 Hello everyone. Welcome to the 2021 Heart Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Jenny Rushlow, Associate Dean for Environmental Programs at Vermont Law School. We're very pleased to welcome you. If you are looking to get a Vermont CLE credit, this talk is worth one credit, and you'll need to keep track for your records. We'll have time for Q&A at the end of the presentation, and if you'd like to put in a question, you can do that at any time during the chat, so you don't forget and at the end of the talk, I'll moderate a Q&A and we'll get to as many questions as we can. Today, we're very pleased to welcome Claire Brown. Claire is a senior staff writer for the Counter, which is an independent nonprofit newsroom that covers the forces shaping how and what we eat. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Intercept. Her work has prompted congressional investigations, led to a major corporation increasing its wages, and inspired legislation introduced into the Senate. Claire is one of our 2021 Summer Media Fellows, selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, and she is our first ASPCA-sponsored animal law media fellow. Today, her lectures titled Algal Blooms in Animal Ag. Please join me in welcoming Claire Brown. Thank you so much, Jenny. As Jenny said, my name is Claire. I am a senior staff writer for the Counter. We used to be called the New Food Economy until January 2020. We changed our name last year, right before the world shut down. We cover all aspects of the food system, from immigration to labor, to climate change, and the industries that touch all three. I'll be talking about one of those industries, the meat industry, in detail today. I'm going to start sharing my screen. The best way to follow the Counter and get updates on all of our reporting is to subscribe to our newsletter. That's available at thecounter.org. It's called Thinly Sliced. It's free, and it comes out on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Here we go. Great. So just a note on the structure of this presentation. I will start by going over what Algal Blooms actually are, how they form, when they're harmful, major contributing ecological factors, human influence factors that may be accelerating the rise of harmful Algal Blooms. Then I'll move into a discussion of how animal agriculture has contributed to the formation of these phenomena. They are increasingly prevalent, and they are exacerbated by climate change. We will focus on CAFOS in this talk. That's concentrated or confined animal feeding operations. Those are large animal ag facilities, many of which can find animals in small spaces. Those are cows, pigs, and chickens, generally. They're certainly not the only type of livestock farms that contribute to the formation of Algal Blooms and farm runoff, but they are so large that they are a major contributing factor. Then we'll touch on the regulatory framework that does, and as we'll see, sometimes doesn't, regulate CAFO runoff and discharge of manure. And finally, we will look at two recent political battles that reveal some possible password word, absent of a meaningful federal action in the space. One of those will be in Ohio, and the other one will be in Iowa. Great. So I just wanted to start by looking at Algal Bloom News from the last couple of weeks. This phenomena peaks in the summer, so it's a little bit of a skewed data set, but if you look, the top left is a screenshot of a storm lake Iowa. Some photos from there, the Twitter user is saying that none of that was there yesterday. It kind of appeared overnight. Iowa actually did not have huge Algal Bloom problems in the past, and someone, a hydrologist I was following on Twitter was speculating that the introduction of invasive zebra mussels, the zebra mussels consumed organisms that would compete with algae and kind of paved the way for Algal Blooms to become a bigger problem in Iowa. We'll talk about other kind of obscure human factors that contribute to the formation of Algal Blooms a little bit later. The top right is a picture of 600 tons of marine life that has passed away because of a red tide in Florida this week. I included Florida because Algal Blooms there are increasingly becoming a political issue. Governor DeSantis got a lot of flak this week, particularly from business operators in the tourism industry. Tourists do not like seeing huge swaths of dead animals because he was in Texas while the Algal Blooms happening and COVID cases in Florida are also increasing. And then the last one is right here in Vermont. It says one week ago on the screenshot, but I took this a few days ago, so it's probably 10 or 12 days old at this point. This closed beaches in Burlington just last week, and the the deck says a little bit about why it was harmful. But I just goes to show this is happening all over the place in all corners of the country and it's all happening right right this minute. So what is an Algal Bloom? This is an aerial photo of one. The Oxford English Dictionary definition is rapid growth of microscopic algae or cyanobacteria and water often resulting in a colored scum on the surface. So not all Algal Blooms are harmful and not all Algal Blooms are caused by human activity, but we are going to talk about the ways these two phenomena are connected. The EPA definition of a harmful Algal Bloom is even simpler than the Oxford Dictionary definition. It's just five words long overgrowth of algae in water. So you can have Algal Blooms without agriculture and you can have agricultural runoff without Algal Blooms, but the two are connected. Algal Blooms are generally seasonal. They're mainly cyanobacteria, blue, green algae, and red tides are composed of dinoflagellates. So there's it's very difficult to get an accurate sense of just how much the prevalence of Algal Blooms has increased over the last decade or so. The Environmental Working Group tracks news reports of Algal Blooms as a proxy for actual Algal Blooms. NOAA does some interesting work forecasting some of the bigger blooms. We'll talk about that in a minute. That's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but they do not capture, you know, some of the smaller ones that hit smaller freshwater bodies. Again, it's possible that this graph is slightly skewed because the news media may be more aware of Algal Blooms than they were in the past, but this gives you a vague sense of, you know, how many news reports we're getting each year. It's a useful data point in that way. You can see this is current as of 2019. So how do Algal Blooms impact humans and wildlife? Probably the most well-known impact is fish kills. Like I said in Florida, the red tide there has killed 600 tons of wildlife this past week or two. It can make the water unsafe for swimming. It also closes beaches for people who have pets. I don't know if you've ever walked near a pond with a dog, but they love to drink the water. Algae in the water can be unsafe for pets, and that's why a lot of local ordinances have a mandated testing of water. They just do not want people to swim or people's pets to swim when there is a harmful level of algae in the water. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is basically a giant Algal Bloom. It vacillates in size. I looked it up for this year. It's about 5,400 square miles. That's roughly the size of Connecticut. That is the result of nutrients washing from farms, lawns, treatment plants, et cetera, from the Mississippi River all the way into the Gulf. That triggers the growth of algae, which creates a low oxygen zone and marine wildlife cannot survive. Lots of fish can just swim out of it, but others cannot. This has been an issue for a long time. It happens every summer, and it's been fluctuating in size. According to NOAA, agriculture is the biggest contributing factor to the continued dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Lastly, when there is algae in the water or harmful levels of algae in the water, water treatment plants have to spend more money to clean that up. We will talk about an emergency situation or two, but it can mean that treatment just gets more expensive over time if algae blooms consistently impact drinking water sources. These phenomena also have ripple effects, no pun intended. A few years ago, I want to say it was 2016, the Dungeonist crab fishery in California had to be closed because there was a risk that the crabs had consumed algae that could then make humans who ate them very sick. There's been a die-off of bottled-nose dolphins in Florida who ate Minhaedon that had consumed algae. The algae did not hurt the fish, but it bio-accumulated, and I think it was 107 dolphins that died one year. These phenomena can impact much further upstream than just the specific pond or specific part of the ocean that they are in. As I said, there are a million different factors that contribute to the formation of algal blooms, sunlight, water temperature, turbidity of the water, as well as other hidden factors like other plants in the water, but there are certain human influence factors that can exacerbate algal blooms. The biggest one, which I'll spend most of my time on today, is agricultural runoff. The two nutrients of major concern are phosphorus and nitrogen. Those can run into the water and quote unquote feed the algae, which can then very quickly grow very quickly. Sewage effluent is also an issue, runoff from factories as well. These were all bigger issues when the Clean Water Act was first implemented, but they are continuing factors. Lastly, climate change, warmer waters, hotter summers, it all creates more favorable conditions for these phenomena to occur. Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, there are subtler human activities that impact the formation of algal blooms that scientists that suspected the invasive zebra mussels had eaten the plants that could would have otherwise competed with algae in Iowa. That's a great example. Those zebra mussels probably hitched a ride on ships and were introduced into U.S. waters where they had no natural predators. Eventually, they made it in Linn to Storm Lake, Iowa. I think it was just a couple of years ago that that happened. You can see that's already having an impact on the ecosystem there. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about how nutrient pollution happens. This is an EPA infographic. I think it's pretty recent. I wanted to flash this up on the screen because if you look on the right hand side, it starts to quantify some of the agricultural impact. If you look, it says livestock production generates close to 1 billion tons of manure every single year that increased by 25 percent between 1964 and 2008. That's fertilizer use that increased. If you look, urban sources flowing into the Gulf of Mexico are just about 10 percent of the nutrients. Fossil fuels put more than 7 million tons of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere. Again, it's not a direct comparison because it's comparing oxides with manure, but the animal agriculture amount of waste dwarfs some of these other sources. How does animal agriculture actually produce all of these nutrients? Animals produce a lot of manure. A single cow can produce 14 gallons of manure and urine in a single day. To give that a better sense of scale, that means 200 cows, which is still a small and medium-sized dairy, produce the same amount of waste in a day as a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people. An annual litter from a typical broiler house is as much phosphorus as the sewage from a community of 6,000 people. Quantities and proportions of these nutrients vary from species to species, but those two key nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, both