Smarter Growth. John H. Spiers

Potomac

      Metropolitan growth was a major contributor to the pollution of the Potomac, with runoff from built-up areas being the fastest growing source of pollution.⁸⁵ Compared to forested land, developed land offers far lower levels of water infiltration and soil conservation; and this exacerbated the overloading of wastewater treatment plants.⁸⁶ Close-in communities experienced “urban stream syndrome” characterized by “increased flash floods; elevated concentrations of nutrients and contaminants; altered stream morphology, including incised channels that cut off vegetation from its water source and increased sedimentation from eroded stream banks; and reduced diversity, with an influx of more tolerant species to counter the loss of more sensitive species.”⁸⁷

      Large-scale industrial farming outside of the metropolitan area also contributed ever-higher pollution loads as their operations expanded and came to rely on pesticide-intensive agriculture.⁸⁸ As exurban growth made its way into West Virginia during the 1990s, the state’s poultry industry more than doubled and dumped 4.6 million pounds of bird carcasses a year into the Potomac, which overburdened rural municipal treatment facilities that then dumped pollution back into the river.⁸⁹ This was a major reason why American Rivers, a national nonprofit conservation organization, ranked the Potomac one of the ten most polluted rivers in the late 1990s.⁹⁰ Many environmentalists, however, tended to discount the environmental impact of farms because they valued their open space, bucolic aesthetic, and wildlife protection. In a more critical light, one could argue that environmentalists held a sentimental view of farming that elided the industrial nature of its operations, particularly with chemical usage and waste.

      Federal policy making proved far less effective in dealing with nonpoint pollution than it had been with using command-and-control regulations to upgrade and build wastewater treatment facilities. The primary reason was that nonpoint pollution was generally a consequence of land use planning, which was traditionally the domain of local communities. The federal government had no mandate to intervene into zoning and land use planning except where federal monies, lands, or other interests were at stake. In addition, many federal agencies supported development through housing, highways, and business creation as well as overseeing an industrial model of agriculture that lacked strong pollution controls. Finally, controlling pollution from farms was largely the province of states and localities, whose imperative for growth often led to weak standards for compliance.⁹¹

      Even as more environmental actors turned their attention to nonpoint pollution, wastewater treatment remained a challenge as development continued apace in Greater Washington. During its inspections of Blue Plains in 1995, the EPA found deteriorating conditions, maintenance issues, and other violations of the facility’s federal operating permit despite a mandate nearly a decade earlier for the plant to add personnel and invest in operations. After filing a lawsuit against the District of Columbia, the EPA reached a settlement requiring the city to use its existing revenues to make upgrades and repairs over the next two years. By 2000, the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority (WASA), which operated Blue Plains, had invested $100 million and were able to cut the facility’s pollution by half.⁹²

      At the turn of the century, however, Blue Plains dumped three billion gallons of raw sewage per year into the Anacostia and Potomac as overflow during periods of heavy rains. Environmentalists sued WASA, and in a 2003 settlement the agency agreed to undertake a $143 million project “to upgrade pumping stations, reroute some sewage pipes and install dams in others.” A year later, it had reduced overflows by 24 percent. In 2004, WASA settled another lawsuit with the EPA when it agreed to build three underground water storage tunnels to eliminate more than fifty sewage overflow discharge outlets into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and Rock Creek.⁹³

      After years of planning, WASA deployed a special machine nicknamed “Lady Bird”—in homage to the former first lady’s commitment to conservation—that began digging thirteen miles of underground tunnels in July 2013.⁹⁴ Two years later, the machine had completed the first four-mile section of the tunnel, which measured twenty-three feet in diameter. Unlike the upgrades at Blue Plains, which were largely financed with federal money, the $2.6 billion tunneling project received less than 10 percent of its funding from federal sources.⁹⁵ This discrepancy was a by-product of the declining influence of environmental issues in national politics in relation to the rise of homeland security, reviving a struggling economy amid the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and a more conservative fiscal and political climate. Federal environmental agencies had also chosen to spend more of their money, time, and resources on legal action and implementing court orders than congressional mandates or capital financing.⁹⁶

      In a highly pluralistic and competitive interest group environment, it was difficult to find common ground for improving water quality on a large scale.⁹⁷ Environmental lobbying and litigation were often restricted to well-funded national organizations or affluent local environmentalists who had the skills to act on the political stage. In addition, these activities had a limited ability to inculcate a keen sense of public investment in environmental issues beyond updating constituents about the latest issues or asking for money to finance political activities. The rise of environmental education and local direct action in the early twenty-first century was a way to break through the political deadlock to continue improving the Potomac’s health.

      One of the earliest and most successful organizations doing this kind of work was the Alice Ferguson Foundation. Its namesake was an artist who in the 1920s bought the 130-acre Hard Bargain Farm in Accokeek about twelve miles south of Washington in Prince George’s. Ferguson managed the farm and later purchased hundreds of acres of nearby land, which she resold to conservation-minded individuals who built homes scattered throughout to block against intensive development. Alice’s husband, Henry, established a nonprofit foundation in her name in 1954 to protect the site’s environmental and cultural resources. In the 1960s, the bottom half of the now 330-acre site was deeded to the National Park Service as part of Piscataway National Park. In the early 1970s, the foundation established an educational center that offered classes for thousands of elementary and middle school students each year, encouraging them to develop a sense of environmental stewardship by visiting the Potomac waterfront and learning about its natural resources and farming history through hands-on activities. Programming was later added to support K–12 school curriculum and to bring high school students to the site. At present, the foundation serves four thousand elementary school students per year in one- and two-day environmental and agricultural programs at Hard Bargain Farm, reaches out to six thousand middle and high school students visiting national and state parks in the Washington area through its Bridging the Watershed program, and trains hundreds of teachers in outdoor environmental education.⁹⁸

      The Alice Ferguson Foundation is best known for its an annual springtime Potomac Watershed Cleanup. The first cleanup began in 1989 at Hard Bargain Farm with fifty volunteers. In 2000, the event had grown to three thousand people at 110 sites. By 2006, it had brought together over thirty-five thousand volunteers, many of them young people, to remove 2.5 million pounds of trash since its inception. The organization’s website proudly documents the number of volunteers, cleanup sites, total trash, and items found to showcase the tangible benefits of the cleanups.⁹⁹

      Over the past decade, the foundation has expanded its outreach about the harm of litter. In 2006, it hosted the First Potomac Watershed Trash Summit to better understand why trash volume increased year after year. Two years later, it published a survey of residents’ attitudes that found nearly two-thirds were bothered “a lot” by litter in the Potomac watershed and wanted to see government do more about it. Yet the survey also revealed that most people littered out of laziness and a mistaken belief that others will clean it up or that it would wash down a storm drain and be filtered.¹⁰⁰

      Admittedly, the amount of trash collected through public cleanup campaigns was a small part of the Potomac’s overall pollution. However, cleanups and environmental education could inspire a sense of environmental stewardship that reached beyond the typical white, middle-class, college-educated residents who traditionally engaged in environmental advocacy. This possibility was on display when a group of fifth graders from nearby Bowie, Maryland, took a two-day field trip to Hard Bargain Farm. While there, the group viewed the open space of the