The Flow Of The River

Flowing to Greenversations

As of Earth Day 2008, I've stopped posting in “Flow of the River” to join Greenversations, the new agency-wide blog.  Please join the conversation over there.

My Favorite Bird

By Marcus Peacock, Deputy Administrator.

I prefer some birds to others. I like the Black-capped Chickadee for example. They’re attractive, gregarious, and hardy enough to withstand a Minnesota winter. English Sparrows, on the other hand ... here we have an invasive species who bullies poor wrens and is only slightly less successful at depositing droppings on my car than the only slightly less revolting Starling.

My favorite bird is the Lesser Scaup (rhymes with “stop”). They are not particularly large or unusually beautiful (see picture) and I only see them once a year when they are blowing through Washington DC on their way to Canada. (I have yet to catch them on the return.) But that’s why I like them. They are my harbinger of spring.

Lesser Scaups - Credit: Fish and Wildlife Service

This year I spotted a pair of Lesser Scaups on February 23. That’s within a week of when I saw one last year and the year before that. I could see my breath that morning. It felt like January, but there they were, oblivious to the temperature.

I like winter, but nothing can compare to the riot of spring in Washington DC. Within two weeks of a Scaup’s fleeting visit the daffodils emerge and not long after that all hell breaks loose: cherry blossoms, Virginia Bluebells, flox, vinca, dogwoods, tulips. Of course the flowers coincide with returning armadas of birds that overwhelm the tired survivors of winter. Red-winged Blackbirds quickly raise a racket in the cattails and you can’t walk a residential block without getting pinged by a full-throated Cardinal.

But when the Scaups show up, that’s all in the future. The marsh lies silent. It’s all a promise to be fulfilled. It’s all potential.

This blog started last summer as an experiment run on a shoe-string. That experiment was a success. Fittingly, today, on Earth Day, EPA becomes only the second federal agency to open up an Agency-wide public blog. It’s called “Greenversations.” Unlike Flow of the River, Greenversations will cover everything we do. It will be home to a flock of EPA bloggers (including me). You’ll hear from permit writers and scientists and lawyers and everything in between. It will create multiple ongoing avenues of communication. It’ll be a riot.

This morning I saw a petal drop from a tulip stem. Can the heat of summer be far off? There is plenty of spring left, but nothing compares to the anticipation introduced by a small and scruffy Lesser Scaup: the herald of unlimited potential.

Being Prepared

Mary Kemp is currently the Homeland Security Coordinator in the Dallas, TX regional office. Mary started at EPA in 1985 and has worked in the asbestos, superfund, and air programs.

This past weekend my son received his Eagle Scout award from the Boy Scouts of America. He received this award with four other scouts, most of which he has been in scouting with since he was a tiger scout. As a parent, it's truly an honor to see your son receive scouting’s highest award. Each of the five Eagle Scouts remarked on the positive experiences they received from scouting and how scouting had changed their lives.

The Boy Scouts of America’s motto is “Be Prepared.” I reflect on how EPA has become more prepared since September 11, 2001. Prior to 9-11, we understood that it had a role through the Federal Response Plan to conduct hazardous material collections. The training for this role occurred primarily through our Superfund Removal/Emergency Response program. After 9-11, it became apparent that during a major disaster potentially all programs within EPA will be required to respond. During an emergency or crisis, the citizens of the United States want to know how clean their air, water, and land in addition to clean-up of hazardous materials. These determinations affect the health of their families and sometimes must be answered before people can rebuild their lives.

EPA has made monumental efforts within the Superfund program to improve response capabilities and train staff on disaster response protocols. The Water program has been actively working with water utilities. Internally, EPA has been conducting tabletop exercises to further work with staffs on discussing “what-if” scenarios. EPA created an Office of Homeland Security to further aid in the coordination efforts between the various Offices within EPA and other federal agencies. EPA has also been conducting research into areas of decontamination, water, risk, and response.

Like the Boy Scouts of America, we at EPA want to be more prepared.

The Challenge of Earth Day

About the author: Karen Reshkin manages the Chicago regional Web site and is editing the Earth Day Challenge blog.

Earth Day comes with lots of flurry
Do great things and in a hurry

Every waking hour is reckoned
As “How long till the twenty-second?”

Earth Day comes with expectations
Big events and presentations

“But what if this year,” someone said,
“We did a better thing instead?”

Old TVs and old prescriptions
Give the Great Lakes great conniptions.

Spare our lakes and our landfills
A million pounds*, a million pills!

Don’t throw out that old computer
Do a thing that’s far astuter…

Medications in the water
That’s a thing you hadn’t oughter

Pharma waste can harm the fauna
This Earth Week we hope you’re gonna

Find an e-waste drive near you.
Some are taking old meds, too!

Our Great Lakes are worth protecting!
Let’s get out and start collecting!

* of electronic waste (e-waste)

Thanks to the inspiration of EPA Region 5 Administrator Mary A. Gade and the efforts of the Earth Day Challenge workgroup, more than 100 events have joined the 2008 Great Lakes Earth Day Challenge. Our goal is to collect, all around the Great Lakes Basin, 1 million pills of outdated or unwanted medicine, and 1 million pounds of e-waste. You can learn more at the Earth Day Challenge web site and its companion blog. Even if you don’t live near the Great Lakes, I hope you’ll do your part this Earth Day and recycle something you might otherwise throw away.

