WIldlife: They're Pooping in the Water

Thanks goes to Jerry Taylor for his funny blog posting over at Cato, "Shoot 'em Before They Poop Again". He writes:

If I were to ask you what the number one cause of bacterial pollution in the Potomac, Anacostia, and more than two dozen other rivers on the federal “impaired waters” list, what would you guess? Sewage discharges? Stormwater run-off? Agricultural waste? How about increased mountains of dung from our supposedly threatened wildlife populations? You guessed it - because we have done such a good job making the human environment safe for all of God’s creatures, we are destroying the planet.

If you’re rushing off to make a bag of popcorn to watch the upcoming brawl between the National Wildlife Foundation (a polluter-defense league if there ever was one) and Greenpeace, walk, don’t run. Animal pollution good. People pollution
bad.

He links to this recent Washington Post article, Wildlife Waste Is Major Water Polluter, Studies Says. This two-page article is worth reading... here are a few snippets:

Part of the problem lies with the unnaturally high populations of deer, geese and raccoons living in modern suburbs and depositing their waste there. But officials say it would be nearly impossible, and wildly unpopular, to kill or relocate enough animals to make a dent in even that segment of the pollution.

That leaves scientists and environmentalists struggling with a more fundamental question: How clean should we expect nature to be? In certain cases, they say, the water standards themselves might be flawed, if they appear to forbid something as natural as wild animals leaving their dung in the woods.

"You need to go back and say, 'Maybe the standards aren't exactly right' if wildlife are causing the problem," said Thomas Henry, an Environmental Protection Agency official who works on water pollution in the mid-Atlantic.

And then this, the first quote of which gave me a chuckle and still does:

"They're pooping in the water," said Chuck Frederickson, an environmentalist who is keeper of the James River, gazing at geese slurping algae off river rocks one recent day. He said the goose population is an obstacle to improving the river: "Do we want less bacteria in the water, or do we want geese around?"

But it is one thing to blame wild animals for pollution and another to figure out how to get them to stop.

Scientists have actually run the numbers for many local streams, using mathematical models to estimate how much the bacteria from wildlife dung needs to be reduced to meet the standards.

But these calculations, required by EPA rules, often have an oddball quality: In the Willis River in central Virginia, for instance, scientists created highly specific estimations of the population density for various animal species (.07 raccoons per acre, for example, and 2.751 muskrats), then factored in the number of grams of waste each animal produces a day (450 grams per raccoon, 100 per muskrat).

Eventually, they determined that there needed to be an 83 percent reduction in the amount of waste that wildlife left directly in streams.

And then finally I'll snip these bits too:

Some environmentalists have an answer: Just stop worrying about the wildlife.
...
Now, the EPA and state agencies seem to be coming to a similar conclusion. In interviews and in official documents, they say they're considering holding some streams to different standards, expecting that not every stream can be made safe for swimming. In such cases, the states would plan to reduce bacteria from human sources as much as possible and then reassess to see whether some level of bacteria from wildlife is natural. But, for now, no such reassessments have been made in this area. Maryland officials seem especially unwilling to do so in the near future, fearing how the public would react to such a lowering of the bar.