Death in the Marsh

By Tom Harris

Selenium, essential in microscopic doses, can be deadly in larger amounts. Death in the Marsh explains how federal irrigation projects have altered selenium's circulation in the environment, allowing it to accumulate in marshes, killing ecosystems and wildlife, and causing deformities in some animals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610912587

Tom Harris

Tom Harris has spent two decades in the animal liberation movement and is a former coordinator of SHAC. He received a five-year prison sentence during the attempted 'elimination' of the anti-vivisection movement and is a named victim in the Miscarriages of Justice category of the Government's Undercover Policing Inquiry.

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Preface

Every reporter dreams of being at the very edge of some riveting new issue, there at the very beginning to discover, interpret, and record a cascade of events so fresh and startling, so important and unique, that they become a watershed to an emerging national crisis and, hopefully, correction. We fantasize not just about writing the first, exclusive accounts but of riding the crest of the subsequent wave of events to their conclusion.

We don’t go around looking for telephone booths in which to change from Clark Kent look-alikes into caped crusaders. But most of us do prefer exposing problems that provoke urgent meetings rather than covering the meetings themselves. That kind of investigative journalism usually involves skulking around hallways and dark corners, lubricating sources in coffee houses or bars, obtaining revealing memos and incriminating documents. For nearly a quarter of a century, my skulkings have more often than not taken me to some fairly glorious surroundings: primeval redwood parks, rugged coastlines, wild rivers, and raucous marshes. As a full-time environment writer for two aggressive regional newspapers in California in that time, I have had the kind of job most newsroom junkies dream about. To be sure, there were meetings and workshops and press conferences and sometimes the great outdoors was a sewer plant, hazardous dump site, or oil spill. But tracing the evolution of modern-day environmental concerns over parts of four decades has had more than its share of rewards.

One of those, the preeminent one of those, has been tracking down a silent killer: selenium, a unique, if not bizarre, natural soil element that now is laying waste to birds and fish and crickets and frogs in dozens of western marshes. I was not the first, or even second, reporter to uncover its lethal impact on Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, in the prolific farm fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Deborah Blum, then with the Fresno Bee, and Lloyd Carter, then with United Press International wire service, can claim that distinction. But a transfer in 1984 to the Sacramento Bee, the flagship of McClatchy Newspapers, put me closer to the Kesterson scene and to the remarkable U.S. Fish and Wildlife researchers and biologists charting selenium’s grisly toll there.

My first brush with this lethal trace element was not the stuff of high drama. After my speech to a group of aspiring environmental journalists at the University of California, in Berkeley, a Sacramento-based reporter asked if I had heard about something called selenium and some bird deaths at a place called Kesterson. I had not. And it bothered me enough that when I got back to my San Jose office, I asked the paper’s library staff to do a story search on the subject. That prompted my first bit of selenium research.

How do you spell it? the library assistant asked. Hmmm, good question, I thought. Just a minute. Let me look it up in the dictionary and I’ll get right back to you. But I didn’t get right back. For even the spelling of this element presented a major challenge.

Well, I thought, there would be time enough later for all the hows and whys and so forth. Now, I could at least spell it for the librarian and see what happens from there. And a lot did happen after that. Not immediately. It took a dozen phone calls, or so, to track down whose refuge it was, state or federal, and who had been doing research there. There were more blanks than live rounds, but, finally, I wound up talking to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research biologist Harry Ohlendorf.

And the start of what would be an eight-year-long search and research process with this natural element came over the phone line, into my computer, and onto the pages of my paper then, the San Jose Mercury, complete with a strip of full-color photos of the most gruesomely misshapen hatchlings you could imagine.

What follows in these pages is a roughly chronological summation of how it felt to be carried along on the very crest of discovery, swept from revelation to chilling revelation by the principal researchers. Others have likened this effort to tell the story of the Kesterson effect through the central characters involved to a mystery . . . an environmental murder mystery, in the marsh. Murder is, perhaps, too strong a word, for it implies knowing, willful, merciless calculation. What happened at Kesterson, and at dozens of other places just like it in nearly every state west of the 100th meridian, a line running due south from about the middle of North Dakota, was terrible and unfortunate and a lot of other things. But it wasn’t purposeful. At best, it was a cruel trick of nature. At worst, it was the predictable price of arrogance, greed, and tunnel bureaucractic vision.

What lifts this story above most others of its kind is the resolve of certain gutsy editors to go beyond hard-hitting investigative journalism, beyond the normal secondhand account of environmental tragedies, onto the frontline of discovery. The search for selenium was driven by the commitment, and integrity, of government employees and citizens who believed more in their mission and responsibility than in professional advancement.

While this is not a story about a story, little of what follows would have been possible without the courage and vision of the Sacramento Bee to do what the U.S. government was afraid to do. And while much of the focus is necessarily on marshes turned into silent graves, the book ranges much further afield—from the agonizing failures of mystified ranchers to the scarred careers of researchers who put service above self and committal to truth above fear of reprisal.

It was nearly sixty years ago that researchers first proved selenium was the toxic agent responsible for widespread livestock poisoning. Then it was tracked to specialized plants that could not grow without it but which were the source of agonizing illness and death to cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and even poultry. In the late 1950s, its role as an essential micronutrient to humans and certain animals was proved. Itwas not until June 1983, on an eerily still marsh in California’s midsection, that its impact on waterfowl and other aquatic marsh life was discovered by federal research biologists. Ironically, in those decades between recognition of selenium’s essentiality and its toxicity, it was widely promoted as the cure for everything from cancer and heart disease to sexual dysfunction and baldness. Even today, without any long-range study of its implications for public health, selenium pills are being ingested daily by millions of Americans. Selenium supplements are being added, without government supervision, to most of the nation’s beef and dairy cattle, swine, and poultry. And its fumes and particles are being belched from the country’s fossil-fuel-powered electrical generating plants and emitted as a by-product from the exhaust fumes of motor vehicles.

The element is so much like sulfur that it often slips into vital aminoacid formation processes in place of it, wreaking havoc instead of good health. Selenium is essential to healthy growth, but in amounts so tiny it would take a powerful microscope to see the proper dose. It becomes highly poisonous, five to ten times more potent than arsenic, in just tiny increments more. Experts who have studied the toxicity of heavy metals and trace elements say selenium has the narrowest range between safety and danger of any of them. Yet, selenium has a remarkably low environmental profile in this hazardous-waste-of-the-week society of ours. Selenium remains one of the least understood, least regulated, of all toxic elements . . . a persistent trend that only now is beginning to change.

Chapter 1

NIGHTMARE at KESTERSON

Barrel-chested Felix Smith pushed the canoe away from the reedy shoreline, settling into the stern seat with a grace that belied his bulk. The craft glided into the heart of the marsh as his slender paddler at the bow set the pace toward a fluttering, fluorescent patch in the cattails that ringed the far shore. Harry Ohlendorf paused to study the map across his knees, checking numbered squares against a chart of code names that looked more like an algebraic formula than a list of bird nest sites.

Smith was doing his own cross-checking as he drove the canoe along with steady, powerful strokes, noting discrepancies almost subconsciously. His mind was on automatic now, whirring through one well-ordered bank of memory after another, sorting, characterizing, evaluating each new incoming observation. Things were falling into place quickly in that well-ordered world, however seemingly disconnected the input. Each bug and each wing stroke, every noise and pattern, was subliminally recorded for comparison with the master tape from a lifetime of such experiences.

The harmony between remembered and observed experience was the magnet that kept pulling the burly biologist back to places like this, a recognition that here, at least, nature was resisting society’s frantic pace of change. There was something peacefully reassuring about a place where patterns, colors, and sounds did not change at the whim of man: something pure and dependable. It was enough just to feel a resonance with the thrum of the wind through the wall of cattails, to be stirred by the staccato chatter of thousands of feeding ducks and the metallic honking of big northern geese.