Bucket Brigade

About the author: Donald Welsh is EPA's Region 3 Administrator in Philadelphia.

The best measures of environmental results, most agree, are the ones that gauge things happening outside our offices, like pounds of pollution that do or don’t enter the air and water, or contaminated sites that do or don’t get cleaned up, or asthma attacks that do or don’t happen – rather than inside our offices, like the number of permits written, plans approved or grants awarded.

It’s a lot easier tallying the “inside” measures, but they don’t give us a true indication of how well we’re doing to identify and fix the environmental problems that have the greatest impact on the people in our Region.

At Region 3 in Philadelphia, we think we’ve found one way to take a better look at the things that really matter. We’re breaking out of the traditional program “silos” that can stifle imagination and collaboration, and learning to use our collective talents and resources to take on the toughest tasks.

Think of it as a bucket brigade.

These buckets represent specific environmental problems we need to solve, or opportunities we want to seize to accelerate environmental improvement.

We’re using some cool new tools like logic models and the mysterious sounding Multi-criteria Integrated Risk Assessment system to evaluate environmental indicators and program efficiency measures, and to factor in the professional judgment of our people, to identify the best opportunities and most important challenges in the region.

We then visit each of the program silos to collect the most appropriate and effective resources to put in each bucket.

Looking across the silos in this way has taught us some surprising lessons, for instance:

• The Resource Conservation Challenge, a program aimed primarily at better materials management, is one of our strongest tools for fighting global warming.
• The Superfund site clean-up program has an important role to play in protecting indoor air quality.
• The wetlands regulatory program can help restore oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay.

You can learn more about how we are using these tools by visiting Region 3's Website.

What we’ve learned so far is that sometimes you can carry more in a bucket than you can hold in a silo.

Collaborations to Inspire Dreaming Big

About the author: Pat Bonner has been working in public involvement from local to international scales since 1971. Her most fun projects with EPA were web based dialogues and what she’s doing now, launching collaboration training across the Agency.

Recently, I experienced a very positive reality check while coordinating EPA’s input to the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) 2007 Annual Report on Cooperative Conservation. 

Pulling together what became the Collaboration and Partnership collection reminded me why people want to work at EPA.  Yes, we want to use what we know to prevent and stop pollution and to protect public health.  Idealism may attract us, but having the chance to see ideas become actions keeps us here generating creative ways to improve environmental results by working with others to solve real problems.

That’s what’s happening in Greensburg, KS where EPA staff members are helping a community to plan and rebuild itself “greener” after an EF-5 tornado (1.7 miles wide, packing 205 mph winds) leveled their town on May 4, 2007.  The goal is to build the greenest city in Kansas and in less than a year people are working together to implement an adopted plan to do just that.

It’s the inspiration that comes from seeing ReGenesis, Inc. of Spartanburg, SC, grow a $20,000 environmental justice grant into the ReGenesis Environmental Justice Partnership that has obtained over $179 million through community driven public/private partnerships. ReGenesis now serves as a national model featured in a documentary film produced by EPA to help similar communities.  It’s the story of how Harold Mitchell’s dream for an environmentally safe and economically viable place to call home became the dream of a community and then a region.  EPA staff has been helping Harold and his community for over 12 years.  Their success has led to legislation initiated by now State Representative Harold Mitchell to make a similar difference in other parts of South Carolina.

There are 109 more examples in the collection.  Here are just a few more good ideas that have been put into actions with or by EPA’s partners: using green infrastructure to reduce stormwater runoff; cleaning out the chemicals used in K-12 schools; enlisting faith-based groups in stewardship (Earthkeepers) actions and partnering with car manufacturers, recyclers and others to reduce pollution from mercury switches.

Looking for inspiration for your own ideas?

Just Breathe

About the author: Jeffrey Levy joined EPA in 1993 to help protect the ozone layer. He is the National Web Content Manager.

I've been doing things outdoors most of my life: hiking, rockclimbing, etc.  For the past 15 years or so, I've also been playing Ultimate Frisbee, which is sort of like soccer mixed with football and basketball.  The upshot is you run.  A lot.  It's usually a race between my lungs and legs to see which will run out of juice first.

A few years ago, I found out I should be more worried about my lungs, especially since I have mild asthma (I don't wheeze so much as cough).  Running a lot can be a real problem when the air quality is bad: a lot of ozone in the air can irritate my lungs and leave me out of breath.  Note this is ozone down near the ground; the stuff up in the stratosphere protects us from the sun's ultraviolet rays

We can help you figure out when it's better to stay home with the Air Quality Index.  This handy site gives you a color-coded, clickable national map with info for many communities.  For example, the AQI is provided for "Northern Virginia," which means the DC suburbs where I live.

Try out the AQI and see if it works for you.  If it doesn't, I'm sure the folks running it would like to hear your ideas for improvement.

P.S. While you're on the Web, take a look at our Earth Day offerings.  We've got podcasts, a "widget" that lets you put a daily environmental tip on your own site, and more.