Episode Ten - Protecting Ohio’s Water
Episode Description:
Water has a power unlike almost any other element on Earth. In large enough quantities or with enough force behind it, water can effectively lay waste to anything people have built. But water is also fragile — prey to the best laid plans of those same people who drink it and play in it and grow with it.
In this episode of Grounded Hope, we'll learn more about Ohio's water: From the history of the Dayton Flood, to toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie, to the people who are fighting to give the Ohio River rights of its own. In all of these stories, you'll hear some persistent themes: That water connects us all, not just metaphorically, but physically; that its health is often threatened by modern farming practices; and that it's counting on us to take care of it.
The Great Miami River as seen from downtown Dayton’s RiverScape Metro Park. This area of Dayton would have been about 20 feet underwater in 1913 following the Great Dayton Flood.
Photo Credit: Lauren Shows
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO:
Water has a power unlike almost any other element on Earth. In large enough quantities or with enough force behind it, water can effectively lay waste to anything people have built. But water is also fragile — prey to the best laid plans of those same people who drink it and play in it and grow with it.
In this episode of Grounded Hope, we'll learn more about Ohio's water: From the history of the Dayton Flood, to toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie, to the people who are fighting to give the Ohio River rights of its own. In all of these stories, you'll hear some persistent themes: That water connects us all, not just metaphorically, but physically; that its health is often threatened by modern farming practices; and that it's counting on us to take care of it.
I'm Lauren Shows. From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.
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Lauren Shows
In downtown Dayton, the Great Miami River flows beneath Monument Avenue, where the Miami Conservancy District looks down on its rushing waters. In 1913, that same river flooded, accounting for the largest natural disaster in Ohio's history. And the Miami Conservancy district was founded soon after to protect the city from future floods. I meet Sarah Hippensteel Hall, manager of watershed partnerships for the Miami Conservancy District, by the Great Miami on a warm afternoon.
Shows
So in 1913, all of this—
Sarah Hippensteel Hall
So we are sitting right in the middle of Riverscape Metropark, right in the middle of downtown Dayton. And if we were in 1913, in March, Easter weekend, we would be 20 feet underwater. And people were rescued off their rooftops or had to wait for the floodwaters to recede to get down. And so the rallying cry was, "Remember those promises that you made in the attic!" "If I ever get out of here, I swear I will make sure this region never floods again." And the community raised $2 million of their own money — 50 cents out of their pocket or whatever the businesses were able to give. And so the the leaders in this community decided they needed a solution that would be so great, so big, so all-encompassing, that the region would never have to worry about flooding again.
Shows
That solution was to take the $2 million the community had pooled and hire the young engineer Arthur Morgan, who would go onto found Community Service, now Agraria. Morgan understood that it wouldn't be enough to shore up flood control for Dayton alone, and that his approach needed to be regional. Here's Morgan talking about that approach, and the foundation of the Miami Conservancy District, in the 1968 documentary, "I See a Village."
Arthur Morgan
I got up there, and I could see they didn't know where they were going, had no precedent for it. Never had a big city like that been washed out. So I had to break the pattern somewhat. And of course, I had to let the lawyers put this in legal language. But they said, "There's no law like this. You can't do this." But I said, "That's what we've got to do — find a way to do it."
Documentary narrator
He finds a way.
Shows
At Morgan’s prodding, legislation was enacted in Ohio that would allow cooperation across county and city boundaries: The Conservancy Act was signed into law by the Ohio General Assembly in 1914, allowing for the establishment of regional flood protection agencies. Morgan helped found the Miami Conservancy District in 1915.
Hippensteel Hall
The solution that Arthur Morgan helped create was system-wide. Now we all kind of look at river systems on a watershed basis, but back then it was really new and unique to think of things as a system. Arthur Morgan is very famous for being a systems thinker.
Shows
Over the last 100 years, the Miami Conservancy District has protected the Miami Valley from more than 1900 floods. None of those high water events have come close to the 1913 flood, but the system is able to protect against that same level of water, plus 40%.
