Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

In December, Portland, Ore.-based, Iberdrola Renewables began generating electricity at its 30-MW facility in Alamosa County. The 89-hectare (220-acre) site used to be farmland, but now it holds roughly 110,000 silicon panels.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — Just as in every address that he has made to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama this week confirmed his commitment to the economic and environmental benefits of wind and solar energy, adding that opening more federal land to clean energy development is in the national interest.

“I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes,” the president declared in the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

But the government’s plan to turn large expanses of the American West into clean energy production zones is confronting considerable challenges, not the least of which is growing public resistance to big wind and solar projects that are popping up on wild lands close to rural communities. The public restiveness — driven by concerns about the effects of utility-scale installations on the environment and on small-town community values — is altering the government’s planning process and putting in doubt just how big the clean energy footprint will be on public lands.

In few places are the outlines of the opposition more clearly defined than here in the San Luis Valley, a high-altitude farming and ranching region that is the size of Connecticut. In this sunny section of Colorado, the Obama administration has designated four parcels — totaling more than 6,500 hectares (16,000 acres) and administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — as “solar energy zones.”

“We are not against solar,” rancher Julie Sullivan told Circle of Blue. Last year, Sullivan helped defeat a large project on private land near her Saguache County home. “But we didn’t want a bad solar project, because then the bar would be lower. That would open the door to more bad projects.”

Competitive Edge and Citizen Acceptance
Indeed, as Jesse Morris, a solar analyst at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a renewable energy research and consulting group, explained in an interview with Circle of Blue, the wind and solar business is being influenced by a host of new trends in energy markets and citizen acceptance.

For instance, innovations in drilling technology and production have boosted domestic supplies of natural gas, which produces half the carbon emissions of coal and is selling at such low prices that utilities are planning new gas-fired electrical power stations. According to Morris, with such competitive pricing for electricity produced from natural gas, the economics of clean energy production could shift from big centralized solar installations to individual rooftop solar and smaller distributed systems.

In other words, big solar plants could quickly become obsolete.

“Solar is great, and we need as much of it as we can get to meet current and future energy needs,” Morris said. “The federal focus is on larger facilities. But — looking longer term — those facilities have real issues.”

In the meantime, the four solar energy zones here in the valley are joined by 13 other solar zones in five additional Western states that, three years ago, the federal government designated as prime areas to generate power from the sun. The Interior Department and a number of sister agencies are nearing the end of an environmental review, which began in 2009 and will reach another milestone on Friday, when the public comment period for the supplement to the 11,000-page draft assessment closes.

The final version will be released this summer. It will amend the BLM’s resource management plans to allow the agency to concentrate solar development in the most suitable areas.

Even through a casual reading of the citizen observations made during the first public comment period in early 2011, it becomes clear that the concerns expressed about big solar plants in the San Luis Valley are shared around much of the West. The Department of the Interior heard complaints about the negative effects of solar development on wildlife, on plants and water resources, on the fragmentation of animal migration corridors, on the cultural resources of Indian tribes, and on marred scenic views.

As a result, the department narrowed the number of solar zones to 17 from 24 and tightened the boundaries of others. The total area now prioritized for solar development on BLM-managed lands has been cut by more than half — from 273,972 hectares (677,000 acres) to 115,335 hectares (285,000 acres).

Though the Interior Department kept all four zones that had been proposed for the San Luis Valley, their total acreage was reduced by a fifth.

Sense and Sensitivity
Since 2010, the BLM has approved more than 5,600 megawatts of solar generating capacity, all in the deserts of Arizona, California, and Nevada.

Right now, a company can apply for a solar permit for any BLM land, Joe Vieira told Circle of Blue. He works on renewable energy projects from the agency’s San Luis Valley office in Monte Vista.

On conducting the latest environmental review, Vieira said, “the BLM is trying to be more strategic with where solar could be developed — finding those places with the least conflict over endangered species, views, and cultural and environmental resources.”

Two of the valley’s four zones have applications pending, Vieira said, and new transmission line capacity would be needed for all four solar zones. Because of suggestions made during the public comment period, the boundaries of three of these zones were modified and reduced. If all four zones were fully developed, the draft assessment estimates that they could support 1,450 MW using photovoltaic (PV) panels, or 2,612 MW using solar troughs.

Ceal Smith, of the San Luis Valley Renewable Communities Alliance, which supports small-scale solar development, calls the BLM plan “a giveaway to industry.” This is partly because, unlike gas and mineral leases, federal laws for wind and solar confer no financial benefits to the host community. To correct this, several U.S. senators from Western states have co-sponsored a bill that would create royalty payments for the two renewable sources based on the amount of electricity generated.

“If energy is being produced, the area needs to benefit,” said Christine Canaly, director of the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, a public lands advocacy group. “That mechanism is not in place for the BLM zones.”

Instead of developing thousand-acre tracts of public land, Smith suggested putting solar panels on degraded private land or in the empty corners of fields that are irrigated by the legions of center-pivot systems in the valley. That course of action would minimize land disturbance and help transition marginal fields away from excessive groundwater use that is draining one of the valley’s aquifers and affecting the holders of senior surface rights.

Portland, Oregon-based Iberdrola Renewables, for instance, built a 30-MW photovoltaic array last year on 90 hectares (220 acres) that were once used to grow carrots and potatoes. Whereas the crops would have consumed at least 270,000 cubic meters (220 acre-feet) of water each year, said Richard Sparks, an irrigation agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the solar plant will use almost none — just a small amount for the bathroom and the kitchen in the operation center, according to Iberdrola spokeswoman Jan Johnson.

On the other hand, solar thermal systems, which use much more water, could put additional strain on the valley’s water resources and traditional land patterns. The authors of the draft environmental assessment anticipated potential conflict, writing that “the transfer of agricultural water rights for solar energy development will result in agricultural fields being put out of production and will significantly alter land use in the San Luis Valley.”

Who Benefits?
The San Luis Valley has long supported small solar projects installed on homes and businesses. But, as Julie Sullivan tells Circle of Blue, few residents of the San Luis Valley are anxious to support a “bad” solar project that could “open the door to more bad projects.”

By bad, Sullivan is referring to a utility-scale project that a decade or so ago would have been widely cited in the national environmental community as beneficial. In this case, it was a 200-megawatt facility proposed by Tessera, a Houston-based company. Initial plans called for a fleet of 8,000 solar dishes, each 12-meters tall (40-feet tall) with Stirling engines to convert the sunlight into electricity.

Sullivan points from her dining room window to the horizon, where the Tessera solar dishes would have stood out against the freshly powdered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This time last year, neighbors representing ranching, agricultural, and environmental groups were meeting in her home to discuss how to stop the project.

“I never thought I’d be fighting solar power,” says Sullivan, who taught environmental studies at Lesley University before marrying into the ranch life. “But it was an industrial project in an agricultural area. The renewable industry wants us to think that anything ‘renewable’ is green, and it’s not.”

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

In the last few years, four photovoltaic solar installations have been built in Alamosa County near the San Luis Valley electrical substation. Together they have the capacity to produce 87 megawatts.

Last July, the company abandoned the project, citing noise levels that exceeded state limits. Defeating the installation marked something of an opening salvo by opponents in what will be a long-running struggle for residents and the federal government to define what a “good” solar project is and to shape solar development here, in the nation’s highest agricultural region.

A Solar Mini-boom
Another hotspot for solar development in the valley is Alamosa County, to the south of Saguache. Because the valley’s transmission substation is in Alamosa, four projects — 87 MW in total — have been built on private land there, providing financial benefits to the county.

Both Smith and Canaly said that Alamosa County had decided to keep projects relatively small — the largest two are 30-MW facilities on no more than 90 hectares (220 acres). They are popular because they make good use of existing grid space and reap tax benefits, which ultimately help local citizens, said Smith and Canaly.

While solar development on the valley’s public land awaits the conclusions of the Interior Department’s environmental review this summer, private landowners have been leasing or selling land to energy companies. A pair of 100-MW solar thermal plants, each with a 200-meter (656-feet) energy-storage tower, are proposed for 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) in Saguache County.

On February 2, the county’s board of commissioners will hold a public hearing to discuss the latest application from SolarReserve, a Delaware-based company.

This article was prepared while the author, Brett Walton, participated in a fellowship that was paid for by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Photo © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue

Domestic production of oil and natural gas is now climbing rapidly, due in part to drilling from rigs like this one in North Dakota.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

Four years ago, when he campaigned for the office he now holds, Barack Obama described the urgent need to pursue clean energy development because of a grave and persistent problem: demand and prices for oil were rising, along with national and economic security risks tied to ever higher imports. Supplies of domestically produced fuel, meanwhile, were falling.

Last night, as the president defined in the State of the Union the basic outlines of an “all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” the country greeted much different conditions. Domestic production of oil and natural gas is now climbing rapidly. Demand is going down. Imports are steadily declining. Prices have steadied.

The result is that while President Obama still presses for more sources of cleaner energy — “I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes,” he said — the allure of pursuing them is not nearly so keen. Summed up, the surge in fossil fuel production has indeed produced an economic reprieve, but one that is exceedingly risky for the land and water, and one that could well turn out to be a surrender to the future.

Here’s why.

Soaring Fossil Fuels
Horizontal drilling technology coupled with high-pressure water blasting — much of it developed with the help of federal research grants — has opened deep beds of hydrocarbon-rich shales all over the country to oil and natural gas production. An energy boom has erupted in eight Great Plains states and three mid-Atlantic states, plus Louisiana and California.

In 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), production of natural gas from deep shales reached 18 billion cubic meters (630 billion cubic feet) per month, one-third of total U.S. natural gas production and 17 times more than in 2000. Last year, U.S. oil production reached almost 6 million barrels per day, and, for the first time since the 1970s, domestic oil production had risen for three straight years.

Photo © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue

Horizontal drilling technology coupled with high-pressure water blasting has opened deep beds of hydrocarbon-rich shales all over the country. Trucks line up to fill with water to frack wells in North Dakota.

“Right now — right now — American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years,” said the president. “Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years.”

The other side of the president’s plan — building a bridge to a new era of cleaner energy sources — is unfolding at a much slower pace. Last year, according to the American Wind Energy Association, almost 7,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity was constructed in the U.S., 31 percent more than in 2010, but China in 2011 built over 14,000 megawatts, or twice as much wind generating capacity.

Troubled Clean Energy
It takes big and consistent federal and state investment in wind, solar, cellulosic biofuels, geothermal, nuclear energy, clean automobiles, trains, and energy-efficient buildings to give innovators and entrepreneurs a solid grip in the cleaner economy. In the era of deficit and disinvestment that describes the political conditions currently at work in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals, lawmakers — supported by the fossil fuel sector — have expressed no enthusiasm for making those investments.

The arguments for pursuing wind, solar, and other cleaner sources of energy make a lot of sense, as do reasons for being more cautious about the consequences of oil and gas production.

The use of water is a good starting point.

Much of the nation’s shale oil and shale gas development is occurring on the arid Great Plains, where drillers require 7,500 to 19,000 cubic meters (2 million to 5 million gallons) of water to hydrofracture each well. In a region where competition for water is fierce, water managers are not sure where the supply for thousands of new wells a year will come from.

In addition, much of the water that goes down each well has to be brought back to the surface and then disposed of safely, because it contains chemical contaminants. States are only now considering requirements for wastewater disposal from shale oil and shale gas fields. Later this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to come out with its preliminary assessment on the risks of fracking. The final analysis will be released in 2014.

Contrast that with generating power from solar photovoltaic and wind energy installations, which require essentially no water to operate. Or generating fuel from switch grass and other sources of plant-based fuel that can be grown on marginal lands and don’t need to be irrigated.

Big clean energy projects, though, are proceeding fitfully as they face mounting price competition in energy markets due to the surge in domestic oil and gas production.

Clean energy projects also confront serious opposition at the grassroots across the country. As Circle of Blue writer Brett Walton will report later this week, one such fight over constructing solar plants is currently taking place in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, which has been identified by the Obama administration as one of the 17 most favorable places in the U.S. to develop solar energy on federal land.

Reprieve or Surrender
In effect, the economic reprieve that is being fostered by new domestic oil and gas production could easily turn out to be a devastating surrender to the future.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have evaluated the effects of rising shale gas production on clean energy innovation and, in a report earlier this month, reached much the same conclusion.

“People speak of [natural] gas as a bridge to the future, but there had better be something at the other end of the bridge,” said Henry Jacoby, co-director emeritus of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and co-author the MIT Energy Initiative’s The Future of Natural Gas.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Colorado’s San Luis Valley is pinched by two mountain ranges, the San Juan peaks to the west and the Sangre de Cristo, seen here, to the east. The valley is the highest agricultural region in the United States.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — At an average altitude of 2,350 meters (7,700 feet), Colorado’s San Luis Valley is the nation’s highest agricultural region and one of its top potato producers. Almost by definition, water dictates the patterns of life and land.

With it, valley farmers have turned this sunny, high-desert rift between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges into one of the most densely irrigated expanses of farmland on the planet. Soon, though, a confrontation between rising global commodity prices, which are pushing production to meet demand, and shrinking water supplies, largely linked to climate change, could cause a number of growers here to do without.

Like heavily irrigated areas in California’s Central Valley, in India’s northern regions, and in the North China Plain, the San Luis Valley has a groundwater supply problem. Since government-subsidized electricity arrived in the 1950s, farmers here have readily pumped from the two aquifer systems that soak up snowmelt like a sponge. Now, those decades of withdrawals have combined with recently lower-than-average river flows to affect water-rights holders along the Rio Grande River, which cuts through the valley before eventually becoming the Texas-Mexico border.

Simply put, the San Luis Valley no longer has enough water to support the abundant farm production that is becoming increasingly supercharged by rising prices for the crops grown here.

There may be a way out. Water officials in the region’s six counties are working with the federal government on a voluntary plan that would pay farmers to take land out of production. If things turn out as planned, up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of the valley’s roughly 240,000 irrigated hectares (600,000 acres) will not be farmed.

