With winter gone and Earth Day a recent memory, it seems like a good time to check in on the local environment before we all head outside to play in the sun again.
Area environmental specialists say the Valley is full of environmentally conscious folks, which is reassuring, but we shouldn’t let this lull us into a false sense of complacency, says Tom Lautzenheiser, a scientist with Mass Audubon whose research is focused on conservation issues in Western and Central Massachusetts. There are many challenges facing the local environment, some of which are being addressed — like the former waste plant in Palmer, which has been designated as a highly-toxic Superfund site — while others, like forest preservation, could use more attention.
Staff writer Peter Vancini joined the Advocate staff in March. He’s a part time caretaker for Mass Audobon. He’s worked as a habitate restoration technician for an ecological restoration company, a student biologist at the Robert E. Barrett Fishway, and an environmental field technician.
The Ground Game
“I think the Valley prides itself on its conservation and the overall efforts of the land trusts in the area,” Lautzenheiser says. “Everyone’s feeling that everything is kind of safe and that we’re doing a great job and so forth, and that maybe conservation is somebody else’s problem.”
Not so, he says. Mass Audubon’s “Losing Ground” report, published in 2014, shows that while gains have been made in preserving land in Massachusetts, roughly 50,000 acres of forested land were lost between 2005 and 2013. Some of that is open space, but about 38,000 acres were developed.
In that same time period, 120,389 acres of land were permanently protected. That represents 10 percent of the total land conserved in the state, putting the pace of land conservation at more than three times the estimated rate. More than a quarter of the state is now permanently preserved.
But the decrease in land development is probably due largely to the Great Recession. With the economy recovering, we’re seeing development pressure renewed as the number of new housing unit permits granted trends back toward pre-recession levels across the state, according to the report.
“The real estate market is warming up again, and I think the development pressures are very likely to start increasing,” Lautzenheiser says. “There are things that we take for granted that are probably not as secure as we’re thinking. We’re not done with our land protection efforts in the Valley.”
Kristin DeBoer, executive director at Kestrel Land Trust in Amherst, agrees. On the positive side, she says, the organization is seeing an increase in interest from landowners looking to preserve their property in perpetuity. Her organization is among a handful of regional land trusts working to preserve land in its natural state. Forests, she says, play a key role in mitigating the effects of climate change by acting as carbon sinks. Habitat connectivity is also an important factor in ensuring that wildlife is able to migrate throughout an area, preserving gene flow among wildlife populations and benefiting the ecological health of forests.
“There’s more research coming on line about the importance of adaptation,” she says. “So as we can protect big swathes of forest that are connected to each other, that will enable plants and animals to adapt to the changes in the weather [patterns].”
DeBoer and Kestrel Land Trust are also advocating for wider adoption of the Community Preservation Act, which places money gained through a surcharge on property owners — not more than 3 percent of the tax levy against real property on real estate sales — into a community preservation fund. The fund is then used for open space conservation, historic preservation, and affordable housing projects. It is typically matched by funds from a state trust. Since it was enacted in 2001, the CPA has helped to preserve over 23,000 acres of land in Massachusetts. At the end of April, the Massachusetts House of Representatives showed its support for the CPA by voting to transfer $10 million in surplus funds from FY2016 to the CPA Trust Fund in FY2017. Yet, of the 55 Massachusetts towns and cities in the Advocate’s readership area, only 25 had adopted CPA legislation as of this month.
CPA advocates often face an uphill battle in convincing the public that paying the tax will be good for their communities. South Hadley, for example, voted down the CPA in April by a 14-vote margin, despite the findings of an Open Space Committee report which found that the “CPA would provide a very needed resource for achieving many community objectives.” The proposal would’ve cost the average homeowner less than $60 per year and enabled the town to take advantage of matching state and federal funds. South Hadley has rejected CPA legislation three times, but advocates have vowed to fight on.
In Holyoke and Palmer, initiatives are underway to bring the CPA before voters this coming November. The Holyoke City Council has repeatedly tabled a motion to move a CPA proposal ahead amid concerns over its fairness. According to a recent Masslive article, city councilors, concerned over raising taxes and the fairness of exemptions for homes under $100,000, said they needed more information before they could reach a decision.
Some concern is understandable. A 2007 Harvard University report by Robin Sherman and David Luberoff stated that “the benefits of the legislation are unequally distributed, and have aided the state’s most affluent municipalities at the expense of cities and towns with the fewer resources. Communities with high property values are more likely to adopt the legislation with the maximum 3 percent surcharge, and hence receive a larger share of state matching funds than communities with lower property values.”