Hippensteel Hall
You can't continue to build your levees higher and higher — and Arthur Morgan saw that. So as we see climate change happening and these changing weather conditions and sort of the unknown of the future, this system is ready to handle that. We continue to invest in our dams and levees and make sure that they are functioning to the highest level possible — and we will probably need to have some major reinvestment in some of our infrastructure in the near future.
Shows
Sarah tells me that, since its foundation, the Miami Conservancy District has expanded its focus to its current mission, which includes not only flood control, but also water stewardship and recreation.
Hippensteel Hall
We have two other really important mission areas, helping communities protect and really make sure that their drinking water sources are going to stay there for the future, making sure our rivers are clean so that we can encourage recreation. So we want people to get down and enjoy the rivers; we want you to get out in your kayak or canoe or go fishing or enjoy the bike trails that run along our levee system. Because we know that if you're enjoying the river, you're more likely to do something to care for it.
Shows
Keeping the water safe for drinking and recreation means paying attention to one of the biggest threats to the water's health: agricultural runoff.
Hippensteel Hall
So we have a widespread system of data collection that helps us understand both groundwater and surface water in our rivers. But we've also had several projects to engage with our agricultural community. Because farming is the largest activity across our landscape. About 70% of that land is being used for primarily row crop agriculture — corn and soybean production — which is very important to the economic engine of Ohio. It's the number one economic driver in Ohio, and one in seven jobs are tied to agribusiness. But those farmers also use fertilizers and herbicides in their processes. And it runs off into our rivers and streams. And that can lead to a real degradation of our river water quality. We have found that our agricultural community wants to make sure that they're not contributing to the problem. We've had some very large scale programs in the past to try to incentivize them to either reduce the amount of those things that they're using, or install things along the riverbank like a vegetated buffer that will help take up the excess that might flow off their crops.
Shows
None of the Miami Conservancy District's current work would be possible, of course, if not for the vision of its original chief engineer, Arthur Morgan.
Documentary narrator
Planned communities, recreation areas, lakes and landscapes, schools. It is not just a means of flood control. It is a revolution in social thinking. Dayton has asked a technical question, and it is answered by a man who insists on seeing life whole.
Shows
For a lot of folks around the U.S., the first time they ever heard about toxic algae blooms was in 2014, when news outlets covered an explosion of algae in Lake Erie that made tap water undrinkable for half a million people in Toledo.
News person 1
Toledo, Ohio without water now for a second day they're having...
News person 2
...we continue to research more about what causes these large blooms out on Lake Erie
News person 3
...algae bloom that turned part of Lake Erie toxic just a few weeks ago, is bringing a new level of attention to run off and several other troubles in the Great Lakes.
Shows
Toledo residents spent three days without access to safe running water due to the toxic algae, or cyanobacteria. Once water began to flow from Toledo taps again, however, news coverage of the crisis slowed to a trickle.
Sheryl Cunningham
Environmental coverage tends to be very event driven.
Shows
That's Sheryl Cunningham, a professor in the Department of Communication and Digital Media at Wittenberg University. Sheryl's been studying public discourse around environmental issues for more than a decade. And she said it's not easy to keep environmental issues in the public eye.
Cunningham
So it's really hard to cover processes that take over long term. I mean, it's one of the same challenges of covering something like climate change. It's happening all the time.
Shows
And it was happening for years before the Toledo water crisis. Sheryl says her own research into media around the algae blooms revealed just how often Lake Erie's water quality issues have popped up in the news.
Cunningham
The most interesting thing to me about this issue is that I started looking at the water quality stuff in about, I don't know maybe like 2013, 2014. And as I was looking, every time I looked especially about the algae bloom issue, it would just push me back further and further. And I was like, "Okay, so this was happening in the early 2000s. This was happening in the '80s. This was happening in the late '70s." We have known about this problem for a long time.
Shows
In fact, algae blooms in Lake Erie have been documented since the 1950s. Decades of study have found that a major contributor to the blooms is agricultural runoff. When it rains on Ohio's corn and soy fields, fertilizer and manure from those fields is washed into waterways that feed into Lake Erie. The phosphorus from fertilizer and manure is like a buffet for cyanobacteria, driving its explosive growth. Which begs the question:
Cunningham
How does an environmental problem like this persist for this long when we know what is causing it?