Though it is still being negotiated, the plan has a significant obstacle: the explosive rise in food prices, which are making the sums offered by the water-conservation program less enticing. Prices for the valley’s mainstay — potatoes — have increased 25 percent in the last five years. Wheat, alfalfa, and barley prices have done even better, more or less doubling over the same period.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

“Industrialized agriculture is destroying this place,” says George Whitten, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Standing in the pastures on his 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) ranch in Saguache County, Whitten explains the district’s land-fallowing plan, in which up to 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) will be taken out of production to protect one of the valley’s aquifers.

“The commodity markets are going to drive this,” said Steve Vandiver, the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, in an interview with Circle of Blue. “If prices stay high, it’s going to be harder to get farmers to sign up.”

If the voluntary program does not work, Vandiver went on to say, the result would be worst for farmers. The state, he said, would then step in — like it did in not long ago in the nearby South Platte Basin — and force well owners to shut down, without compensation.

“We’re trying to keep that from happening here,” he said. “We’re trying to provide a soft landing.”

Living On A Borrowed Resource
Viewed from above, the San Luis Valley is a punch card of tightly packed center-pivot sprinklers that can pump four cubic meters (1,000 gallons) of water per minute. Settlers started farming the valley in the 1850s, and, by 1903, all of the available surface water had been claimed. Because the valley receives so little rain — just 75 millimeters (three inches) more in a year than what Las Vegas receives — everything is irrigated.

Years ago, farmers relied on groundwater only to finish off the last weeks of the irrigation season, when surface flows were dwindling. But for the last two decades, surface flows in the Rio Grande have declined in comparison with the historical average, said Mike Gibson, the manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District. To make up for the shortage, farmers have pumped groundwater to take up the slack.

Climate change plays a role in the new river patterns, Gibson told Circle of Blue. Wind storms from the deserts in Arizona and New Mexico are more frequent, and they drop dust on the mountain snowpack, which is the primary water source for the valley’s rivers. The warming effect of the dust, combined with higher temperatures, means that the spring melt has moved several weeks earlier in the year. With a longer dry period in the summer, more groundwater is required to balance the changes in the river.

New reservoirs to store the altered flows are prohibited under a compact between Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, Gibson told Circle of Blue, but existing reservoirs are being renovated to maximize their storage capacity.

Vandiver told Circle of Blue that the valley is millions of cubic meters shy of sustainable water levels in the aquifer systems. Each year roughly 615 million cubic meters (500,000 acre-feet) are pumped to produce the bounty of alfalfa, barley, potatoes, and leafy greens that contributes nearly 40 percent of the valley’s economy.

The water district banned new wells in the deep aquifer in 1972 and in the shallow aquifer in 1981 — but the over-pumping persists. The district is still developing groundwater models to determine how much of the annual deficit needs to be paid back.

“We have a huge economy here, based on a resource that doesn’t exist,” says George Whitten, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Whitten’s family has owned Blue Range Ranch since 1897, and he believes that, at the current rate, the agriculture-based economy and the water won’t last for much longer.

Project Fallow: Earning Money To Not Grow
The valley’s water agencies are working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Services Agency to approve an incentive program that would pay farmers to leave their land fallow. The incentive is authorized by the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), which was enacted by Congress in 1997 to improve water conservation, wildlife habitat, and soils.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

The southwest windows in the Whitten kitchen face the San Juan Mountains. On the counter are Siberian tomatoes, a variety well adapted to the valley’s short growing season.

The Farm Services Agency runs water conservation CREPs in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. The agency spent $US 164 million on CREP payments nationwide during the 2010 fiscal year.

The Republican River Basin is the only CREP program currently in Colorado, and it began in 2006 with a goal of fallowing 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres). But high crop prices have proven to be an impediment in Colorado and in other states — as of October, the program had enrolled less than 60 percent of that target acreage.

Under the San Luis Valley plan, farmers would sign a 15-year contract to take land out of production. They would receive an annual payment per acre, based on local land rates. Valley water officials are asking the federal government for an annual average of $US 370 per hectare ($US 150 per acre).

In addition, the local government must provide at least 20 percent of the program cost. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District is meeting this requirement by levying a “pumping fee” between $US 35 and $US 60 per 1,000 cubic meters ($US 45 and $US 75 per acre-foot) on farmers who pump groundwater in excess of their surface water right. The fees are charged to irrigators in Subdistrict No. 1, a patch of land north of the Rio Grande, where the aquifer is most depleted and where the fallowing would occur. A smaller administrative fee is also charged to all irrigated land.

“If CREP doesn’t occur,” Vandiver said, “we will have to do the best we can with the money that the subdistrict collects.”

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Officials in the San Luis Valley’s six counties are working with energy companies to develop solar power on exhausted farmland. SunPower’s 17-megawatt photovoltaic array in Alamosa County, shown here, was the largest in Colorado when it began generating power in December 2010.

Valley officials hope the plan will be approved in time for this year’s irrigation season, but they cannot foresee how its effects will ripple through the community.

“We don’t know what the economic and social impacts will be from taking tens of thousands of acres out of agricultural production,” Gibson said.

And if the goals of the management plan are not met, the state is waiting in the wings to enforce the limits with mandatory restrictions. The state engineer, who oversees water rights, will present draft rules to the state supreme court this year.

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

George Whitten’s family has owned Blue Range Ranch since 1897. If we’re going to continue agriculture in the Mountain West, he says, ranchers and farmers will have to consider the proper animals and plants for a drier future.

So, in essence, those farming in the depleted section of the aquifer have to ask themselves this question: If we pass up the land-fallowing deal and continue reaping jackpot harvests, can we find the surface water offsets that the state could require?

Karla Shriver, who for 26 years has grown potatoes on 400 hectares (1,000 acres) south of the Rio Grande, is someone who believes more people will take the payments rather than leave it to chance. She told Circle of Blue that, looking long term, the CREP money may be the best offer that farmers could get.

“We can’t maintain high prices forever,” Shriver said. “It’s all cyclical.”

The Sun and the Water
Because the area gets an average 340 days of sunshine per year, the San Luis Valley is at the center of solar power development in the Western U.S. The Bureau of Land Management has put four parcels of land it manages on the “fast-track” for regulatory approval, and several investor-owned companies are already operating in the valley.

If hectares of silicon panels were to replace irrigated crops on worn-out land, this solar industrialization could also help the water problem. But solar jobs are not farm jobs, and valley residents have pushed back against large solar projects. Besides, farming has been not just a way of life, but life itself here for the last 150 years.

“Agriculture is our economy in the valley,” said Vandiver, of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “If it goes away, we have nothing left.”

Part of the reporting for this story was done while the author, Brett Walton, participated in a fellowship that was paid for by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Photo courtesy Doc Searls via Flickr

San Luis Valley from the air.

Photo © Ellen MacDonald

On Monday, the U.S. Department of the Interior banned any new uranium and other hardrock mining claims around the Grand Canyon, citing the potential health and environmental risks related to water contamination, Reuters reported.

The decision withdraws more than 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of federal land — as well as the nearby watershed — for the next 20 years, the longest moratorium allowed by law, according to the official statement. Previously approved mining claims and existing mining operations would not be affected. The National Mining Association has expressed disappointment but stopped short of announcing an immediate challenge to the decision.

“A withdrawal is the right approach for this priceless American landscape,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. “People from all over the country and around the world come to visit the Grand Canyon. Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place and millions of people in the Colorado River Basin depend on the river for drinking water, irrigation, industrial, and environmental use.”

While hailed by environmental and progressive groups for protecting this World Heritage site and its neighboring Colorado River watershed, the Obama administration’s decision has been denounced by industry groups and some members of Congress from Western states as a big-government move that would hurt consumers and kill new jobs, according to Reuters.

Representative Doc Hastings, a Republican from the state of Washington who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, accused the administration of “putting politics above American jobs and American energy security.”

But Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said that protecting the $US 687 million tourism industry that is dependent upon the canyon makes much more sense, according to the Guardian. “Extending the current moratorium on new uranium mining claims will protect tourism-related jobs, drinking water for millions downstream, and critical wildlife habitat,” Karpinski said.

As the price of uranium has risen, so has the number of claims on public land near the national park, from fewer than 1,000 per year in 2005 to more than 8,000 in 2009, though annual claims have declined slightly since then, according to Reuters, which cited figures from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

“The withdrawal maintains the pace of hardrock mining, particularly uranium, near the Grand Canyon,” BLM director Bob Abbey said, “but also gives the Department a chance to monitor the impacts associated with uranium mining in this area. It preserves the ability of future decision-makers to make thoughtful decisions about managing this area of national environmental and cultural significance based on the best information available.”

During the withdrawal period, the BLM projects that up to 11 uranium mines, including four that are currently approved, could continue, based on valid pre-existing rights. By comparison, during the 1980s, nine uranium mines were developed on these lands and five were mined out. Without the ban, there could be 30 uranium mines in the area over the next 20 years, including the four that are currently approved, with as many as six operating at one time, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) estimates, according to the Interior Department’s statement.

At least one creek in the national park is known to be contaminated by uranium, and the government’s environmental impact review found high levels of arsenic from old uranium operations, as well as pollution in the Colorado River, the Guardian reported.

The decision to ban new mining claims in the area comes after more than two years of evaluation, during which the BLM analyzed the proposed withdrawal in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service.

Source: Guardian, Reuters, U.S. Department of the Interior

Photo courtesy ofRainforest Action Network

Emergildo Criollo, leader of the Cofan indigenous tribe, was part of the Ecuadorean delegation that visited the United Houma Nation in Louisiana after the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.

On Tuesday, an Ecuadorean appeals court upheld a ruling that Chevron Corp must pay $US 18 billion in damages to the government of Ecuador for allegedly polluting the Amazon River basin and damaging people’s health, Reuters reported.

An Ecuadorean judge had ordered the U.S. oil giant to pay $US 8.6 billion in environmental damages last February, but the amount was increased to about $US 18 billion after Chevron failed to make a public apology, as required by the original ruling.

“We ratify the ruling of Febuary 14, 2011, in all its parts, including the sentence for moral reparation,” the court in the Amazonian city of Lago Agrio said in its ruling on Tuesday.

“This (ruling) confirms and ratifies that the company polluted and affected the Amazon,” the plaintiffs said in a statement. “It is necessary to clarify that no amount will be enough to repair all the crime they did in our area, nor will it be enough to bring the dead back to life.”

In the next chapter of the 18-year bitter legal dispute, Chevron — which is currently also battling claims that it is responsible for environmental damage from an offshore oil spill in Brazil last November — quickly denounced Tuesday’s appellate court decision, calling it “illegitimate” and a fraud, according to Reuters.

“Today’s decision is another glaring example of the politicization and corruption of Ecuador’s judiciary that has plagued this fraudulent case from the start,” the statement said. “The Lago Agrio judgment was procured through a corrupt and fraudulent scheme, much of which was captured on film and memorialized in the plaintiffs’ representatives’ own emails and correspondence.”

Chevron accuses the lawyers of misconduct, including fabricating expert reports, manufacturing evidence, bribing and colluding with court officials, among others.

In a statement, the company also said it was pursuing an action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the plaintiffs’ lawyers for violations of the federal racketeering statute and common-law fraud.

Chevron is also banking on international arbitrators, who are expected to decide this month if they will weigh in on what has become a landmark international legal dispute.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs’ latest statement has accused Chevron of “junk science,” lies, and “an international lobbying campaign to taint the reputation of Ecuador’s government.”

The laswsuit against the U.S. oil company was brought on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans from the Amazon River basin, who accuse Texaco – which Chevron acquired in 2001 – of dumping 450 million barrels (19 billion gallons) of toxic oilfield waste and 400,000 barrels (17 million gallons) of raw crude oil into unlined pits and rivers in the Amazon jungle between 1972 and 1992 and of damaging indigenous people’s health, according to the BBC. The local community asserts that decades of negligent drilling have polluted nearly 5,000 square kilometers (2,000 square miles) of Amazon waterways traditionally used by for laundry, cooking, drinking, and bathing.

Chevron denies responsibility, saying that Texaco had cleaned up its share of waste pits. The company also argues that investigators have found no scientific evidence of the long-term environmental, health, and social damage that the plaintiffs describe.

Commenting on the appellate court’s ruling, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, said he was happy and described the dispute as a “David and Goliath” battle.

Yet, an Edward Jones analyst in St. Louis told Bloomberg that the ultimate outcome is unlikely to “cost the company.”

“There is really very little that Ecuador can go after in the country, and Chevron doesn’t really have any material assets there,” Brian Youngberg said in a phone interview with Bloomberg. “We are going to have to watch this play out through the international court system and the U.S. court system.”

Source: BBC, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Global Post, Reuters

Photo © Aubrey Ann Parker/Circle of Blue

Panama is one of the fastest-growing economies in the Western Hemisphere, largely thanks to a new free-trade agreement with the U.S. and an ongoing $US 5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal. Slated for completion in 2014, the expansion will double the canal's capacity, which will reduce emissions, and the new system will recycle 60 percent of the water in each transit, along with an overall decrease of 7 percent less water than is used by the existing locks.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

Food
The food crisis in the Horn of Africa will continue this year, according to a famine early warning system funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Though the famine early warning system has global forecasts, the Horn of Africa is the only emergency spot forecasted in the near term.

In response, the United Nations, which said in a statement that the situation is “expected to get worse”, has called for more than $US 2.3 billion in aid to help Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti to cope with refugee settlement and the short-term effects of the drought. At the same time, the executive director for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that a million children in Africa’s Sahel region are at risk of malnutrition in 2012 because of poor harvests caused by insufficient rain.

Health
Global health leaders are hopeful that 2012 is the year that Guinea worm, a water-borne parasite, will be eradicated. Infections have fallen from 3.5 million in 1986 to 1,056 during the first 10 months of 2011. Following small pox, Guinea worm would be the second-ever human disease to be eradicated. Polio, another water-borne disease, is next in line. Advocates anticipate a polio-free world in 2013.

Energy
Thanks to the payroll tax cut compromise, U.S. President Barack Obama has 60 days to approve or deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The 2,700-kilometer (1,700-mile) oil conduit from the Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas would have an initial capacity of 700,000 barrels per day. The president’s decision should come by the end of February.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will make several final decisions this year that could have consequences for water resources, and the agency will start the rule-making process for several new regulations. In the spring, the EPA will decide what pollution controls are necessary for the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant that provides nearly all the electricity to move Arizona’s annual share of the Colorado River, 3.5 billion cubic meters (912 billion gallons).

The EPA will also submit a draft rule, expected to be released in January, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants.

By the end of 2012, preliminary results from the EPA’s investigation into drinking water contamination from hydraulic fracturing will be available. Already this year, Ohio has suspended operations at five deep wells used to dispose of fracking-related fluids, citing concerns of a possible link between well activity and nearly a dozen quakes in the area.

Governments could determine the fate of several large dams on major rivers this year: the Grand Inga on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the Xayaburi on the Mekong River in Laos; the Mphanda Nkuwa on the Zambezi River in Mozambique; and a cascade of dams on the Nu River in China.

Barring any delays, two World Bank-funded studies on Tajikistan’s proposed Rogun Dam will be completed by the end of the year. The studies are a prerequisite for possible World Bank financing for the project. One study assesses the dam’s technical and economic merits; the other looks at potential environmental and social effects. At 336 meters (1102 feet), Rogun would be the world’s tallest dam, trumping the Nurek Dam, also in Tajikistan.

Policy
In Australia, water management officials are expected to release the final versionof the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, a controversial policy that will reduce the amount of water withdrawn from the basin’s rivers.

During the first half of the year, the U.S. EPA will hold public meetings to formulate a draft version of its new “integrated planning” policy, which will reduce the cost of complying with water quality violations. In October 2011, the agency’s acting assistant administrator for water used a three-page memo to introduce the concept.

March 31 is the target deadline for the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to decide whether or not to approve a plan for removal of four dams in the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California. The Klamath agreements also include projects for environmental restoration, fisheries, water conservation, and tribal programs.

The Chinese government is expected to release its latest Five-Year Plan for the energy sector. The plan is expected to guide the country’s next phase of hydropower development.

Law
On January 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about landowner rights and government power. The case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, began when the EPA claimed an Idaho couple was building their home on a wetland — in violation of the Clean Water Act — and threatened fines of $US 32,500 per day until the couple complied. The Supreme Court will decide whether the EPA violated due process laws. If so, the agency may have to seek permission from a judge before using compliance orders, its most common enforcement tool.

The Nevada state engineer will decide by March whether to grant groundwater rights in four rural valleys to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the wholesale provider for the Las Vegas area.

In August the International Court of Arbitration will submit its final decision on India’s Kishanganga hydroelectric project, a point of contention between India and Pakistan since construction began five years ago. In the fall of 2011, the court issued an interim decision that ordered India to halt construction of works that would permanently affect the river’s flow.

This could be the year that the International Maritime Organization’s convention on ballast water management is approved. The convention would reduce the risk of invasive aquatic species by requiring cargo ships to manage the water they use to balance their loads. For the convention to enter into force, it must be ratified by countries representing 35 percent of the world’s merchant shipping tonnage. To date, the convention is 9 percentage points below that threshold.

Meetings
The sixth edition of the water-sector’s largest gathering, the World Water Forum, will take place March 12 through 17 in Marseille, France. The fourth World Water Development Report will be released that week.

In June, sustainable development advocates will come together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit, a landmark conference that produced agreements on climate change and biological diversity. This iteration will focus on the green economy and poverty.

Arts
Several water-themed documentaries will be released in 2012. The global water crisis is the subject of Last Call at the Oasis, while actor and director Robert Redford narrates The River Red, a film that considers a new “water ethic” for the Western United States. Hidden history is the topic of Under the City, in which filmmakers go underground to explore rivers buried by urban development in London and New York City, among others.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has turned his lens on the mining and oil industries, is now working on a series about water, which will be completed in 2013.

Brett Walton is a Seattle-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Walton can be reached at brett@circleofblue.org.

The infographic below shows how these pharmaceuticals, if not properly disposed of, can end up in the water cycle.

Infographic © Kelly Shea / Circle of Blue

Infograpic: Unprescribed Drugs in the Water Cycle. Click for full-size infographic.

Infographic by Kelly Shea, a recent graduate of Ball State University’s journalism graphics program and a Seattle-based designer, for Circle of Blue. Shea can be reached at kelly@circleofblue.org.

This graphic was made to accompany Circle of Blue reporter Brett Walton’s report, Unprescribed: Legislation to Keep Drugs Out of Water Thwarted by U.S. Pharmaceutical Lobbying ]]> http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2011/world/infographic-unprescribed-%e2%80%94-drugs-in-the-water-cycle/feed/ 1 http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2011/world/ned-breslin-scratching-the-surface-retooling-the-wash-models-indicators-part-iii/ http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2011/world/ned-breslin-scratching-the-surface-retooling-the-wash-models-indicators-part-iii/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:00:54 +0000 Ned Breslin http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/?p=33576 Sharing failures can be just as valuable as sharing successes. Yet, the development sector more often touts its successes as indicators to donors, who, in turn, are content to think short term and tend to not ask the tough questions.

Images courtesy Chris Korbulic and Water For People

’Tis the season for giving. During the holiday season, hundreds of millions of dollars are donated worlwide to non-profit organizations working in the development sector. “Give the gift of clean water” is a common slogan that you are sure to find in your inbox at least a dozen times over the course of the next month.

But what does it mean to give clean water? How do we know that change is occurring? What looks different now, as compared to five years ago? If we had known then what we know now, what would we have done differently from the beginning? Looking five years down the road, will water still be flowing?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ned Breslin is the CEO at Water For People, a nonprofit that implements drinking water and sanitation solutions in 11 developing countries. He is author of Rethinking Hydrophilantropy.

Though there is value to sharing the successes, as well as the failures, of an organization as lessons learned by that organization and lessons that other organizations can learn from, this is information that the development sector struggles to feel comfortable offering. There is a stigma associated with more transparent insight into programmatic impact, largely — but not exclusively — because of concerns over fundraising. Two points of view dominate this problem:

1. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: There are those who believe that, if the truth were known about how difficult it is to transform lives with development assistance, this would actually undermine funding for a particular cause or organization. This is perhaps best exemplified by a recent blog by Jessica Keralis, the chair of the communications committee for the American Public Health Association’s (APHA’s) International Health Section. Keralis essentially argues that context matters when discussing development; yet context with value to an audience that is otherwise unacquainted with the relevant back-story is difficult to come by in an increasingly sound-bite-driven era.

   “Is there value to sharing failures that could be lessons for your own organization or others? Absolutely,” writes Keralis. “But how much good does it do the average layperson to hear about a failed project? …Unless an individual has background knowledge on how aid and development works, it is difficult to put these stories into context.”

