Editor’s note: This commentary is by Denise Smith, the executive director of the Friends of Northern Lake Champlain who lives in St. Albans. She has spent most of her life in the Lake Champlain Basin.
[T]he Friends of Northern Lake Champlain (FNLC) and many of our partners in the region, statewide, and at the federal level have been working diligently to resolve water quality issues in our region. As we all know, the efforts have been ongoing for years. Recently, UVM released a study that indicated 65 percent of Vermonters would be willing to pay $40 or more to support clean water and 95 percent of Vermonters in the survey indicated water quality was a top concern to them. In Franklin County, where some of the water quality issues are the most significant, the willingness to pay for clean water was less significant. Some people think it’s because we feel so many resources have already been wasted on this and we will never be able to clean it up, so we may as well give up now.
Although the FNLC agrees that there has been tremendous resources spent on Lake Champlain over the past decade, the on-the-ground implementation projects have not been prioritized (certainly not in Franklin County) and the work that needs to be done now is going to be a heavy lift by all of us. We disagree that too much money has been spent and that we do not need to invest more or that we should give up because we will never fix it. Every day EPA takes impaired water bodies off their list and puts them on the restored list because of the work of people like you and me.
Every time we move soil, build a new house or driveway, fill in a wetland, straighten river channels, or spread manure in the rain, we are contributing to the degradation of Lake Champlain.
I believe there are two paths we can take with this issue going forward.
The first path, the path of least resistance, is to continue the belief and the mantra that we will never get it fixed, so why should we try? We should continue to criticize the work that individual landowners and local watershed groups are doing to help mitigate the problem, and we should be unappreciative of any of the state and federal help that is being offered.
The second path is the more difficult one. It is the path that requires us to rethink the way we manage and live on this land. It will cause us to reflect on how every time we move soil, build a new house or driveway, fill in a wetland, straighten river channels, or spread manure in the rain, we are contributing to the degradation of Lake Champlain. It is the path that asks you to step way out of your comfort zone and join the Misssiquoi River Basin Association on a Tree Planting Day. It is the path that asks municipalities and VTrans to fix their roads and culverts to accommodate the water. It is a path that asks you to not cut down all of the trees on your lot. It is the path that asks us to protect wetlands and floodplains and not straighten rivers, not because DEC or EPA is asking us to, but because we care about clean water. It is the path that asks our farmers to implement their nutrient management plans and change their field management practices to include better buffers, reduced tillage, and increase year round cover on their crop lands. This path requires all of us to think about water and how we can better manage our earth to help absorb and filter that water, so it enters our water bodies clean. This is the path that FNLC is choosing and it is the path that we are hoping the residents of Vermont will join us on.