But this analysis is based on the fact that the lower income communities had not adopted the legislation and were thus unable to benefit from it, or had not utilized the act to its greatest potential.
In 2015, the EPA completed its review of 23 Massachusetts Superfund sites — sites identified by the EPA as highly-toxic priorities for cleanup. EPA Superfund sites are recognized as the most thoroughly polluted sites in the country. Within Massachusetts, the vast majority of these sites are located at the eastern end of the state, though there’s one in the Berkshires. And in Palmer, PSC Resources served as a waste oil refinery and solvent recovery plant in the 1970s. The site, located within a 100-year floodplain, was abandoned by its owner, leaving millions of gallons of waste products on site and the surrounding soil, groundwater, surface water, and wetlands heavily contaminated. Remediation and containment measures were implemented, but PSC Resources will require monitoring in the form of 5-year testing and inspections for the foreseeable future.
The most recent report, released in Sept 2015, showed that levels of all of the known contaminants, including 1,4-dioxane, vinyl chloride, benzene, and a slew of other toxins, had not exceeded acceptable levels.
More Than Wacky Weather
At the root of many of the environmental problems we face here in Western Mass, and globally, is (you guessed it) man-made climate change. Michael Rawlins is an assistant professor in the geosciences department at UMass and manages the Climate Science Research Center there. Like nearly 100 percent of climate scientists, Rawlins says that humans are to blame for the warming climate and that those effects are observable right here at home. Winter temperatures in Amherst, he says, are an average of four degrees Fahrenheit warmer today than they were when local recordkeeping began 180 years ago. The winter of 2015/16 is the second-warmest winter on record in Amherst, and the three warmest winters have all occurred within the last 14 years. Now, he says, we’re crossing a threshold.
“The warmest winters we have have now crossed the 32 degrees Farenheit threshold,” Rawlins says. “That has huge implications for snowmelt. We see evidence that … the length of the frozen season, the amount of time below freezing, is contracting, and that’s projected to contract across North America.”
This has major implications for human as well as ecological health. As average temperatures rise, so do incidences of tick-borne illnesses and other pathogens among both humans and wildlife. A 2014 report from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that higher winter temperatures reduce tick die-off, extend mosquito breeding seasons, and allow organisms that carry diseases to expand their geographic ranges. Non-native invasive plants and insects are steadily expanding their ranges northward too, imperiling biodiversity in both terrestrial and aquatic habitats.
A plant or animal that is introduced to one habitat from another can become invasive if it has the ability to thrive under a wide variety of environmental conditions. Invasives also tend to be ferocious competitors within their ecological niche, growing or reproducing faster, displaying more aggressive characteristics, or employing a variety of other dirty tricks to crowd out their native competitors.
To make matters worse: introduced species are generally not part of a local food chain and therefore are not widely snacked upon by native fauna or afflicted by plant diseases.
Japanese knotweed is a particularly notable scourge of roadsides and river banks in the Valley and beyond. The plant grows and spreads quickly and is highly resilient to control measures. Stem injection and “cut and drip” herbicide treatments are generally effective, but they require that each individual stem be treated by hand — a time-consuming effort that can require years of repetition to achieve eradication.
And then there are the invasive insects.
The southern pine beetle, according to The New York Times, is responsible for the decimation for over 30,000 acres of pine forest in New Jersey alone since it was discovered there in 2003. Lautzenheiser says that the beetle may be the latest of a series of destructive insects gunning for Western Mass forests.
Though the beetles were not observed to have been responsible for any tree mortality in Massachusetts in 2015, they were caught in 18 out of 30 traps placed by DCR and Mass Fish and Wildlife from Southwick to Cape Cod and have been wreaking havoc in other states as they’ve made their way up the eastern seaboard.
Like many experts, Lautzenheiser feels it’s just a matter of time. With average winter temperatures climbing, the beetles are unlikely to be kept at bay for long.
Pines aren’t the only trees at risk from invasive insects either. The emerald ash borer is also a growing problem in the state.
“If you look at white ash, any component of ash, it’s likely to be lost in the landscape within a decade,” Lautzenheiser says. “Ash is likely to basically just get wiped out by emerald ash borer given that it’s destroyed tens of millions of ash trees in the Midwest and its inexorably spreading through Massachusetts now. In those places where ash is an important component, you’re likely to see a lot of forest destruction.”