exist and they can both feed alkyl blooms. There's kind of two main ways that manure from animal agriculture enters the water supply. It can happen via leaks from confined animal feeding operations, which can sometimes hold manure in a lagoon-style setting. It also can happen via runoff from farms that have been sprayed with manure. A lot of the manure produced in animal agriculture operations is sprayed in the form of fertilizer on nearby farms. The issue is that that also winds up in the water supply. I included this graphic just to give a sense of the mismatch between what crops require and what manure offers. In some cases, there's excess. In some cases, there's a bit of a deficit. That is one contributing factor to excess of one of these nutrients in the soil. I just thought this was an interesting map of the transfer of nutrients from some parts of the country to another. You can see corn is produced kind of in the Midwest here and the animals that eat the corn are more spread out. The phosphorus that comes from the corn is also transformed or transferred when the crop is transferred and that comes out the other end and the animals deposit an excess of phosphorus in the soil. Great. This is a visualization, again, from that environmental working group study that I cited earlier. You can see the black dots are CAFOs and the orange fields, which you can see kind of filling in as the simulation runs, that's where the manure is sprayed. You can see some of these counties are almost entirely covered in sprayed manure. When those fields are overloaded, that's what contributes to the runoff into the water. When the manure is sprayed when the field is frozen or when a rainstorm comes right after the manure is sprayed that can contribute to runoff, the excess nutrients can also leach through the soil into the groundwater. One other point I wanted to make based on this graphic is that in addition to the manure, farms also purchase synthetic fertilizers with some of the same nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus. Even if the manure itself is not contributing to too many nutrients in the water, it is functioning in addition to the fertilizer to act as kind of a double whammy. I'll show that in a minute. Great. This is a graph that is also from that same environmental working group study. They basically cross-referenced the amount of manure that was sold in the areas where they were studying with the amount of manure that was applied to the ground. What they found was that if you combine those two, and that's in the third column here, you see a nutrient overload. They don't have any way to prove that all of the fertilizer sold was applied to the land, and so the numbers in column three are probably a little bit exaggerated, but I did find it remarkable that none of these were less than 150 percent of the nutrients that the crops could use. And you can see in the last column, assuming that all of the fertilizer was purchased was actually used in the area in that year, they estimated the tons of nutrient overload, and you can see those numbers on the right-hand side. Great. So all of this contributes to water pollution, which then contributes to the formation of algal blooms. I included an EPA quote here. The National Water Quality Assessment shows that agricultural runoff is the leading cause of water quality impacts to rivers and streams. The third leading source for lakes, and the second largest source of impairment to wetlands. This is a dated graphic, but it shows a 1997 survey of excess phosphorus in soils. This is phosphorus buildup. The red states have more phosphorus than is needed, or more than half of the soils tested have more phosphorus than is needed. So you can see the scope of the problem. It's not just states on the Mississippi. It's kind of all over the place. So how is farm pollution regulated? I'm only going to talk about water in this presentation. There's a lot to look at in terms of farming and air pollution as well. It's a little bit outside the scope of this presentation, but I encourage you to look into it on your own. Some would argue that it's even worse than water regulation or lack thereof. Okay, so the 1972 Clean Water Act administered by the EPA was created during a time of emergency in terms of the help of the water systems in the United States. It is meant to establish some regulations in terms of what sources are allowed to discharge into the water. Importantly, the Clean Water Act separates regulated entities into point sources and non-point sources. So this is Environmental Studies 101. A point source is something with a pipe or something with a very concrete source. An example would be a single factory or a single pipe coming out of a factory. A non-point source is how most farmland is classified. It's not a single identifiable source of solution. This will become important later when we look at Iowa's attempts to classify CAFOs as classify drainage districts around farmland as point sources, and there will be an interesting rationale there. So this creates already a little bit of interesting tension. CAFOs are explicitly defined as point sources. Farms are not. So you can have a situation, and I was reading this in an NRDC report from 2019, you can have a situation where the CAFO itself is regulated, but if the manure is transferred to a farm that's a separate business entity or that's a few miles down the road and that manure is sprayed and then runs off, it is not regulated. And so it's kind of an interesting distinction that has been made here. So how do those regulations actually work? I flashed out this GAO report from 2008 that shows some of the challenges EPA is facing, has faced when trying to go through the rulemaking process to regulate water pollutants discharged by CAFOs. One of the top line findings from this report was that the EPA doesn't actually even know