Acid Rain and Vermont’s Waterways Transcript

Back to Acid Rain and Vermont’s Waterways episode.

Amanda: This is Before Your Time, presented by the Vermont Historical Society and Vermont Humanities. Every episode, we go inside the stacks at the Vermont Historical Society to look at an object from their permanent collection that tells us something unique about our state. Then we take a closer look at the people, the events, or the ideas that surround each artifact.

The objects that we’re looking at for these episodes are maps. Each one represents a different moment in Vermont, with questions that spiral out and persist to our present day.

Today’s map is the most modern map in our series, dating from a little less than forty years ago. It’s got a lengthy title – “Map of Regions Sensitive to Acidic Deposition in Vermont.”

The map itself is really kind of beautiful. The whole state of Vermont is covered in layers of blue, darker along the spines of the mountains and lighter in the valleys. The darker the blue, the less “buffering capacity” there is in that area – we’ll talk more about that later. There are squares and circles scattered across the landscape, some completely filled in and some partially filled in. The legend at the side explains that those squares and circles represent rivers and streams – and how filled in they are represents their level of alkalinity. There’s a lot of data in this map, and all of it ties back to one big thing: acid rain.

If you’re of a certain age, you have definitely heard of acid rain. Maybe you were a kid like me when it was a big concern, and you imagined it as actual acid coming down from the sky to scour away everything in its path. The story this map tells is much more subtle than that, and it goes back to something that was a pretty big deal in the 1980s in Vermont – and still has lessons for us today.

Bob Mello: So I when I came to Vermont, I began climbing mountains. My first mountain was camel’s home, and and it’s still my favorite mountain to climb.

Amanda: You’re listening to Bob Mello, who retired at the end of 2022 from a long and distinguished legal career. He was a superior court judge for over a decade, and before that, a practicing lawyer.

Bob: But I noticed that there were a tremendous number of dead trees at the top and along the trails to the top of the mountain. One day I read an article just happened on an article written by a biologist at UVM named Herb Fogelman, where he talked about the extraordinary deaths of trees at the top of Camel’s Hump and the studies that scientists were doing about why the trees were dying and the incredible dispute between the scientific community over what was the cause. Was it acid rain or was it natural causes? And that’s how I became interested in the subject of acid rain because of my concern for the trees on the mountain. I kind of promised myself after I read that article that if I ever had time, I’d look into it.

Amanda: And he was so committed to figuring out what was going on with acid rain that he actually took a year off from practicing law to learn more.

Bob: Obviously, I’m not a scientist. And so I had to study scientific journals so that I required a learning curve in itself. But I studied thousands of articles. I wrote thousands of articles. And the purpose of the book was to take what I learned, which was totally inaccessible to average people. Nobody could. Nobody could spend that kind of time and put it into one place where people could access it. That was the idea of the book.

Amanda: So what is acid rain, anyway?

Bruce: Well, acid rain as is defined as anthropogenic atmospheric input to our ecosystems and it’s basically derived from industrial was derived especially from industrial emissions in the sixties and seventies which began to increase. And this comes mainly from coal fired power plants where the coal was fairly high in sulfur and nitrates. And when that got into the atmosphere, it got in the atmosphere in the form of sulfate and nitrates that combined with rainwater to produce acids, specifically sulfuric acid and nitric acid. And that fell on our on our on the ground fell in our forests in Vermont and contaminated the waters depending on the and the soils.

Amanda: That’s Bruce Forsberg, an environmental scientist with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. He spent the first forty years of his career studying the impact of acid rain in the Amazon, and now here in Vermont he coordinates the acid rain program.

Bruce: Most most of the soils in the state have a little bit of carbonate in them. There are fairly thin soils in the states and in fairly old soils, so they don’t have much carbonate in them. But there are there’s enough carbonate in most of the soils so that when the acid hits those soils, it’s that’s the best where it’s buffered, buffered by the carbonate in the soils. So this basically inactivates the acids so it doesn’t affect the soil found, doesn’t affect the trees. And when the water runs off into small streams in the lakes, those streams aren’t that acidified, they aren’t that impacted by it. But we have a lot of regions in Vermont which have very thin soils, almost no carbonates in the soils. So they have no what we call buffering capacity. So when the acid rain fell in those areas, it went directly into the streams. It wasn’t decertified, it wasn’t buffer. It went directly into the streams, lowering the increase in the acidity of those streams and the lakes that those streams flowed into as well. And that had major impacts on the floor and found it in the streams and in the lakes.

