Although Russian River Watershed Protection Committee (RRWPC, see side bar) has developed some expertise in water and wastewater issues that confront communities in the lower Russian River, much of that expertise is applicable to environmental crises being experienced in other areas as well. Revelations about the functioning of the Regional Board are likely germane to the functioning of other governmental decision-making bodies. This article will initially describe the malfunctions of the Regional Board and then bring home the urgency of the need for change with a discussion of new information on estrogenic chemicals.
As\ scientists become more knowledgeable about the inter-relatedness of all living things, our social institutions often lag too many years behind in addressing the issues inherent in that new information. RRWPC has made some general observations about Regional Board dysfunctions. It has been our experience that:
1. Very few, if any, local governmental agencies, including the Regional Board, ever base their conclusions/decisions on well-considered and scientifically-derived data. To the contrary, most governmental employees and even privately contracted consultants do not have the time or resources to carefully and specifically research potential causes of complex problems. Further, these agencies often seem out of communication with one another and seldom share their data or in-house studies. It is not uncommon for two agencies to e collecting the same data with neither one knowing what the other is doing. In our current governmental system, most decisions about the environment are ultimately political ones and seldom reflect the realities of the natural world.
2. Cumulative impacts have been defined in CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) as, "...two or more individual effects which, when considered together, are considerable or which compound or increase other environmental impacts." To be adequate, cumulative impacts analysis must address current, past and anticipated impacts of related future projects. For example, Santa Rosa's long-range plans should consider not only the combined impacts of all wastewater dischargers into the Russian River, but also wastewater generated by their growth projections for the next twenty years. Governmental agencies and their consultants almost never fulfill this requirement.
3. The Regional Board is required to conduct an equivalent environmental review process when updating the regional Basin Plan, although there is no requirement for such a review to be conducted in specific permit application processes. In the last Basin Plan review, Board staff neither provided specific descriptions of the state of beneficial uses, nor made any reference to standards that might assure those protections continue. The Inland Surface Waters Plan had just been deleted by legal action (August, 1993) and no numeric standards had taken their place. Therefore, with no standard in place and no beneficial uses adequately described, as well as a monitoring program that provided almost no scientifically reliable data, it was easy to conclude that the Basin Plan failed to address cumulative impacts.
4. Even when evidence does exist as to er quality impairment, as with bacteriological contamination of lower river public beaches, the Regional Board has minimized the importance and has done little, if anything, to either acknowledge or address the problem.
5. The Regional Board has invested a great deal of money in developing a computer model for the Russian River with the intent of using it for estimating water quality impacts of pollutants. RRWPC has been tracking the development of this model closely and has uncovered problems with the data upon which the model had been based. We are also concerned that governmental decision makers give undue prestige to the conclusions drawn from this estimated data and that the intent is to use these models to provide a basis for decision=making in lieu of scientifically=based data collection. Furthermore, RRWPC is concerned that ultimately, the general public may be excluded entirely from agency decision-making processes by the necessity for specialized and highly technical expertise needed to understand and run the model.
The Regional Board, responsible for protecting water quality in the Eel and Russian River Basins, has recently set a precedent for turning over its charge to address cumulative impacts to individual permit holders, (i.e. Santa Rosa.)
The Regional Board has directed the city of Santa Rosa to study the cumulative impacts of their discharge on the Russian River. Since the Regional Board never defined how this should be done, the analysis of cumulative impacts (i.e. the combined effect of all discharges on water quality in combination with each other and many other factors) will never be adequately analyzed, making it much easier for Santa Rosa and others to obtain permission for higher discharge allowances without looking at the real picture. Furthermore, there is dire need for biological assessments and the development of baseline data. Many agencies, including the Regional Board, have begun to look at study programs to develop this information, but things are moving much too slowly.
Cumulative impact studies are especially important now due to new evidence about estrogens and chemicals that mimic estrogens that wreak havoc with wildlife and human's reproductive, immune, nervous and endocrine systems and threaten biodiversity, sustainable development and ecosystem health. Toxic exposures to the adult before and during embryonic development have sometimes waited until puberty to show their deleterious effect.
There is evidence coming forth that gives more cause for concern about pesticides, some heavy metals, certain chlorinated byproducts, surfacants in soap, estrogens and other chemicals that may go through the waste sream. The scientific community is beginning to see correlations between those contaminants and a whole range of reproductive and other health problems both in wildlife and humans. Undetectable amounts of these estrogenic chemicals can bioaccumulate and also interact with one another in unknown ways. Ordinary testing procedures of contaminants that register non-detectable, may nonetheless be having a cumulative and synergistic effect that results in reproductive impairments. Some chemicals like the dioxins, PCB, and DDT are extremely toxic in minute amounts and still reside in the environment in spite of being banned from use.
On July 26-28, 1991, and December 10-12, 1993, over twenty wildlife experts gathered in a retreat at Wingspread Conence Center in Racine, Wisconsin, to discuss concerns about endocrine disrupters in the environment which are believed to lead to severe and often sudden decline in wildlife species that in some cses have led to extirpatin. It was their belief that certain chemical compounds introduced into our environment in the last 50 yeas may be responsible for eproductie and other chanes that have caused this decline. It was felt that these changes are profound, insidious, pevasive and require immediate action by the world community! The situation has become so critical that this group of scientists uncharacteristically called for immediate attention to this problem even before all of the data was in and the hypotheses proven.