where all the CAFOs are. We'll look at that in more in a second. But two federal court decisions at that time had affected EPA and some states' abilities to regulate CAFO water pollutants. As you can see, the court decision affected EPA's ability to regulate CAFOs. States' reactions varied, and that patchwork of regulations are something that we will look at in addition. Again, in 2006, there was a jurisdiction question, also very interesting. There's another interesting wrinkle here. In 2013, a district court decision exempted stormwater runoff. I think I have a slide about that later, so maybe we'll save that for a minute. Okay, so because of this framework, permitting and discharge enforcement are generally left to states. EPA retains its permitting authority in a handful of states that don't have much animal agriculture. I know New Hampshire was one of them, but big ag states like North Carolina and Iowa kind of run their own ship. That means that permitting and enforcement is a pretty spotty process. I don't know if you can read these quotes, but the North Carolina one says, poultry CAFOs are not even required to submit waste management plans. Environmental regulators don't even know how much manure is applied on fields. There's been a lot of work by advocacy groups simply to fly over the state of North Carolina and identify poultry CAFOs because the reporting requirements do not even map those facilities. Permitting and enforcement has also been spotty in Iowa. I think you can see here this quote says, one of the most shocking results from the work plan is the number of confinements that were found that were not complying with the rules of filing manure management plans or having state construction permits. So the Iowa's own Department of Natural Resources found 12 animal feeding operations that did not have any permits. I'm going to look at these in a minute. So where we've landed, EPA rules require CAFOs that plan to discharge. I think I have the terminology right to obtain permits. And what that means is that CAFOs who say they are not discharging do not always have EPA discharge permits. I highlighted Iowa here because there's the largest gap between the total number of CAFOs and the total number of permits. You can see in some states the gap is much smaller. Michigan has 282 CAFOs and 267 of them have permits. So some states actually have followed through with guidance that requires every single state to get permits and some have not. So the agricultural stormwater exemption originally applied just to as interpreted by the courts applied only to manure that was sprayed on fields offsite. I think it was a 2013 decision that said CAFOs themselves are also exempt. So that means that runoff that results from storms is not regulated under the Clean Water Act. This is a picture of some North Carolina poultry farms during Hurricane Florence. This Waterkeeper Alliance has done a lot of work, like I said, just identifying where these farms are. Another interesting thing that they have done is fly above kind of manure lagoons in North Carolina during times of floods to show where when they breach. Breach means leak. So I can remember, I think it was 2018, Hurricane Florence landed. They were taking daily satellite imagery and sharing that with the media to show what it looked like when these lagoons had breached and the effluent was just kind of flowing into the into the water. Okay, so absent these federal standards that would prevent runoff that causes the formation of algal blooms. There have been a couple of recent emergency type situations. So in 2014, Toledo, this the town of Toledo had a drinking water crisis. There was an algal bloom in Lake Eury that prompted the declaration of a state of emergency. Residents were urged to avoid drinking tap water for 2.5 days. The water was deemed safe a couple of days later, but there was widespread consistent that farming and climate change were both contributing factors. So what happened? Toledo citizens started organizing. They have an origin story where they met in a bar and decided to do something about the quality of Lake Eury. They got this Lake Eury Bill of Rights, which is so-called Rights of Nature law. I don't know how many of you were watching the Tuesday presentation, but you probably learned way more than I know from that. So the Lake Eury Bill of Rights was a ballot question in Ohio. They organized for about five years before it was put to a vote. It was kind of a coalition of several environmental groups. There's a national group and an international group that support Rights of Nature legislation, so they got some help writing it from them. The ballot question granted Lake Eury the right to quote exist, flourish, and naturally evolve. It's kind of an interesting legal framework that some environmental advocates hope will be meaningful in the future when it comes to advocating on behalf of impaired waterways and other natural features. And the Bill work concretely would have allowed people and environmental groups to file a suit against polluters on behalf of the lake. So that basically meant that the citizens of Lake Eury, or an environmental group representing Lake Eury, could have sued upstream farmers for polluting the lake. And so obviously was challenged in court the very next day by a farmer. So this is some reporting that I did around that time. There was a lot of politics involved with this. What I learned based on a FOIA dump from one of the interest groups involved with this. Basically what happened is that the Senate or the state legislature passed a budget bill that included preemption language. I will read that sentence here. The specific language was nature or any ecosystem does not have standing to participate in or bring action in any court of common please. No person on behalf of or representing nature and an ecosystem shall bring an action in any court of common please. So this is preemption language that just kind of appeared in the budget bill. My reporting was to figure out how it got there. What was revealed through the FOIA request from this interest group was that the Ohio Chamber of Commerce enlisted a key Republican lawmaker. Kind of at the 11th hour the bill was already written. It was a budget amendment. The chamber of commerce which represents business interests in Ohio got in touch with him. I want to say the day before the vote or even the night before the vote. It was after the period to add amendments that actually closed. The lawmaker agreed to meet with him immediately and that preemption language made it into the bill. So this I think surprised a lot of advocates in Ohio. You know I think they knew that there would be a significant court challenge but I don't think they realized preemption legislation would be passed so quickly. This happened in July after the ballot question passed in February. And then in February 2020 the results of that lawsuit I mentioned came down and the federal judge ruled the legislation invalid. He called it unconstitutionally vague and exceeds the power of municipal government in Ohio. So the city of Toledo appealed this decision but they wound up dropping the appeal in May of 2020 citing budgetary constraints. There was a lot happening in the world in May of 2020 that could have also been a contributing factor. I should also add that I forgot to mention the proportion of voters who voted in favor of the bill of rights. It was 61 percent in favor 39 percent imposed in this election. It was actually only 9,955 votes in favor so it was a very small election and actually a relatively small number of voters who voted this legislation in. They were very determined and very organized. Okay so the Lake Erie bill of rights is kind of dead. The appeal is dropped. There is not much else that can happen here. Let's look at the aftermath. So on the plus side the episode did spur some government action. The governor rolled out an initiative called H2 Ohio. The legislature set the goal of reducing runoff by 40 percent by 2025 which is not insignificant and they also appropriated 172 million dollars for the first two years. However this is still a voluntary and incentive-based approach to reducing agricultural runoff. It's only focused on road crops and not on animal agriculture but it does give farmers between $2 and $60 per acre for conservation practices like planting buffer strips, preserving wetlands that can serve to filter out the water, etc. I should also add that these incentives mirror existing federal incentives and farmers were not able to kind of double up on money from both the federal and the state. It's also actually less money than a previous governor appropriated to clean up Lake Erie so it's not quite as huge as I think some of the folks playing claiming victory would would like us to believe. On the other hand it is some money and the farm groups including the Ohio Farm Bureau did kind of get together and start meeting and talking about reducing runoff because I think the Lake Erie bill of rights began to spur them into action so I don't think we've heard the last of it out of Toledo. I wanted to end on this part on a quote from an advocate there. She said the ag industry is still focused on growth. There are no rules saying no more permits for CAFOs in the area so I think some of the lee board Lake Erie bill of rights proponents would really have liked to have seen a CAFO moratorium or more stringent rules on how close to the watershed these farms can spray or build and that did not make it into H2 Ohio as far as I'm aware. All right moving on to the state of Iowa so Iowa as you probably know is a major major ag state mostly hogs also chickens or male is located there and nitrogen runoff has become an increasing concern in Iowa. The the runoff from the farms has begun to cause problems in the drinking water so we are going to look at the public utilities approach to limiting the pollution from upstream farms. So the rivers and questions are the Raccoon and the Des Moines River upstream and groundwater tests in 2013 and 2014 this last day was about in 2015. Some of them were up to four times the EPA's recommended maximum contaminant level. Des Moines Water Works, the public water utility said that they had spent more than $900,000 during periods where high nature levels meant that they had to run machinery that could remove nitrates. They also said that they would have to spend $76 million or more on denitrification technology in the future. Now I did look at 2020 numbers and they ultimately spent about $18 million so the numbers were not nearly as high as they had worried but there may be a more more expensive solutions on the horizon which I will talk about in a minute. Okay so the board of supervisors for the Des Moines Water Works again the public utility voted unanimously to file this clean water act complaint. The complaint was against three county boards of supervisors which were collectively responsible for 10 drayton inch districts alleging a clean water act violation and again these were the counties where the water works had measured the water and the nitrates were four times the maximum allowable amount so they said you know they had a pretty good idea that this is where the bulk of the pollution was coming from. Now you might remember I was talking about point and non point sources of pollution what Detroit Des Moines Water Works wanted to do was name those drainage districts as point sources and their rationale was that you know the the water filters from pipe to pipe and it comes out of one pipe and therefore it is a point source. I thought that was a little bit of an interesting argument and here's the exact quote because drainage districts transport nitrate pollution through a system of channels and pipes they should be recognized and held accountable like every other point source contributor that's an FAQ that they put out to their constituents or the drinking the drinking water users of Des Moines Iowa in 2015 and then just to bring it back to Algal Blooms one more time not long after about 18 months later they did detect blue green algae in one of their water sources again so it's not just the nutrients pollution that is a problem it is also the concern about the formation of algae and we looked at storm lake that has certainly become front of mind in the last week or two that ended up being an isolated incident and they were able to switch from one river to another just for a few days we will talk in a minute about what has happened to the quality of water since then okay so the case was dismissed two years later the federal court said that the drainage districts lack the ability to redress the injury the point source issue is not something that they weighed in on Des Moines water work decided not to appeal the anecdotally I think there was a whole lot of political backlash for this lawsuit there was an agricultural center at called the Leopold Center at Iowa State that was defunded a little bit after the suit drew to a close there was never any clear connection made but I spoke with leaders of the center which was a very progressive sustainable agriculture center at the time who said they suspected there was a connection between the lawsuit and the defunding of their organization I also did some reporting where I spoke to someone who had testified a state university employee who had testified on behalf of the plaintiff and seen his position eliminated only to be reinstated reinstated after the suit was thrown out okay so Des Moines water work did not appeal and today we have a problem that's actually gotten worse you see this AP headline from earlier this month Des Moines faces extreme measures to find clean water what they're actually considering doing is drilling wells which is quite uncommon for for a city to have to do especially one adjacent to as much water as Des Moines but basically they are considering drilling wells to have a source of clean water during the summer when nutrient runoff is a such a major problem again it's kind of an astounding consideration I'm not sure how much it would cost or whether they will actually do it but that was a data point account interesting there's one more interesting data point environmental group also earlier this month was saying that Iowa's current waterway cleanup plan could take 22 000 years to put into action I had a look at that report a progress report between 1992 1996 and 2006 to 2010 and it showed very very little progress made to reduce to reduce nutrient pollution in waterways the legislature in Iowa continues to to favor a voluntary approach to runoff regulation great so a couple of summary thoughts water pollution from CAFOS both through leaks which we didn't talk about much and through farm runoff which we know is not regulated under the clean clean water act continue to contribute to the formation of harmful algal blooms as well as other negative environmental and human health impacts so far these two efforts find alternate ways of forcing the federal government or finding other ways to regulate ag runoff have not been successful and lastly I wanted to end on a few farming practices that do seem to work again they are not to be all an end all by any means but some of them are very simple planting buffer strips between places where fertilizer is sprayed and waterways putting cover crops onto soil to reduce all runoff and erosion scheduling fertilizer application to avoid times of rain or times when the ground is frozen maintaining wetlands and many of these practices are already incentivized under existing federal programs but again just like some of the state programs those are currently all volunteer in all incentive space so that is all I have to say about animal ag and algal blooms this is one last picture of a red tide and I will take questions thank you so much Claire that was a really striking and beautiful but disturbing photograph at the end there so for our listeners we have a few minutes to ask questions from the audience and if you if you post your question I will I will pose it to Claire and if you want to do that if you're watching on our website live stream just click on the icon at the bottom of the video to bring up the chat box where you can log in and add your question or if you're watching on Facebook live stream just add your question in the comment box below okay we have a couple questions to start what are resources for regular citizens to find out if an algae bloom is toxic so I think local authorities test quite frequently I was at Lake Champlain earlier this week and there were signs posted everywhere about the frequency with which they test the water I think there do exist some testing kits that you can use as well I know a lot of the activism in Toledo was around individualized citizen testing when they were trying to maintain some energy around the issue after that 2014 algal bloom so there are testing kits you know a lot of people have also seemed to succeed in convincing their city or convincing volunteer organizations to test on a schedule in the summer I think those tests are pretty reliable okay great thank you next question in the examples you gave including Toledo and Des Moines actions seem to focus on remediating the algae bloom pollution have you come across any examples of towns or cities taking up preventative measure against this pollution yeah you know I think because of the it's it's it's specific to kind of the geography of the place right when it's when you are regulating an upstream farm I think that's when you have to take the kind of action that I outlined here but I do know you know