Shows
Well, part of the answer is, as Sarah Hippensteel Hall mentioned in the first segment of this podcast, agriculture is a major player in Ohio's economy. Curbing modern farming practices that are harmful to Ohio's ecosystems, but beneficial to its financial state, hasn't historically been a legislative priority. Here's Sheryl, again:
Cunningham
For the most part in Ohio, regulation has been up to the individual farmer to do the right thing. And even when many of them do, if some don't, you're still going to create this sort of cumulative effect, especially if you look at it over time, or you get kind of the perfect conditions for algae blooms to occur.
Shows
When it comes to "doing the right thing," Ohio has recently offered an incentive for farmers and other individuals looking to work toward water health. In 2019, the state established the H2Ohio initiative. But the grants offered by the initiative aren't geared at changing the way modern farmers work the land — they're aimed at changing the land itself.
Cunningham
The big strategy right now with H2Ohio, as it relates to this particular issue, because it does cover some other things like septic infrastructure, lead pipes, things like that. But the agricultural piece has to do with, how do we not get these big dumps of nutrients all at once? So it's really about building wetlands and trying to create spaces that can help filter these nutrients. So what's interesting about that is that you're not actually asking the farmers to change their behavior or what they're doing. I mean, there is education that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has done and that other agricultural groups have done to try and let farmers know what's happening and that this is what we need to be aware of. We want everybody to understand how water quality issues relate to what we do, but giving people money to create a wetland on their farm — that really is what H2Ohio is doing.
Shows
Some of the wetlands efforts Sheryl's talking about are being fielded where she grew up in Williams County, Ohio.
Cunningham
So Williams County, Ohio. The water that's coming off of farm fields there is often flowing into the St. Joseph River. The St. Joseph River is then flowing into, I believe, the Maumee — but it is actually having an impact on the Lake Erie ecosystem.
Shows
200 years ago, all of Williams County and another 1500 square miles surrounding it would have been wetland — when it was part of the Great Black Swamp. Settlers in the mid-19th century drained the swamp over the course of several decades. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Great Black Swamp was gone, and so was the protection it had afforded Lake Erie — but the Black Swamp Conservancy, with grants from H2Ohio has worked to convert nearly 70 acres of farmland to wetlands in Williams County. These wetlands will do what they would have done two centuries ago: Catch water that drains from nearby farms and slow it down, soaking up phosphorus and other nutrients before they can make it to the St. Joseph River, and then the Maumee River, and then Lake Erie.
Cunningham
Creating these wetlands now is sort of coming back, in a way — not to all of the land, but the parts of it that are most important to trying to control what the state would call nutrient pollution. Water actually helps us think ecologically — it helps us see that these are connected. So to see that these projects are happening on the St. Joseph River as part of H2Ohio, this is a good thing that is happening. Right? It is drawing attention to a persistent environmental problem. And we will need to wait and see what the results of this program are. But I think it is better than what we were doing before which was — didn't seem like much.
Shows
Imagine if Lake Erie or the Great Black Swamp had been able to defend themselves from pollution or drainage, legally, in a court of law. What if a body of water had the same rights as a person? That's what Citizens for the Rights of the Ohio River Watershed, or CROW, is working toward now. The group's goal is to gain legal rights for the Ohio River, which, according to the EPA, is one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Here's Jim Schenk, who's part of CROW's leadership.
Jim Schenk
We are involved in this because the legislature and corporations are basically destroying our ecosystem. A way around that is to recognize the rights of other species and plants and animals and places. But we're focusing on the Ohio River because it's such a major part of who we are. As I tell people, I'm 70% Ohio River — that's where I get almost all my water — so it's really important to us that we recognize the rights of the Ohio River to flourish.
Shows
Jim is talking to me from his Cincinnati backyard, which is just a few minutes walk from a view of the Ohio River. With him is Deborah Jordan, another member of CROW. She says the group comprises folks who have a different view of legislation around pollution: That state regulation doesn't really curb pollution, but actually permits corporations to legally pollute up to a certain level.
