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Editor’s note: This op-ed is by James H. Maroney Jr., a law school student, who is a former farmer.
In their joint appearance at Vermont Law School April 20, Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Deb Markowitz and Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner David Mears conveyed an easy spirit of can-do and community pulling-together, which they said was indicative of the best sort of public governance. (Agency of Agriculture Food & Markets Secretary Chuck Ross was invited but did not show.) Vermont is indeed a place where community is important and surely government works best that works with the public’s broad interest foremost in mind.
The occasion was to mark the publication by the Agency of Natural Resources of a brochure called “Resilience: A Report on the Health of Vermont’s Environment.” We learn on page 12 that “State and federal agencies have invested more than $140 million since 2004 to accelerate the reduction of phosphorus pollution in Lake Champlain and to reduce related pollutants in other waters statewide. But lake phosphorus levels are still too high.”
The message is unambiguous: We are “accelerating” in our effort to reduce lake pollution but we are making less progress than we had hoped. But the statement is, at best, misleading or, at worst, a bold mischaracterization of the facts.
On the previous page, we see a chart and accompanying graphs that clearly show phosphorus loading, over the period 1990-2010, in Missisquoi Bay, St. Albans Bay, Northeast Arm, Malletts Bay, Main Lake and South Lake — the whole lake — is rising and that all of these areas are moving steadily away from, not nearer to, compliance with Vermont’s water quality standards. The disparity between the secretaries’ and the commissioner’s protestations of “disappointed progress” and the facts would not be so alarming were we not tempted to see an effort at dissimulation.
Perhaps, in view of the expenditure of $140 million of public money — that is a very large number, for which we should see quite tangible and significant progress — perhaps they might have written something closer to: “The data indicate we have utterly failed to stanch the flow of nutrients into Lake Champlain, which in spite of huge expenditures of your money, continues upwards. It is now incumbent upon us, as your faithful representatives, to step back and honestly explore where we went wrong and to even entertain an entirely different remedy.”
This is not the end of the dishonesty. I note an effort in the report to disperse responsibility for the rising levels of phosphorus in the lake away from conventional dairy, which is responsible for 55-60 percent of the phosphorus in and still entering the lake, the rise of which coincides very neatly with the rise of artificial fertilizer use by conventional dairy, onto streambed dereliction during floods, development and stormwater runoff. These activities are indeed a source of phosphorus entering the lake (40-45 percent by most expert opinions), but not the main source,which is incontrovertibly conventional dairy.
The resilient effort to shield dairy at all costs is laudable but unhelpful, not just to readers, who, if they do not see through it, are surely wondering whether the expenditure of $140 million in public money to save the industry could possibly be the worth the candle, but to the lake, which in spite of the expenditure is progressing steadily in the wrong direction. It is also empirically unhelpful to the dairy industry: over the same period (1990-2010) Vermont dairy farms have dwindled from 1,800 to 900. They are again struggling — dare I say perennially struggling — with their own profligacy. With official state sanction, conventional dairy has again boosted production, again flooded its markets, again lowered its own prices and is again seeking state and federal support in order to maintain the subsidies that keep this absurd cycle alive.
I appreciate that dairy is important to Vermont: 97 percent of Vermonters told the Survey on the Future of Vermont they support farming. But this simply cannot be what they had in mind.
Would it not be more in keeping with the Vermont spirit of community, with pulling together, to dispense with the dissimulation and to admit that the present course is not working; that it cannot work; that there is no way to meet our federally mandated total maximum daily load (TMDL) without reforming conventional dairy; that the “best management practices” and the “accepted agricultural practices” are not effective because they were not written to be effective; that irrespective of venerable tradition and ample state subsidies, conventional dairy is on life support, which in a state looking desperately for money with which to rebuild its state hospital and its roads, we simply cannot afford? Would it not be more in keeping with “We get tough things done” for the Shumlin administration to break with its predecessor and acknowledge that there are far more people in Vermont (97 percent) who want to solve this problem honestly and creatively than who want to read that we are going with one hand to allocate another $140 million to keep alive the fiction that Vermont can stanch lake pollution without regulating dairy, while with the other the Agency of Agriculture permits conventional dairy (0.01 percent) to apply 100 million pounds/year of artificial nutrients to riparian land along our streams and rivers, just to make a product for which there is insufficient demand, that loses millions for itself and for the state economy and that pollutes the lake?
The first responsibility of the commissioner of Environmental Conservation and the secretaries of Natural Resources and Agriculture is to the public, not to the private interest. Do they not, after the expenditure of $140 million — that is a very large number, for which we should see quite tangible and significant progress — think that the people of Vermont deserve a fair explanation of why their tax dollars continue to flow out and the lake continues to be degraded?
Vermont’s accepted agricultural practices rules were drafted in accordance with 10 V.S.A. §1259(i) …“in order to reduce the amount of agricultural pollutants entering the waters of the state.” The facts in your brochure are abundantly clear: The rules have been in place almost 20 years and they are empirically not achieving this purpose.
It is with that exquisite purpose in mind that I resubmitted my petition to Commissioner Mears and Secretaries Ross and Markowitz to reopen the AAPs for review. Ninety-seven percent of Vermonters, who envisage another approach to save agriculture, demand that they do so without further delay — and without further expenditure of public money.
(The petition, signed by 12 students at Vermont Law School, can be found at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17953783/Petition%20revised_0408.pdf)
