Upstream And Out of Mind

Dr. Louis Kaplan of the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, Pennsylvania, which assesses impacts to ecosystems from water-chemistry changes upstream, told me this: "First-order streams have their own ecology with their own unique insects and fish [including endangered species] that live nowhere else. They are some of the most diverse and productive environments on earth because, in addition to their own production, they are heavily subsidized by the forests they flow out of. They also provide food material for organisms downstream."

From his research in the Northeast's piedmont Kaplan has found that when trees are removed from the banks of headwater streams the increased sunlight encourages grasses. Grasses trap sediments and grow sod, and streams get narrow. Kaplan and his colleagues have seen two-foot-wide meadow streams suddenly spread out to as much as 12 feet when they enter heavily shaded woodlands. In small streams almost all biological activity is associated with the bottom, so uncut, undeveloped forests create more habitat and more diverse habitat, and the shade keeps the water cooler. Trees provide leaf litter, important food for insects, and riparian-zone trees remove nutrients. "All this makes for healthier streams," says Kaplan.

Salmonids throughout the nation use headwater streams for thermal refuge in summer and, because groundwater remains at virtually constant temperature year round, refuge from ice in winter. In one study, reported in the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, young-of-the-year brook trout that had been spawned in a lake migrated into small, spring-fed tributaries where they spent the summer. "Small streams, even if they are fishless, are important producers of insects that drift to the downstream fish assemblage," says Dr. Judy Meyer, a professor of stream ecology at the University of Georgia. "Headwater streams are the first aquatic systems that see the input from the terrestrial environment. So they serve as a nutrient and sediment buffer for downstream ecosystems." Meyer and her co-researchers have screened all the leaves out of headwaters and recorded dramatic reduction in food available to wild brook trout downstream.

In the coal seams of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and Pennsylvania mountaintop removal, in which the mountain is taken from the coal instead of vice versa, produces waste in the form of "overburden," as the coal companies call the broken pieces of the most diverse temperate forests on earth. They dump this waste into valleys, burying headwater streams. Stream burial is patently illegal under the Clean Water Act because the Corps can issue permits only for "fill," not mining waste. So on May 4, 2002 the Bush Administration finalized a rule that redefined mining waste as fill. ("If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" asked Abraham Lincoln. Five? No: "Four. Because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.")

Chief US District Judge Charles H. Haden agreed with Lincoln, and struck down Bush's rule five days later. "Only Congress can rewrite the Clean Water Act," he wrote. The administration is appealing, and with excellent prospects of success because the case is before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative in the nation.

Another ruse of mountaintop removers and their government enablers is to redefine streams. For example, a study funded by Arch Coal to assess productivity of Pigeonroost Branch, a headwater it wanted to bury in Blair, West Virginia, yielded only three, five and six taxa of benethic invertebrates at three sampling stations, indicating that the stream was basically a "dry wash." But Pigeonroost Branch didn't look like a dry wash to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which found 30, 13 and 24 taxa at the same three stations. Nor did it look like a dry wash to me when I hiked along it, flushing the wild brook trout said by Arch not to exist. A survey of the Eastern states by the US Fish and Wildlife Service—incomplete because some mining regions weren't evaluated—turned up 897.2 miles of stream buried by mountain-top removal. In West Virginia the service checked only five of 13 coal counties but still found 470 miles of obliterated stream. Reaches of the Little Coal River that once supported commercial barge traffic are now so choked with mining waste from headwaters they can't even float a canoe.

Ben Stout of Wheeling (West Virginia) Jesuit University has found headwater streams in mountaintop-removal country to be even more biologically important than the streams they feed. "The Coal industry prefers to call these streams 'dry washes,' " he told me. "But at 175 permit-application sites in West Virginia and Kentucky we found all eight orders of aquatic insects we were looking for—in all, 80 taxa, including perennial species. The biological community begins in watersheds as small as six acres. In fact, the most diverse communities start right up there at the spring seeps. The majority of taxa we found are leaf-shredders; when they shred leaves the particles feed the whole downstream community. And emerging insects export this energy back to the forest in a form that's available to salamanders, frogs, fish and birds. An intermittent stream is the link between a forest and a river. Fill it, and you break that link." Once a headwater stream gets buried, the rest of the system is not only starved but poisoned. "The runoff from the toes of these valley fills is laden with aluminum, iron and manganese," says Stout. "It's nasty, nasty stuff."

With its guidance and advanced rulemaking proposal the Bush Administration has rejected the advice of the people who know most about the value of headwaters, among them the professional biologists and managers who make up the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the Wildlife Society and the American Fisheries Society and who, with groups such as Ducks Unlimited, wrote EPA, the Corps and the White House Council on Environmental Quality as follows: "Removing protections for non-navigable tributaries of navigable waters would jeopardize many important wetlands that comprise significant fish and wildlife habitat [and support] a diversity of flora and fauna, in addition to providing enhanced water quality, flood attenuation and groundwater recharge. Isolated wetlands, ephemeral streams and tributaries are an integral part of our nation's watersheds, and thus affect the health of all waters of the United States."

The administration also rejected the advice of 43 of the nation's leading stream authorities - PhD senior scientists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences and its boards, officers of other national scientific organizations and leading authors on stream ecology and water quality. In an impassioned letter to the Corps they painstakingly detailed the many ways seemingly inconsequential headwater streams "provide valuable ecological goods and services" and urged that they be protected.

President Bush's assault on the Clean Water Act didn't start with his guidance and advanced rulemaking proposal. It started when he moved into the White House. In 2000 there had been 40,000 discharges of untreated sewage, laden with viruses and bacteria, into the nation's lakes, streams, streets, basements and playgrounds. But among the first things Bush did on taking office in January 2001 was derail improvements in sewer systems that would have cost $1.92 per household per year, block regulations designed to control overflows of raw sewage and set the EPA on a course of relaxing sewer-system guidelines.