A Time Bomb in the Earth

The Bush administration has reacted to America's selenium crisis by proposing relaxed standards. The current standard, which is causing so many problems with bioaccumulation, sets the limit for waterborne selenium at 5 parts per billion. The far laxer proposed standard--which EPA has offered in the wake of intense lobbying by mining, agribusiness and the electrical power industry--does away with a waterborne standard, replacing it with a fish-borne standard of 7.91 parts per million.

So that I might better understand the biological implications of the proposed standard I sought out the Department of Interior's resident selenium expert, Dr. Joseph Skorupa of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who provided this assessment: "Nothing short of reckless." And he said: "The tissue standard would mean 50- to 90-percent mortality for cutthroat trout. And one commonality that everyone, including the corporate sector, agrees on is that, if EPA is going to switch to tissue-based standard, it needs to develop guidelines on how regulators can use that because it's not fish that come out of discharge pipes; it's water. You have to relate that tissue standard to what goes into the environment."

I'd first met Dr. Skorupa in 1993, shortly after he'd been disciplined for discovering and disseminating information about selenium--namely that it was wiping out Central-Valley wildlife, including endangered species. "Basically," he told me at the time, "I was locked into a windowless office, not allowed to take phone calls, not allowed to talk to anybody, not allowed to say 'hello' to the person in the next office." He was forbidden to pursue further selenium study, and when he procured an $800,000 grant from the California Department of Water Resources he was ordered to give it back. Finally, he was forbidden to seek outside funding for selenium work, although he was free to pursue other grants.

Since then Dr. Skorupa has been high-profile enough that bureaucrats fear him. Still, he says this: "Any time the selenium issue gets near the energy sector I still get clamped down on really tightly." For example, shortly after selenium became a potential impediment to mountaintop-removal coal extraction he was invited to speak at a US Geological Survey symposium. The Interior Department heard about the title of his paper: "Fatal Flaws in EPA's Proposed Selenium Criteria" and informed USGS that the conference would be cancelled unless the title was changed. "I got this meek call from USGS begging me to let them change it," he reports. "I said fine, they could call it 'Bambi Meets SpongeBob,' but I wasn't going to change the content." Nor did he under the new title of "A Technical Review of EPA's Proposed Selenium Criteria."

Recently California irrigators served by the federal Central Valley Project have taken to citing the draft 7.91 parts per million tissue-based criterion as "scientific" support for relaxed environmental standards for their 25-year water contract renewals.

Rather than hacking new phosphate strip mines into the habitat of vanishing species, it strikes me that we should be cleaning up all 21 abandoned and permitted phosphate strip mines that are already poisoning Idaho's earth and water. By no means is the nation starving for phosphate. We have more than enough in places where it can be extracted without further compromising threatened and endangered species and creating new ones.

Under the current setup the public gets to pay for selenium cleanup twice--once with its fish and wildlife, and (provided the states and feds get around to doing something) once with its money. In the past, mining companies just walked away from their messes, and they aren't doing a whole lot better today. In no case is the damage by active or abandoned mines to fish, wildlife, water quality and public health being adequately remediated or even assessed.

Recently, mining companies have been required to set aside cleanup and reclamation bonds of $2,500 per affected acre, but this doesn't begin to cover the expense. Finally, "reclamation" in sensitive watersheds is a will-of-the-wisp goal that has never been achieved and may well be impossible. And, if it is impossible or if mining companies can't afford to do effective reclamation in sensitive watersheds (and elsewhere), the public cannot afford to allow them access to public resources