Amanda: Remember our map? This is the kind of buffering it was talking about. We’ll hear a lot more from Bruce later, but for now back to Bob. Bob was a good researcher and a good writer, and it turns out he was researching and writing his book on acid rain – which he eventually published under the title Last Stand of the Red Spruce – at a pivotal moment in environmental history.

Bob: But the scientific evidence was so clear, and the risks of not doing anything were so severe that the time had come to finally pass the amendments to the Clean Air Act that Senator Waxman and others have been trying for years to get passed.

Amanda: The huge interest in acid rain meant that the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC, actually paid to publish Bob’s book as part of their national campaign to stop acid rain.

Bob: They decided that this was the year 1987. This was the year to finally make the big push to make it happen. The EPA had been doing nothing for years. The president of the United States claimed that acid rain was caused by trees. And so it was a big battle in Congress. And so they decided to make my book part of the campaign. So they paid to publish the book. They flew me down to Washington. They gave a speech in the Mansfield Room of the Senate.

Amanda: The book – which, by the way, had an introduction by Senator Patrick Leahy – was published the same year our map came out. And it brought together some early evidence that Bruce Forsberg still uses today.

Bruce: So the monitoring of our lakes, which were in these what we call acid sensitive parts of the state, began in the early eighties. And we’ve been monitoring these lakes. We have sort of 12 core lakes that we’ve monitored for 40 years and about 60 other lakes that we monitor every three years. Well, but one of the reasons I was hired was because I have a lot of experience with aquatic environments and acid rain from other regions. And so they have 40 years of data they want me to work up at this point. So I’m doing at the moment a synthesis of all this data and looking at the trends, the long term trends in the chemistry so that we can understand exactly what happened here in this state.

Amanda: Bruce says that because Vermont started collecting data so early, and because they kept gathering it, they actually can point to data showing the impact of the Clean Air Act.

Bruce: And when the when the Clear Air Act was enacted, this was in the in the eighties, in the early eighties. And the Clean Air Act amendments that came through in the in the nineties, we started to see a major drop in all of the deposition trends for both sulfate and nitrate and hydrogen protons that were coming out of the atmosphere. So we detected this major drop and gradual trend of dropping in the in the emissions and in the in the deposition. And we also saw similar trends in the lakes. So the lakes have been recovering in terms of of this sort of acid rain impacts. The sulfates have been going down in the lakes, the nitrates have been going down in the lakes in concert with the decreases in the deposition rate.

Amanda: So problem solved, right? We identified a challenge – acid rain – and took appropriate steps to fix it. It’s actually a great success story about a huge challenge.

Except, even after forty years, most of the lakes that Bruce is responsible for monitoring still haven’t recovered completely. Of the twelve lakes that met the highest criteria for damage from acid, only two are now healthy again. Things are trending in the right direction, but they’re far from fixed.

And of course water quality goes far beyond just monitoring certain lakes.

Karen: Well, when we talk about water quality of surface waters, meaning lakes, streams and wetlands, we’re talking about the ability of those waters to support uses that Vermonters have identified as important, like swimming or boating, fishing, but also seeing the importance of it as a drinking water source without having to spend too much water or too much money cleaning it or irrigation for agricultural crops. But then we also appreciate it for supporting aquatic biota and its habitat, meaning the fish, the frogs, the bugs, etc. So if pollutants enter our waterways, those uses we value are limited, degraded.

Amanda: Bob Mello wrote about acid rain in the 1980s, and Bruce Forsberg continues to monitor its consequences today. But Karen Bates has to think even bigger.

Karen: So my name is Karen Bates. I’m a watershed planner for the Water Investment Division, which is in the Department of Environmental Conservation of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. And I’ve been working for over 25 years in the area of surface water assessment and management, and currently I am the planner that assesses and or I currently I’m responsible for developing surface water management plans for the Winooski Basin, the Massasoit Bay Basin and the areas that drain directly into Lake Champlain, north of Harrisburg.

Amanda: We can think of our waterways as a connective tissue for Vermont, and the issues that impact them cover way more area than you may have thought.

Karen: So we were talking about a planning process to ensure that those surface waters that we’ve identified as degraded are going to be remediated. Then we have to look at the entire area of land that might be draining to that one specific surface water. So in the state of Vermont, what we do is we we actually develop surface water management plans. We call them tactical basin plans for a specific river basin. So I specifically in this area, I am developing a surface water management plan for the when you ski basin drains into Lake Champlain, when we want to look at what we should do or where we should focus on, we look at the assessment results. We know Lake Champlain has too much phosphorus in it, which is resulting in the algal blooms which make it difficult to enjoy swimming and recreating. And so we are then looking at nutrients that might be released from the landscape all the way up in Cabot because that’s the headwaters of the one to ski river. So basically we’re looking to address land use then within the entire watershed of the Winooski River and that is called the basin of that are the watershed of the Winooski River. Every area of land that when it rains or when the snow melts, eventually that water is going to drain into the Winooski River and is because the Winooski is also part of the Lake Champlain Basin. The Lake Champlain Basin.

Amanda: Some of the issues that affect our waterways are structural – and historic – and others are more modern.

Karen: So, you know, way back when the European settlers came to Vermont, they cleared a lot of land, meaning there was a lot of open dirt. And we had significant erosion of sediment into the lake, into the rivers, and now into the lake. We changed the channeling of streams, straightened them. That caused more erosion as well. And then we have a lot of human waste that was directed directly into the river. They were seen as a way to get our waste away from where we were living. Has a flow downstream. So they would have been a source of significant pollution. And then when industry came, they would add their own pollutants as well. But with the passing of the Federal Clean Water Act in 1972, it made it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from a source like a pipe that would from a factory or a pipe from a a wastewater source. I’m sorry. A pipe from a. I’m trying to figure out how to say this nicely, but, you know, all wastewater pipe from residents. So once we had that, as well as the associated funding, we could start to be again to address those point sources of pollutants and they. Became less of a source of degradation to our share of our waterways.

Amanda: Another modern issue with more history than you probably realized is the problem of phosphorus runoffs into Lake Champlain.

Karen: So, for example, you know, we have phosphorus, which is the probably the primary source of the nutrient are the the algal blooms that we see in Lake Champlain. … The problem with too much nutrients is that it can then accelerate plant growth and the cyanobacteria is or algae. Other algae is a plant. And so with too much phosphorus, they can really. Accelerate and explode, the population can explode. And that’s where you then get that visible green scum or the green filamentous growth of algae in the water.

Amanda: Karen explained that phosphorus occurs all the time in the natural world – it’s present in minerals and soils and part of the natural cycle of life. But humans quickly learned ways to add a whole lot more of it to the environment.

Karen: We were able to start mining phosphorus. So out in the Midwest I think there are huge phosphorus mines where they learned that they could, you know, after World War Two, they could. Mine it. They could combine it to be able to put it into a fertilizer that was easily transportable. It then came in to our states, to it came to our farms because it was a wonderful way to produce food. It was a great way to increase our production of food, which was a concern. And nobody had really any thoughts about how it could be bad. So it was just applied without any limits associated with it, except for what you could manage to bring to your farm or get onto the fields. So over the years with the what became an excess of application of phosphorus, our soils became saturated with that. …Phosphorus can easily adhere to soils and so it it stayed in our soils. It didn’t wash out. It’s there. And when our soils eroded, it’s after a rainstorm, after the fields had been plowed or somebody had constructed something, then all that soil drained into a river that then drained in the lake and the phosphorus is in, the sediment is still there. So we call that legacy phosphorus.

Amanda: Water is one of those things that we know, intellectually, is critically important to our world – it’s necessary to life, and when it starts to go wrong, everything suffers. And just one map, showing just one aspect of how water can go wrong, opens up so many questions that we grapple with every day for Vermont’s landscape.

Before Your Time is presented by Vermont Humanities and the Vermont Historical Society. This episode was produced by Amanda Kay Gustin, Ryan Newswanger, and Noel Clark. Thanks to our guests: Bob Mello, Bruce Forsberg, and Karen Bates. Special thanks for the support of this limited series goes to the Lake Champlain Basin Program and their Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership Corridor of Commerce granting program.

Visit our website, Before Your Time dot org, to find a scan of the map and other images and sources related to this episode. And if you like what you hear, please tell your friends about the podcast. Thanks for listening!