Lake Erie was very very in really tough place I want to say 30 or 40 years ago just because of runoff from the city of Toledo and so they spent a lot of money to treat their water and to make sure that the the runoff from the sewers was filtered a little bit better and that did a lot I'm not sure if that answers your question great thank you in the example you gave about Ohio why was it that the the legislation applied only to row crops and not to animals do you think yeah so I should be clear that was an initiative it's not binding legislation I think it's because it's an incentive space and they were seeing row crops as the main source of runoff again you know leaks I think are less of a concern in Ohio so I think the idea was if they pay the farmers who are spreading the manure to prevent the runoff then you know that will have a greater impact than key foes who I think you know in many cases are not directly discharging into the water except in a case of emergency so you know I think advocates in many many places would like to see KFO moratoria simply so that less manure is produced and ends up on land in their area but so far I think efforts to incentivize change has focused on row crop cover farmers because that's where a lot of the runoff comes from okay one of the challenges with regulating water pollution from agriculture is that it's not it's not so clearly a point source as compared to effluent from a pipe coming out of a you know a water treatment plant or something like that and so it can be difficult to address those pollution issues and tie them to a specific farm or or portion of a farm have you in your research come across examples of collaborative efforts regional efforts county efforts to address algae pollution from animal ag as opposed to you know one municipality at a time I would be very interested to learn more about efforts like that I think at the federal level there's a lot of interest in making you know the the very simple you know buffer strips wetland conservation mandatory instead of optional that's been kind of the biggest idea you know make it less about measuring what's running off and more about preventing runoff in the first place but I would be very curious to learn more about successful efforts by you know regions watersheds in particular coming together have you noticed any themes in the the locations that you've observed where you've noticed that they've been more or less successful in being able to regulate this runoff are there are there any anything you've noticed that kind of shows continuity across locations about why they may or may not be able to address this problem yeah you know I think state laws and state regulating authorities have a lot of power they are in charge of both the permitting process and in the enforcement of the permits and so states that have you know really strong permit requirements and really follow up on it I think are able to better prevent some of the runoff we're looking at in many cases the advocacy concerns are as simple as people simply are not following the rules about not spring nor when the ground is frozen so I think you know some of that is ecological right in North Carolina the ground isn't frozen all that often but some of that is also you know the strength of the local regulators great and maybe last question you know you're talking to an audience of many lawyers and law students and we kind of have our own methods of collecting information when we want to build a case around something like water pollution you know the clean water act has citizen suit provisions and so sometimes people other than the government are involved in trying to enforce water pollution as a journalist how do you go about gathering information on something like this and how might it do you think be different from the way lawyers go about it if you have a sense yeah and so FOIA is great for you know figuring out what kinds of backdoor meetings or or invisible factors might be at play right so that story we did with the intercept about the Chamber of Commerce trying to block the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in a way that was you know invisible to advocates I think is probably a prime example to be totally frank we get a lot of help from these independent monitoring groups like Waterkeeper and North Carolina you know they'll reach out after a hurricane and say you know publish these photos of the breach that we have just taken from our helicopter and so that I'm in New York I can't be everywhere at once especially now and so we do get a lot of help from environmental groups who are doing kind of their own independent monitoring their homes citizen advocacy do you ever this is just me because I'm curious you know you hear sometimes about from an NGO saying that that they sometimes will get a tip from someone on the inside at an agency that something that something is not being enforced the way it should and you know you didn't hear it from me kind of thing is that ever something that you've experienced in this area I think I've actually probably only published like two or three pieces on Alba Bloom specifically but it is something that you know we have an anonymous tip like we love tips you know we can often bet them and sometimes they really do play out in a really interesting way so you know just as a sometimes it's as simple as saying you know look at this municipality when you're thinking about this rule and that's something that we really appreciate from our readers that's great okay well we've got it we've got to wrap up so that our students can transition to their their next class thank you Claire for that really interesting presentation and discussion and thank you to everybody who joined us today our next hot topic talk will be on July 27th at noon eastern time right here and we hope that you'll join us then thank you everybody thank you