   Therefore, Keralis points out, it is not prudent to be honest about what is happening in the field. She even states that, if she were running an NGO, she would consciously not divulge project difficulties to donors, who could lose faith “in a charity’s ability to learn from its mistakes.”

   And, let’s be frank, many CEOs and fundraising directors would tell you the same thing after hours, over a beer.

   Keralis goes on to say, however, that there is “true value to learning from failed projects.” Unsuccessful scientific experiments are still published alongside their breakthrough counterparts, but the difference is that they are published in professional journals — in other words, “failures are shared with an audience that can appreciate them and the lessons they bring.” In conclusion, Keralis suggests that the development sector use the research world as a model for how best to exchange lessons about failure, as if within a like-minded support group. And she implies quite strongly that the general public should not be told of these difficulties.

2. One Size Fits All: The development sector is still dominated by simplistic fundraising campaigns that link a small donation with a large, transformative result. You know the campaigns I speak of: “Your $25 donation equals water for life for one person,” or “Contribute $10 per month to end hunger.”

   The hope with these one-size-fits-all campaigns is that people will reach for their wallets and not ask any challenging questions about whether or not the intended outcome was actually achieved. And, to date, that hope has proven to be true – it seems that the simple threshold of low payment for transformative outcome does, in fact, lead to donor contentment. Data on how much is actually raised using this model is not clearly evident, but the fact that the approach is so prolific suggests that it at least resonates with both organizations and individuals.

   Once again, many CEOs and fundraising directors would tell you, over that same beer, that this approach is an easy sell, with little risk of tough questions.

Thankfully, quite a few senior leaders from significant development agencies are beginning to challenge both of these standard viewpoints.

For instance, Dr. Unni Karunakara — the president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), an international and independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflicts, epidemics, healthcare exclusions, and natural or man-made disasters — correctly questions relief agencies and the media for oversimplifying the challenges faced on the ground in Somalia with simplistic messages about how famine can be easily eradicated.

Dr. Karunakara rightly worries that the effort to raise lots of money through simplistic messaging misleads people, undermines education efforts on what it truly takes to eradicate hunger, and are likely to backfire, as it is improbable that hunger and famine will never again rear their ugly heads.

The consequence of such simple campaigns — and their possible ricochet-like effects — could raise broad doubts about the entire development effort in Somalia, despite the fact that some organizations, like MSF, are already hard at work and continue to be invested over the long term, in ways that might, in fact, lead to a change over time. Dr. Karunakara and his cohorts at MSF understand that transforming Somalia will take considerable time, significant resources, multiple actors working together, and a good deal of luck.

And that battle would be completely undermined if a donor bothers to ask the legitimate question, “Wait a minute; I thought my $25 solved this problem?”

Similarly, Dominic Nutt, the head of the communications and campaign team for World Vision — a Christian humanitarian organization that provides hope and assistance to 100 million people in nearly 100 countries by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice — suggests that, like many in the development sector, his organization may be somewhat stuck, due to their simplistic fundraising approach.

Nutt argues that the gap between field realities and fundraising promises are immense, and that simplistic messages, though they appeal to the average person who will, in turn, then open his or her own wallet to make a donation, ultimately mask the difficulties of what real support for global development work looks like. In this way, Nutt asks exactly the right question about whether this simplicity actually undermines the fieldwork.

Two Demographics + Two Solutions = One Transformative Change
I welcome further discussion and open debate on this challenge that non-profits face, as I know of no field staff who likes these simplistic campaigns or who believes that such small amounts of cash can radically change, for example, the life prospects of a rural African woman. Likewise, it sounds as if more and more senior leadership is saying the same thing — and not just after hours, over a beer.

Yet, despite this growing bottom-up awareness, the development sector will never become truly transparent until two things happen. First, non-profits that are engaged in complex overseas development will need to find the courage to tell their stories, to be open and honest about difficulties they have encountered in achieving transformative changes around the world, and to communicate their failings alongside their successes.

For water supply, this is simple. Sustainability — which rolls off the tongues of non-profits quite easily when talking about their own work — in the water sector means that water is flowing, that inevitable mechanical failures are addressed rapidly, and that funds collected are used to keep water flowing, to extend services to new families in a service area, and to eventually upgrade the water technology, so that water continues to flow forever.

Shifting gears, the second thing that needs to happen within the development sector looks at the funders, rather than the funded. Philanthropists must begin asking tougher questions about the real and lasting impact of their charitable contributions, which will require donors to be clear as to what outcomes they expect to see. This means that philanthropists must stop focusing only on the short-term questions of whether money was spent well and whether the project was completed. Though both questions matter, the more challenging questions take this dialogue to the next level.

The question is not whether $10,000 was allocated to a small village in northern Uganda and a handpump was installed, but, rather, whether that $10,000 actually has led — over time — to the community collecting clean water from that improved source (and its upgraded replacements) forever. The question is not whether a family of four in rural India repaid a loan for a new toilet, but whether they actually use that toilet and no longer are plagued by open defecation in their household. The question is not whether a pledge of $15 fed a Sudanese girl for one month, but whether that she eventually began to thrive, not just survive, so that she never again has to reach her hand out for another bowl of donated food.

I believe that this is what the donated money was intended to do: to keep water flowing in northern Uganda, and to have a functioning toilet that is used in rural India, and to eradicate hunger for a girl in Sudan. The money — important that it is and necessary that it is spent well — is simply the vehicle to these desired outcomes.

But, as with chiseling any sculpture out of solid rock, to truly scratch the surface of transformative change, organizations must allow the imperfections of their glossy façade to be seen and donors must choose the right tools with which to etch.

Ned Breslin
Follow Ned Breslin on Twitter.

This is the third in a multi-part series in which Ned Breslin discusses NGO success-indicator models and their alternatives. See Part I and Part II on Circle of Blue.

Infographic © Kelly Shea / Circle of Blue

Unprescribed: Drugs in the Water Cycle infographic. Click for full infographic.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

At least a decade after analytic technology became sensitive enough to detect pharmaceuticals at concentrations of parts per trillion — or one drop in a thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools — nearly half of the states in the union have proposed legislation to encourage safe disposal of prescription medications. Because trace levels of pharmaceuticals have been detected in drinking water and linked to abnormalities in aquatic organisms, drug-disposal legislation has attracted broad support from public health officials, law enforcement agencies, and environmental groups.

Yet the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, whose twelve largest companies made a profit of $US 44 billion in 2010, have countered with a coast-to-coast campaign to prevent lawmakers from making the industry pay for drug-disposal programs, asserting that the programs have little effect on water quality, are burdensome to the consumer, and could lead to drug theft and abuse.

The debate over the relevance of these programs, which would involve new state safety regulations, pits expanding knowledge about the risks of minute concentrations of prescription drugs in the nation’s waters against a powerful industry’s resistance to governmental safety mandates. The contest comes during an era of economic distress in the United States that has prompted fresh doubts among many citizens about the effects of health and environmental regulations on the nation’s economic performance. Health and environmental advocates, meanwhile, contend that fouling the nation’s waters with prescription drugs and prompting higher levels of human disease represents a much larger threat to the economy and the nation’s well-being.

In 2009, some 3.9 billion prescriptions — topping $US 300 billion in sales for the first time — were dispensed in the U.S., according to IMS Health, a market research company. Sales nearly doubled over the last decade, and the baby boomers, all 78 million of them, are reaching the age when prescription drug use increases.

There is a wide range of estimates for how many of those drugs go unused. The pharmaceutical industry maintains that the figure is 10 percent. According to research from the Unused and Expired Medications Registry, which keeps a large database on such matters, an estimated 40 percent of medications are not taken by the consumer and need to be disposed.

State Programs: Popular, Successful, and Broke
In September U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat, introduced legislation that would create a national industry-funded drug take-back program. Since no such permanent program now exists, some states are responding with their own plans, which are quickly running out of money. Cities and counties also run small-scale collection programs, using drop boxes or collaborations with pharmacies.

“The question is: who is going to pay?” Margaret Shield told Circle of Blue. Shield is the policy liaison for the Local Hazardous Waste Program in King County, Washington. “The drug industry can incorporate a program into the cost of business, and they’re saying no.”

Maine’s landmark program — the first statewide program in the nation when it began in 2007 — will exhaust its funding by the end of the year.

“Our state, like many, is broke,” Jennifer Crittenden, Maine’s program director since its inception, told Circle of Blue. “We’ve had a change in government administration with different priorities. There are no plans to continue funding the program.”

Crittenden said Maine’s program has been “immensely successful” and that it became a national model. The total annual cost for the program, which collected just over one metric ton (2,373 pounds) of drugs in its two-year pilot phase, is $US 75,000.

Because of budget austerity, five states — Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington — submitted bills during the 2009-10 legislative session that would have required the pharmaceutical industry to pay for drug disposal: none of these bills passed. The only industry-funded program is at the city level, in San Francisco.

Likewise, Iowa, Nebraska, and New Hampshire have enacted statewide drug take-back programs, which allow customers to drop unwanted pills at the pharmacy or to mail leftover medicines to a collection center, and 20 other states have introduced similar legislation to set up full-time programs or trial studies.

Kate Gainer, who administers the take-back program in Iowa, said she has had a different funding partner each year since the program started in 2009. “We’ve tried different angles but haven’t identified a sustainable source,” Gainer told Circle of Blue. “We pursued pharmaceutical avenues, but that was not successful.” The Iowa program has received nearly 10 metric tons (21,545 pounds) of returned drugs in just two years.

In Colorado, the same dynamic holds: Greg Fabisiak, who manages the state’s pilot project for the Department of Public Health and Environment, said the main challenges were finding funding and operating a large-scale program. The pilot project has only 11 drop-off locations in the entire state, but has collected 5.5 metric tons (12,000 pounds) of drugs since 2009.

New Protections Merited
Certainly, say advocates of drug-disposal legislation, the scientific evidence merits new safeguards. Numerous studies have observed fish developing sexual and behavioral abnormalities, such as males producing eggs or females disinclined to spawn. The scientific consensus is that pharmaceuticals threaten aquatic organisms, though the effects on human health are not as clear.

Pharmaceutical chemicals and hormones have reportedly been detected in the drinking water for at least 14 percent of Americans, according to test results from utilities and independent researchers published by the Associated Press in March 2008. Most worrisome are the endocrine disruptors — a sub-class that includes the estrogen used in birth control and bisphenol A used in plastics — which interfere with hormones and can lead to abnormal sexual development in fish, frogs, and even humans.

Image courtesy DEA

Collection bins advertise the Drug Enforcement Administration’s first national drug take-back event in September 2010. A second event was held in April this year. Combined, the DEA collected more than 600,000 pounds of unused or expired medications.

More than a year and a half later, in October 2009, the Obama administration released an updated guideline for how to safely dispose of the millions of pounds of medications that expire or go unused in the United States each year. Further, there have been three national take-back events since September 2010, with the most recent last Saturday, October 29, though there is currently no continuous national drug-disposal program.

Instituting take-back programs will be easier, now that the U.S. Congress passed a bill last year allowing changes to the Controlled Substances Act. Currently, controlled substances — such as narcotics and Oxycontin — can be handled only by law enforcement officers, meaning those pills cannot be returned to pharmacies. The U.S. Attorney General is expected to announce the specific policy changes this fall.

However, efforts to establish a sustainable source of funding to change ideas about drug-company responsibilities have failed so far, largely because of strong opposition and lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry, which does not want industry-funded programs to become a legal precedent. The bill in Washington state, for example, would have cost pharmaceutical manufacturers 1.5 cents per prescription.

Big Industry Lobbying Big Dollars
As late as 2007, the U.S. government encouraged people to dispose of certain medications by doing what health and environmental advocates now discourage — flushing them down the toilet so that they would not result in accidental poisoning, theft, or prescription drug abuse.

Since the mid-1990s, however, drug take-back programs have cropped up around the world as part of a wider “product stewardship.” An industry-funded model is standard in Australia, as well as in many European countries and Canadian provinces.

Though industry lobbying has successfully blocked all state attempts for such programs in the U.S., the nation’s first industry-pays model began this fall in San Francisco at the city level. The one-year pilot program carries a price tag of $US 110,000, with more than 90 percent being covered by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobby group for drug research and biotech companies, and the remainder handled by Genentech, a biotechnology company.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a bill through committee for an industry-funded program, but the bill never came up for a full vote because industry representatives wanted to negotiate the outcome, said Caitlin Sanders, a toxic substances specialist at the San Francisco Department of the Environment

Shushma Bhatia, the toxics reduction program manager for the department, told Circle of Blue that the regulations for the program have been written, but the city still needs to find a vendor to manage collection and disposal.

These local and state programs have proved popular, and single-day national collection events, coordinated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), have exceeded expectations. During the three Saturday events in the last 13 months, law enforcement agencies throughout the country set up temporary collection sites, where citizens, sometimes toting pill-filled kitchen-drawers, have deposited nearly 450 metric tons (1 million pounds) of unwanted medications.

Image courtesy DEA

A man in Troy, Mo., brings a kitchen drawer filled with unused or expired medications to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s first national drug take-back collection event.

“The amount of prescription drugs turned in by the American public during the past three Take-Back Day events speaks volumes about the need to develop a convenient way to rid homes of unwanted or expired prescription drugs,” said DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart, in a press statement. “DEA remains hard at work to establish just such a drug disposal process, and will continue to offer take-back opportunities until the proper regulations are in place.”

But if those regulations would make drug companies pay, the industry wants no part of it.