A Cleaner River Runs Through It
There’s still plenty to do in our waterways, too. While small dam removal projects continue to help increase habitat continuity, there are still over 1,000 small dams in the Connecticut River watershed. Most are no longer serving their intended purposes and seriously limit the amount of habitat available to migratory fish. The entire state has over 3,000 dams, making Massachusetts one of the most heavily dammed areas in the country.
Andrew Fisk is the executive director of the Connecticut River Watershed Council. He says that while improvements have been made the last 20 years in terms of better wastewater treatment and removing combined sewer overflows responsible for contaminating rivers, the water quality still isn’t as high as it should be. He says the lack of numerical standards around nutrient runoff are at least partly to blame.
“The goal for the public’s waters should be expressed in terms of standards,” Fisk says. “And it’s not just saying ‘this number for dissolved oxygen’ or ‘this concentration of bacteria.’ We need to define healthy water in terms of the organisms that live there so we can restore all of the indigenous fish … Populations are nowhere near what they could and should be.”
While combined sewer overflow (CSO) — the sewage runoff that occurs when aging sewers are inundated with rain — remains a problem in the Connecticut River, Fisk says there’s been a great deal of improvement over the past two decades.
To date, the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission has spent over $100 million on CSO elimination projects within the watershed since 2003. The Pioneer Valley Planning Commission’s Connecticut River Cleanup Committee has been working on replacing the problem sewers for over 20 years, reducing the number of CSOs discharging into the Connecticut from 132 to 65. Chris Curtis, the PVPC’s chief planner and section manager of environment and land use, estimates that it will take 20 more years and another $350 million to completely solve the problem. The committee’s federal funding dried up about six years ago, but it was recently granted $1.25 million in state funds through the Department of Environmental Protection, with which it plans to fund major sewer separation projects in Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee.
Air Fail
The American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” 2016 report, which analyzed air quality data from 2012 to 2014, gave failing grades to both Hampden and Hampshire counties for ozone pollution. There’s a silver lining, though: the number of days in the “orange,” indicating unhealthy air pollution levels for sensitive members of the population, have dropped drastically in both counties since 1996. From 2012 to 2014, Hampden County had an average of 12.5 fewer high-ozone days than it did in 1996. In Hampshire County, there were 23.2 fewer.
Hampden County received an “A” for its low levels of particle pollution, too. In fact, Springfield was named among the cleanest metropolitan areas in the country when it comes to 24-hour particle pollution averages. Data on particle pollution for Hampshire County was not collected, while Franklin County’s data was inconclusive.
Mt. Tom Closes: The closure of the Mt. Tom power station, one of Massachusetts’ last coal-burning power plants, in December of 2014 was certainly a bright spot for both environmental and health advocates. Though emissions were greatly curtailed in the years leading up to its shutdown, the plant released tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, as well as a number of other chemicals designated toxic by the EPA.
According to EPA Toxic Release Inventory numbers from 1998 to 2009, the year before it installed an emissions control system that greatly reduced emissions of toxins, Mount Tom released over 3,191 metric tons of toxins into the air. Total releases during that time were over 3,785 metric tons. That’s roughly the mass of the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo astronauts into space. Keep in mind that the plant opened in 1960.
By quantity, hydrochloric acid made up the bulk of those toxic emissions, but lead, mercury, sulfuric acid, and a number of others were also released into the environment. Substances like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are recognized by organizations like the EPA and Clean Air Task Force as being strongly associated with respiratory disease, were released in much greater amounts.
Holyoke continues to experience pediatric asthma rates at more than double the state average, according to Bureau of Environmental Health data, though it’s unfair to suggest that the power plant is solely responsible.
On the Horizon
Also, we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that the shelving of Tennessee Gas’s Northeast Energy Direct fracked natural gas pipeline was a small victory, but assurances that it will remain shelved are still elusive.
Overall, it’s a mixed bag for the Valley. We’ve made some great strides in recent years in cleaning up our waterways, improving air quality, and preserving land in its natural state, but there’s still more to do.•
Contact Peter Vancini at pvancini@valleyadvocate.com.
P.S. — Look out for turtles! They cross roads in droves this time of year. If you happen across one, get out of the car safely and move the turtle to the side of the road it’s headed for. (Don’t pick up snapping turtles!) The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggests nudging it across the road with a broom or shovel.
