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FUTURESAVER OF THE WEEK ENDING 7-18-98

Dr. Mary O'Brien is a dedicated environmental activist known locally, nationally and internationally. She has worked on toxics and other environmental issues for the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, Environmental Research Foundation, Hell's Canyon Preservation Council and other organizations. She was instrumental in creating and passing the nation's first local hazardous materials accounting law in Eugene Oregon. She is currently active on Eugene's Toxic Board, the Governor's Task Force on Hazardous Substance Reporting and Eugene's Citizens for Public Accountability. She was a keynote speaker at the 1998 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference and won the Environmentalists award there. She knows that we need to be practical, generous and radical. For having an excellent grasp of what it takes to have a liveable environment and for working tirelessly toward saving our environment, Mary O'Brien has been named Futuresaver of the Week. Click the links below for more information.

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EUGENE WEEKLY COLUMN BY MARY O'BRIEN:

Holy Water
The liquid that gives us life silently accumulates that which takes away life.

Holy water.

For our first months of life, we floated in it, sipped it, swallowed it, and absorbed it directly through our skin. When we had grown a waterproof covering, we left our mother's pond, to walk around on Earth, holding the water within.

Frogs have beginnings like ours, except their water-bound larval stages are in outdoor ponds or streams.

Holy water, wash away our misdeeds.

Water washes away what we don't want to deal with anymore: Our bodily wastes. Our Drano. Our cars' motor oil. Our factories' toxic wastes. Our tree- and food-farms' pesticide, fertilizer, and livestock runoff.

But where is "away"?

Into the frog's pond-womb? Into the salamander's stream-womb? Into the drinking water of the human mother as she fills the pond in which her child floats while assembling itself?

For quite awhile now, Oregon State University zoologist Andy Blaustein has been watching out for frogs and salamanders. His small friends live out there in our mythical "away," where they're becoming deformed, paralyzed, slow, and ill; and they're dying too early.

Don't we have water quality standards?

Surface waters unimpacted by nitrate-generating human activities such as livestock grazing, sewage releases, and agricultural fertilizers, normally contain trace amounts to one milligram (mg) nitrate per liter. This is roughly one part nitrate per million parts (ppm) water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends as "safe" for warm water fish no more than 90 milligrams nitrate pollution per liter of water, which is approximately 90 ppm.

It appears that frogs can't live with EPA's standards. Blaustein placed salamander and frog larvae for 15 days in water with various concentrations of nitrate, and found that 90 mg nitrate per liter is twice the concentration that kills 50 percent of Northwestern salamander larvae (Ambystoma gracile) and almost four times more than the amount that kills 50 percent of spotted frog tadpoles (Rana pretiosa).

Worse, nitrates are often transformed into nitrites, which have one less oxygen atom per molecule, but more toxicity. The 5 mg/liter "standard" for nitrite stream pollution that EPA says will protect warm-water fishes is lethal to the four salamander and frog species Blaustein has been studying. The EPA's drinking water pollution limit of one mg/liter nitrite, supposedly protective of humans, causes significant larval mortality and deformities.

The EPA wasn't thinking about frogs when it set nitrate/nitrite pollution standards. Or maybe it wasn't even thinking deeply enough about us: Blaustein wonders aloud whether we really want to be drinking water that causes malformations in frogs.

Blaustein is continuing his studies. He's going to see how combinations of very small amounts of fertilizers, pesticides, and toxics affect different species of frogs and salamanders.

Streams and ponds collect our misdeeds.

You would think we would revere water. It was our first environment, and we depend on our internal store of it every minute of our life. But somehow we have been getting it all backward. We could be trying to make sure our streams, ponds, and wetlands have everything they deserve - things like shade, streamside vegetation, freedom to wander, beavers, tiny native garbage collectors. Instead, we use creeks and streams as waste dumps and sewers. We pipe, drain, dam, and fill them in. We treat them as trespassers if they dare, on some wild, rainy day, to venture out of their assigned, strait-jacket channels. And we fancy we know what hazardous substances we're putting into them and that we can estimate (via risk assessment) how much of each toxic substance can be withstood by those who drink, breathe, and develop in the polluted water.

In fact, we don't know any of these things. hat we do know is all the things we want to do to water, rather than for water. It's time to go beyond that: To admit that there never has been an "away" for what we throw into streams. To acknowledge that streams need the same things each of us needs: understanding, respect, freedom, protection from harm, and time and space to heal. To absorb the reality that we are no more and no less than the condition of the watery communities around and inside us; than the condition of the spotted frog, Northwestern salamander, and salmon. And then, with our lives and laws, to care well for this one, large holiness of water, land, air, and living beings.

Holy all.

Mary O'Brien has worked as a public interest scientist for the past 18 years. She can be reached at mob@efn.org