During the 2009-10 legislation session in Maine — which was considering industry-pays legislation — there were advertisements in state newspapers claiming that take-back programs would increase the cost of health care, would not have a positive effect on water quality, and would create an opportunity for theft. These ads were paid for by the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA), the lobby group for generic drugs, and PhRMA, which has, since 1998, ranked fifth in the nation for lobbying expenditures, spending $US 90.7 million on lobbying activities in the U.S. from 2007 to 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In a January 2011 comment to a report on product stewardship by Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection, the GPhA praised Maine’s legislature, which “wisely rejected” a pharmaceutical take-back program that was projected to cost $US 1.5 million annually for three years, “after which the annual cost would be unlimited.” The GPhA criticized the mail-back component of the program, stating that the estimated costs were $US 7.50 to $US 17.00 per envelope, since some generic medicines only cost $US 4 for a 1-month supply. The GPhA went on to say that effective and affordable take-back programs could be instated, “without mandating manufacturer-funded programs that risk increasing health care costs.”

Several pharmaceutical-industry groups sponsored this advertisement, which ran in Maine newspapers when the state legislature was considering a bill to establish an industry-funded take-back program.

Additionally, the comment mentions Raanan Bloom, the FDA’s environmental assessment expert, who says “the main way drug residues enter water systems is by people taking medications and then naturally passing them through their bodies.” According to the GPhA, it is estimated that more than 90 percent of the trace medicines found in surface water is excreted, rather than discarded or flushed:

“Thus, even if a costly program were 100 percent effective, it would do little if anything to impact the amount of pharmaceuticals entering water systems. In addition, experts agree that there is no scientific evidence to demonstrate that the traces of pharmaceuticals detected in water have any impact to humans.”

Widespread, But Miniscule
Pharmaceutical take-back programs are a multi-faceted issue. Advocates for take-back programs acknowledge that improper disposal is a small source of environmental contamination, compared to amounts that are excreted in bodily waste. They also recognize that the concentrations in rivers and lakes are millions of times smaller than prescribed doses, meaning the threat to human health is minimal, though consensus is that the same cannot be said for aquatic life.

Since the 1970s, the academic community has been aware of minute concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water. But because the concentrations are so low — usually measured in parts per trillion, or thousands of times smaller than prescribed doses— it is only recently that monitoring technology has become sophisticated enough for detection.

About a decade ago, environmental advocates became concerned after the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed the first national evaluation, sampling water in 30 states. Published in 2002, that study found detectable levels of pharmaceuticals in 80 percent of the 139 streams tested.

Then, in March 2008, the Associated Press brought public attention to the issue with its investigative series that revealed traces of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water of 41 million Americans in 24 major metropolitan areas. The AP’s findings led to hearings at the local, state, and federal levels. At a committee hearing in April 2008, Senate Democrats rebuked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not doing its job.

Since the 2002 USGS study, hundreds of tests have been carried out on water bodies across the U.S. The EPA maintains a database with thousands of research papers on the environmental contamination caused by pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCPs. This is a broad designation for a class of more than 1,500 FDA-approved substances used in everything from Advil and antidepressants to soaps, lotions, and veterinary medicines — basically, anything humans or their pets put on their bodies that isn’t clothing and anything ingested that isn’t food.

Potential Threat: Fish Only?
Of the more than 1,500 identified compounds, only a couple dozen have ever shown up in treated drinking water that is supplied to homes. Fear of the human defects, however, is based more on assumption than empirical evidence. Scientists have not found a direct effect on humans from long-term, chronic exposure to PPCPs, mostly because it is too early in the research cycle for those studies to have been completed. A World Health Organization summary report released in June concluded that, though available data is limited, there is a “substantial margin of safety” between the concentrations currently in drinking water and the concentrations that would be needed to cause harm to humans.

Though human health is an assumed but unsubstantiated concern, the greatest immediate risk is to aquatic organisms, which have constant, prolonged exposure to contaminated water. These effects can move up the food chain, compounding at every trophic level, from the smallest organisms to the largest, with pharmaceuticals turning up in fish tissue. Furthermore, there is scientific evidence that these contaminants have altered the reproductive behavior and sex ratios of several species of fish.

Additionally, pharmaceutical-laden water is an ideal petri dish for nurturing that perpetual public health nightmare — antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Continuous exposure to low doses of medications would allow water-borne microbes to build immunity to the drugs that are designed to kill them.

Other Solutions
Despite this, the EPA does not regulate PPCPs, and most wastewater treatment facilities are not equipped to remove all of them. Doing so would require revamping the treatment process.

“We’re talking reverse osmosis and membrane technology everywhere, and that gets expensive,” said Gabriel Eckstein, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University who has co-authored a report on keeping pharmaceuticals out of water bodies without relying on regulatory bulwarks like the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Take-back programs are just one relatively inexpensive process that can be used to prevent unused medications from entering water supplies, according to Sierra Fletcher of the Product Stewardship Institute, an advocacy group. The more fraught aspects — such as drugs designed to be fully metabolized and upgrades to wastewater treatment plants — will be significantly more expensive and will require years for development.

“We don’t have a product-stewardship culture in the U.S.,” California State Senator Joe Simitian, a Democrat, told Circle of Blue. Simitian sponsored a bill — which passed in 2007 — to create guidelines for take-back programs in the state, but he doesn’t see the same vigor at the state or national level as in San Francisco.

“It’s difficult,” Simitian said, “because it’s a significant change in mindset. We’re trying to reshape the way we think about things in what is currently a throw-away world. It’s easier if there’s one obvious responsible party. But is it who makes the drug? Who sells it? Who buys it? Once that begins, everyone agrees there is a problem and something should be done, but somebody else should do it.”

Brett Walton is a Seattle-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Walton can be reached at brett@circleofblue.org.

Stats via FAO — Graphic © Aubrey Ann Parker / Circle of Blue

Flooding has damaged about 12.5 percent of the total national cropped area in Thailand, 12 percent in Cambodia, 7.5 percent in Laos, 6 percent in the Philippines, and 0.4 percent in Vietnam, according to the report.

The intense monsoon rains, typhoons, and tropical storms in Southeast Asia over the last two months may cause “serious food shortages” in the region, the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report last week.

The recent floods have killed hundreds of people and displaced millions of others, as well as battered housing, infrastructure, and agriculture in several countries. Although flood waters have begun receding in some areas, the difficulties in delivering food assistance have raised concerns about food shortages in the affected communities. Additionally, as shown in the graphic above, domestic crops have been damaged in several countries.

Thailand, in particular, is experiencing the worst flooding in 50 years, with two-thirds of the country inundated and 356 recorded deaths. Along with the heavy rains, water flowing from the North has swollen rivers and canals, damaged infrastructure, disrupted business, and caused food and water shortages in a number of Bangkok’s districts. This is bad news for the Thai capital, as it makes up more than 40 percent of the nation’s economy, Bloomberg reported.

The agricultural and manufacturing industries are struggling as well. According to Reuters, 6.4 million metric tons (7 million tons) of paddy may be lost from Thailand’s main 2011-2012 rice crop, which could slash total production to only 16.3 million metric tons (18 million tons). Meanwhile, Thailand’s car-manufacturing industry — which is the biggest in Southeast Asia — is losing 6,000 cars per day of output. The Thai government plans to set aside $US 3.2 billion to revive the industrial sector, with help from international financial institutions.

Sources: Bloomberg, FAO, Reuters