The fairytale suburb where I live--Dublin, Ohio--has adopted the slogan "It's Greener in Dublin." Now when the city mentions Green, they don't mean it in the environmentally friendly sense. One of the reasons it's greener is we use a lot of fertilizer and weed-killers. Located on the banks of the Scioto River (pronounced sigh-OH-ta) upstream from Columbus, all of that fertilizer has to go somewhere right? As they say, s*%t flows downstream:
Some suburban and West Side parents are being advised to not give their infants tap water to drink.
Water in Griggs Reservoir was found yesterday to have unsafe nitrate levels, Columbus officials announced last night at Columbus City Council.
But all is not lost--economics may be able to save the Scioto.
Less than a year after funds became available for a program aimed at protecting Scioto River floodplain, more than 42,000 acres have been enrolled by farmers who are turning cropland into floodplain forest, grassland, and wetlands.
That’s way ahead of the expected enrollment rate for the Scioto Watershed Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP). The program managers had expected to enroll about 7,000 acres a year, taking 10 years to reach the goal of 70,000 protected acres. But landowners jumped at the opportunity to receive annual payments in exchange for a commitment to maintain conservation practices in the floodplain for 15 years.
The quick response to the program means the anticipated benefits of the Scioto CREP will come even faster to the Scioto watershed: less topsoil lost to flooding, less sediment and fewer farm chemicals in the stream, cleaner water for the many cities and towns that line the Scioto, less chance of downstream flooding, and better health for the aquatic animals – including 33 threatened or endangered fish and freshwater mussel species – that make the Scioto watershed the most biologically rich river system in Ohio.
Gee, do we really have to pay people to be environmentally responsible? I don't know that we HAVE to, but it sure works a lot better than begging.