Deborah Jordan
We've seen different fights where we win a little bit, but because of regulations, they are permitted to pollute. So here we are granting these permits to pollute, and we fight to get them all in good order. But they're still polluting. Our bodies are 60 to 70% water; five million of us get water from the Ohio River in this area. We're in the Ohio River watershed — we specifically are in the Boldface Creek watershed, which is behind this ridge, which flows into the Ohio. So we're all impacted, and we're all affecting it. But mostly I think it's corporations who are given personhood, and they're allowed to do those things. Nature is property. So getting to the bottom line, nature's property. And so we are allowed to do what we want with our property.
Shows
The law already recognizes the rights of individuals to represent others who are unable to speak for themselves, so it's not out of the question that CROW would look to do the same for the Ohio River. Just as Arthur Morgan recognized that water systems connect the people who live among them, CROW understands that the Ohio river is not just water flowing in a ditch, but an assembly — maybe even a community — of every being that depends on and contributes to the health of the watershed.
Schenk
Fifteen states make up the watershed. So that's huge!
Jordan
I think that when people think Ohio River, it's like, no, we're all connected, and there is a bigger piece connected to the Ohio River.
Shows
CROW isn't the first organization in Ohio to work toward rights of nature. In 2019, with Lake Erie still plagued by toxic algae every year, Toledo residents passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights designed to protect the lake from further pollution. Very quickly, however, the law was challenged by an agricultural company and by the State of Ohio. In 2020, a federal judge declared the Lake Erie Bill of Rights unconstitutional, writing that it failed to make the, "appropriate balance between environmental protection and economic activity."
Schenk
Well, I think we know right off that once we push this, we're going to get shut down. I mean, they did Lake Erie. And within 12 hours after they passed the law, they got sued. So we know that's going to happen. But hopefully over time, we can change people's mind. And they will realize, you know, that what's happening is really destructive. And we realize it's a huge undertaking. This view and the view of the culture are so different, that it's gonna take a while.
Shows
There have been some major successes in the rights of nature movement. In 2008, Ecuador gave its citizens the constitutional right to legally represent environmental ecosystems. In 2017, the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India were granted rights by their governments. Their successes are a bolster to CROW, Deborah says — even when it sometimes seems like they might be staring down defeat.
Jordan
I don't like predictions because we don't always predict how things will come together. You know, let's talk about what needs to collapse and what we need to nurture. And so I don't like to predict that it will take a long time, because something surprising might happen. He's supposed to be the eternal optimist! But I'm hopeful because I practice it.
Shows
Jim also says he's heard the protestations of those who don't take the idea of rights of nature seriously. To borrow a phrase, why should we give rights to a rock?
Schenk
People think that's really crazy, but then when you think that we are giving rights to a nonentity [corporations], how insane — but people are okay with that, because it happens, you know. But corporations don't exist. They don't need water, they don't need food. They don't need air. They don't need any of this stuff. And underlying corporations — their sole goal is profit. So we've given them rights. You know, I'd much rather a rock have rights.
Shows
So if CROW can help folks understand that giving rights to a river is really no more ludicrous than giving it to a corporation, they'll have jumped their biggest hurdle.
Schenk
Right now we see everything as property. And I always tell people, "If I ever say I own something, whack me upside the head" — because we can't own the Earth. But what we can do is fall in love. We've got to see the Earth as this amazing place that it is. Our being alive is almost impossible. What an honor it is to be part of this amazing planet.
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Host outro
Visit our website at groundedhope.org and click on the "Educational Resources" tab to learn more about Ohio's waterways. This podcast is brought to you by the people at Agraria, Ohio's first center for regenerative practices, and is funded in part by a grant from Ohio Humanities. Sign up for Agraria's "Pathways to Regeneration: Honoring Water" conference, being held on November 5 and 6, at www.communitysolution.org, to hear stories directly from Indigenous peoples, artists, activists and researchers working to protect water.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson. Our scholars are Beth Bridgeman, who teaches a series of reskilling and resilience courses at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio; and Rick Livingston, the assistant director of the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
I'm Lauren Shows, and you've been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset