Piedmont environmental council

Stop and smell the roses: COVID has changed the way we’re relating to nature

Just about everything has changed in the last month—and as our habits have shifted, so has our relationship with the local environment.

“People aren’t flying, people aren’t driving,” says Jamie Brunkow, the senior advocacy manager of the James River Association. Those transportation changes have effects for our air and our water. “Typically we think of that as less smog and less air pollution. But a lot of the nitrogen that ends up going into our rivers, going into the [Chesapeake] Bay, comes from the air.”

StreetLight Data, a firm specializing in transportation data, has been tracking the change in vehicle miles traveled all over the country since the COVID crisis began.

From the week of April 19 to April 25, Albemarle County drivers covered around 75 percent fewer miles than during an average week before the crisis. Charlottesville drivers were even more conservative, covering 82 percent fewer miles than in a baseline week. That drop-off is less pronounced but still visible in more rural counties—in Buckingham, for example, drivers only drove 40 percent fewer miles.

Charlottesville’s airport saw 84 flights canceled due to coronavirus in just the second half of March. Air travel has become a central concern for environmental activists—one widely repeated statistic says for every person who takes a round trip flight from New York to London, 30 square feet of ice is lost from the arctic. And short flights, like the Charlottesville airport’s regular connections to nearby hubs in Philadelphia and Charlotte, produce more harmful emissions per mile than longer flights.

Additionally, decreased traffic means the world is quieter and darker, which is good for animals like birds and frogs. “A lot of disruption in species reproduction has been attributed to the disruption of their light receptors or ability to hear calls for mating,” says Chris Miller, the president of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “There’s a lot of evidence that truck noise, car noise, and light pollution interfere with those natural cycles.”

Meanwhile, with social distancing in effect, outdoor spaces that remain accessible are seeing increased visitors. This March, the trail near the John Warner Parkway saw 607 bikers and pedestrians per day, according to the City’s trail counter. That’s roughly four times more than the 130 people who used the trail per day in March of 2019.

Lisa Wittenborn, program director of the Rivanna Conservation Alliance, says that the increased foot traffic is a double-edged sword for the Rivanna. “We’re really excited that people are out and using the resource,” Wittenborn says. “We hope people are being careful not to impact the river. That people are picking up after their dogs, and picking up their trash and not disrupting the banks, and that sort of thing.”

The crisis is having other messy effects. “They’re seeing evidence of the toilet paper shortage in the wastewater treatment plant,” Wittenborn says, “because of the things people are flushing. Those wipes say they’re flushable but they’re not. They can cause clogs and backups and sewage leaks. You don’t think about the little impacts.”

Overall, though, this period is a sort of experiment in a possible, more sustainable future: Zoom meetings aren’t fun, but they do decrease emissions. “There’s something about a hard stop like this that really forces you to reevaluate the frame and how to move forward,” Brunkow says. “It’s going to be really interesting to look back at these unintended consequences to see where things change.”

Maybe those changes will manifest as subtle attitude shifts. “I do think that this whole experience has brought to the forefront the importance of having these wild or semi-wild open spaces that we can all enjoy together,” Wittenborn says. “It’s gotten a lot of people to stop and really pay attention to what’s going on outside their windows. Seeing flowers bloom they’ve never noticed before, watching birds, whatever it is. I think people are much more in tune with the natural world right now. Because we’ve slowed down, and we have a chance to just observe.”

Clean up your act: Local environmental groups sound off on Trump’s Clean Water Act rollback

Keeping our waterways swimmable, fishable, and drinkable seems like an uncontroversial goal—but the Trump administration apparently disagrees. Since assuming control, the administration has made a series of efforts to weaken long-standing protections for America’s waterways. Local environmental groups have grave concerns about the potential effects of these suggested laws in Virginia and across the country.

The Clean Water Act prevents people, farms, and factories from dumping waste into water and using chemicals that could lead to harmful runoff. The most recent piece of Trump legislation, announced in late January, would redefine which types of waterways are protected by the act.

“These rules will reduce the scope of Clean Water Act protection in an unprecedented way, in terms of putting hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands in Virginia at risk,” says Jamie Brunkow, senior advocacy manager at the James River Association.

“There are industrial and other interests that stand to profit by a narrower scope of Clean Water Act protections,” says Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Jonathan Gendzier. “That includes big industrial agriculture, homebuilders, and other polluting industries.”

Trump’s rules “reflect a simplistic notion that we should only be regulating navigable waters,” says Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council.

Confining the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction to “navigable waters” means leaving out smaller tributaries that feed in to larger waterways. Vernal pools, intermittent streams, prairie potholes, and other seasonal but critical water features could lose protection. Since all of these waterways are interconnected, pollution anywhere means pollution everywhere. “All the little ravines that have rocks in them and no water until it rains, if you’re allowed to dump whatever you want in there, the second it rains all that is going to come into your streams,” says Bryan Hofmann, deputy director of Friends of the Rappahannock.

The Clean Water Act was initially passed by the Nixon administration, with bipartisan support, in 1972. It’s widely considered an environmental success story, and has directly resulted in improvement of water quality in places like the James River, says Brunkow.

“It’s hard to imagine, but we didn’t have any rules in place that prevented you from directly putting sewage into waterways,” Brunkow says. “The James in Richmond was largely considered an open sewer prior to the Clean Water Act.”

This rollback is bad news for people and animals alike. Brook trout, endangered Shenandoah salamanders, oysters, otters, blue crabs, bald eagles and even dolphins all rely on the Rappahannock system, says Hofmann, and any pollution wreaks havoc on those fragile systems. Meanwhile, “In Charlottesville, most of the public drinking supply comes from surface water, which runs off the land,” Miller says.

Repealing the federal rules means more responsibility falls to states. Virginia has decent protections in place, compared to neighboring states like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, says Hofmann, but the rollback means fewer staff and a decreased budget.

The rule change “puts an additional strain on our state agencies,” Brunkow says. “It’s really a devastating blow to have lost that national standard.”

The Southern Environmental Law Center has been fighting against Trump water deregulation since the administration took office, says Gendzier. They plan to challenge this new rule as well, and anticipate a months-long legal battle.

“Having a big power plant go through and discharge whatever they want into the water, farms having their cattle sitting there all day long and defecating into the stream—” Hofmann says, “The Clean Water Act prevents those huge bad things from happening.”