• Evidence of growing precipitous decline of numerous plant and animal species in North America and other industrial nations is currently taking place. (In the Russian River, the Coho Salmon is currently the prime example with steelhead trout also in rapid decline. The frogs and turtles and other amphibians may also be going the way of the salmon.)
• Scientists have observed thyroid dysfunction in birds and fish; decreased fertility in birds, shellfish, and mammals; decreased hatching success in birds, fish and turtles; gross birth deformities in birds, fish and turtles; metabolic abnormalities in birds, fish, and mammals; behavioral abnormalities in birds; demasculinization and feminization of male fish, birds and mammals; definization and masculinazation of female fish and birds; and compromised immune systems in birds and mammals.
• In humans some alarming trends have included male sperm counts worldwide diminishing by half in the last 50 years, declines in semen amounts and quality, sharp rises in testicular and prostate concer in industrialized countries (on the rise here in Sonoma County), increase in the incidence of undescended testicles in newborn males and conenital abnormalities of the urinary tract. All of these conditions have been reported in the offspring of women subjected to DES while pregnant.
• DES was a synthetic hormone prescribed to pregnant women between 1950 and 1970 to prevent miscarriage. Daughters born to women who took DES have experienced vaginal coner, genital tract abnormalities, abnormal pregnancies and some changes in immune responses. Sons and daughters have experienced abnormalities in their reproductive systems and reduced fertility. It is unknown whether the effects of DES were exacerbated by exposures to other contaminants, such as DDT liberally applied to food crops during those same years. These results parallel the respones to the estrogenic effect seen in wildlife.
• Some embryonic changes result in early death but others may not be apparent until the offspring reach reproductive maturity. These reproductive changes are irreversible and while not always apparent, they may cause the inability to propogate and therefore impede the survival of the species. Because the embryo is the most sensitive life stage, it can be seriously affected by very small amounts of estrogenic pollutants.
• Some changes can impair the imune, nervous, and endocrine systems, as well. Chemicals may produce changes in functionality such as impaired immune systems unable to recover from disease, inability to obtain a food supply or avoid predators, and abnormal reproductive development because of endocrine impairment.
• In effec5t, these estrogenic hormones mimic the activities of natural hormones and cause breakdowns in the reproductive systems of wildlife and humans. It is suspected that exposure can be passed on through the food chain. For instance, it is believed that contaminated fish can be a major source of exposure for birds. There is reason to believe that the same may be true for humans. Further, these contaminants bioaccumulate in fat cells; their effect may be cumulative.
• Regulatory protections need to e established with consideration for continued species reproductive viability as well as survival. This is difficult because it is ipossible to sess the assortment of multiple chemical conacts to which an animal may be exposed. Further, it is believed that impacts on wildlife from these endocrinal contaminants are so insidious and profound that major epidemiological research on humans needs to be undetaken soon.
Probably the most insidious aspect of these problem, scientists believe, is that it is unlikely that results reported above can be traced to one simple exposure to a contaminant. Since these chamicals can bioaccumulate in the fat cells, and since the synergistic efffects of multiple exposures to a variety of contaminants is unknown, it is hard to egulate these contaminants on a cae by case basis. Many women with breast cancer are found to have substantial amounts of pesticide residue in their blood. In addition, many of these endocrine disrupters have characteristics which facilitate their widespread dispersal.Endocrinologist Ana Soto at Tufts University School of Medicine believes that taking 10 estrogenic chemicals and combining each of them at 1/10th of their effective dose would give an effective dose.
Estrogenic chemicals can be present in herbicides, insecticides (including Endosulfan which is currently in widespread use in Sonoma County), fungicides, Nematocides and Industrial Chemicals, including cadmium, diocins, lead, mercury, PCBs, PCP, PBBs, DDT, and others. Many of these substances, while banned for use in this country, still persist in the environment. Further, they are still legal in many other countries and exported to other nations. Alsok animals and birds that migrate long distances can help to spread the contamination.
Studies by John Sumpter and Charles R. Tyler, biologists at Brunal University in Uxbridge, England discovered that components of birth control pills moving through 30 different sewer systems were found to produce estrogenic effects in fis. Furthermore, chemical components of many dish soaps also include s=estrogenic effects as does leaching chemicals from some plastics (including PVC pipe).
The Regional Board has maintained that because pollutants in the main water column in the river are non-detectable, there is no problem. They minimized the importance of the wildlife/human connection of estrogenic imitators with the excuse that not enough is known.
Finally, in the last year, many harbor seal pups have died at the mouth of the Russian River from some viral inection. In early 1988, 25,000 harbor seals abruptly perished in the North and Baltic Seas. The cause of death was identified as a distemper virus. Researchers theorized, however, that the immune systems of the seals had been previously impaired by earlier exposures to toxics in the water which caused an exaggerated effect by the virus. In fact, there have been many other instances of als, dolphins and whales suffering similar fates. Many of these animals were later found to have large amounts of organochlorines in their systems. Because these toxins accumulate in fat cells (as with humans) it was not surprising that the effects began showing up in large mammals at the top of the food chain. Unfortunately, these same tests have not een conducted on Russian River Harbor Seals.
Currently, Cal EPA is conducting a one-year study of pesticide residues in the Russian River. Unfortunately, they only have one station in the Guerneville area. Hopefully, they will give us better information on the actual water quality of the Russian River.
There is much more to e uncovered about the biological health of the Russian River. We would hope that our local institutions would confront these problems head on. The longer we wait, the more irremediable the situation will become.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited