring that Chemours pay a $12 million fine.
Late last year the state filed a lawsuit against the companies, alleging that they “knowingly discharged vast quantities of PFAS into the air, water, sediments, and soils of . . . southeastern North Carolina.”
Asked to comment about the CR test finding in Pittsboro, Chemours spokesman Thom Sueta said in an email that the company had taken “numerous actions to reduce the emissions of fluorinated organic compounds (FOCs)—that includes PFAS,” and that its goal was to reduce them “by at least 99 percent” at its sites worldwide compared with a 2018 baseline.
Sueta said there were “many sources that impact the water quality of the Cape Fear River.” At its Fayetteville, N.C., site, Chemours has installed “a thermal oxidizer that is destroying more than 99.99 percent of FOC emissions from the processes directed to it” and there was “remediation work underway to address groundwater, including our seep treatment units,” Sueta said.
Long-Standing Concerns
The highest concentrations of PFAS chemicals from the 2007 EPA study were found upstream of the Chemours plant, near Pittsboro.
That was one of the first indications that the problem might be more widespread than first thought, says Emily Sutton, at the Haw River Assembly, a nonprofit that focuses on the Haw. For Sutton, who serves as riverkeeper for the Haw and spends most of her time these days studying, thinking, and talking PFAS, the issue is threefold.
The first and often most pressing problem for locals like those in Pittsboro is the contamination in municipal drinking water. But solving this requires hugely expensive upgrades to wastewater treatment facilities (recently floated price tags for Pittsboro, a town of 4,200, range upwards of $20 million) or costly individual, in-home filtration systems. “We know that the drinking water in the town of Pittsboro is contaminated,” Sutton says. “People who are concerned are left to pay for a reverse osmosis system in their own home. That means that only people who can afford that luxury have safe drinking water.”
The second problem is identifying and stopping contamination at its source. According to Sutton, ongoing testing has revealed that much of the PFAS chemicals floating down the Haw and into Pittsboro originate from the nearby city of Burlington. Late last year, the Haw River Assembly helped forge an agreement with the city, compelling it to identify the local facilities or companies responsible for discharging PFAS.
More broadly, Sutton says, regulatory agencies in the U.S. need to reconsider their priorities. The current system favors the introduction of new chemicals, products, or processes, only later limiting or removing them after they’re proved to be harmful. Sutton would rather bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality operate under the precautionary principle—the idea that the onus lies with companies and producers to prove something is harmless before it is introduced into the environment.
PFAS chemicals are a perfect example, she adds, saying that of the some 5,000 compounds in the category, scientists can only test for roughly 30. “We can’t regulate these compounds one at a time,” Sutton says. “The science exists to demonstrate that (they) should be regulated as a class because they’re equally as harmful. It’s such an obvious step that we could take as a country to prioritize the health of our communities rather than the profit of industries.”
Officials in the town insist that they are doing everything they can to improve the water quality. Chris Kennedy, the town manager for Pittsboro, told the Guardian that that while the town was not a contributor to PFAS, it was “still diligently working towards removing PFAS from our potable water supply.” Kennedy said the town was in the process of installing infrastructure that will remove at least 90 percent of PFAS by the end of the year and that it was taking steps where it could “to reduce contamination into the Haw River, which will provide the best results long term.”
Pittsboro itself stands at a crossroads. A new 7,100-acre mixed-use development is set to add as many as 60,000 people to the town. That kind of rapid growth is likely to squeeze low-income residents and exacerbate public health disparities that already exist in the community, says Jennifer Platt, a Pittsboro resident and adjunct professor of public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Platt, who has a 12-year-old son, installed a home filtration system after she first learned about the PFAS contamination, calling it “not affordable but mandatory.” But she also recognizes that many residents don’t have the means to do what she did.
“Here it’s about equity in terms of who understands the problem with the water and who’s able to deal with it,” the 51-year-old says.
Platt is part of the local Water Quality Task Force, which recently recommended that the town build a centralized water station—fitted with a reverse osmosis filtration system—where residents could access clean water. She adds that she would like to see the money from lawsuits against PFAS polluters redistributed to affected residents to subsidize filtration systems or bottled water.
But while she is optimistic now that the ball is rolling, the whole ordeal has highlighted the failures of government and regulatory agencies to keep people safe, particularly those in more marginalized areas, Platt says.
“Our national policies are not geared toward protecting us,” she says. “Poorer communities are bearing the brunt of our pollution. What we have to do now is to continue to mitigate the problem as best as we can until we have a permanent solution.”
Editor’s Note: Reporting in North Carolina for the Guardian was supported by the Water Foundation.