But something was out of tune today: some small dissonance in the rhythm of the place, some tiny glitch that disturbed the natural order of things. It had been like that since the two men had raced daybreak to the marsh to watch the creeping warmth of the sun gently uncover its fog-shrouded beauty, a wake-up call for the refuge’s slumbering residents.

This makes it all worthwhile, Smith had murmured, afraid that even a whisper would be an unwarranted intrusion. Nothing compares to a marsh at daybreak.

Their early arrival had as much to do with pragmatism as with the poetry of nature. Even as early in the year as June, California’s great Central Valley can feel like an oven by noon. Most years, the flanking Sierra foothills and low-slung Coast Range are scorched a barren, straw-colored hue by early June.

But the magic of the marsh at dawn seemed subtly tarnished this day in 1983.

The dusty road from the office of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge to the backside of the marsh had been just too virgin. It is one thing to put the first footprints of the day onto any trail. It can be curiously disquieting to feel like they are the first in time. The soft earth that framed the gravelled levee road should have been an intricate, lined tapestry from the daily traffic of marsh inhabitants. The tiny, matched chevrons of valley quail, the wavering trails of snakes, and the hippity gait of bush bunnies should all have been recorded there. So, too, should the telltale tracks of herons, egrets, and dozens of other creatures, great and small.

But they weren’t.

The launching of the canoe should have been accompanied by a chorus of complaining blackbirds, bullfrogs, crickets, and other common marsh residents. It wasn’t.

It should have sent streams of ducks and coots rocketing out of the cattails, flapping furiously to get airborne. It didn’t.

The discrepancies began to mount.

Biologists don’t like things out of place and they don’t like mysteries, especially not in naturally harmonious if somewhat raucous places like marshes.

Man, the silence around here is deafening, Smith boomed, his deep bass voice an exclamation point to the eerie stillness. He was not one to suffer in silence.

Ohlendorf, a reserved counterpoint to the gregarious Smith, looked up from his charts and swiveled around. Yeah, it does give you a funny feeling, he countered before bending back to his maps and his work. He had his own demons to wrestle and they were every bit as real as Smith’s perceptions.

He and other wildlife agency biologists were growing increasingly concerned about the experiment. As the $3.5 billion complex of the Central Valley Project and the $2.5 billion State Water Project’s dams and canals siphoned more water from the valley’s seven major rivers for thirsty farmlands, the rich, meandering wetlands there grew drier . . . and smaller. Riverbeds once laced with oxbows and sloughs framed by dense riparian forests are now bermed and cemented into sterile, man-made aqueducts; adjacent marshes have been obliterated.

Before the bureaucratic plumbers moved in, there were more than 4 million acres of such habitat along the 400-mile-plus valley trough formed by its two main sculptors, the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Vast pockets of freshwater marsh once dotted the valley from Bakersfield, in the south, nearly all the way to Redding in the north. Framed by canopies of broadleaf oak, cottonwood, and other deciduous trees, the thirteen main tributaries to those major arteries carry moisture and nutrients down from the great Sierra Nevada, bookended by the 14,000-foot-plus peaks of Mt. Shasta, on the north, and Mt. Whitney to the south. Together, the vast mosaic of wetlands once harbored so many ducks, geese, swans, and cranes—an estimated 15 million migratory waterfowl in all—that their arrivals and departures darkened the skies. Today, the birds number fewer than 3 million and barely 150,000 acres of that waterfowl haven remain. The water that once nourished widgeon grass, cattails, and wild rice now sustains row-crops, cotton fields, rice paddies, and orchards. The Central Valley, though dramatically degraded from its historic condition, continues to support 60 percent of the waterfowl that use the Pacific Flyway, one of the nation’s three major migrational corridors.

The rectangular, mirrored surface of the man-made ponds across which the two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists cruised came from subsurface field drainage from 8,000 acres of northwestern Fresno County farmland,¹ more than 30 miles away. Ohlendorf and Smith had seen the dull, concrete sumps in the lowest corners of the fields on earlier trips through the valley and they knew all about the drainage ditches that carried the surplus irrigation seepage away from the fields to the concrete drainage canal. What they couldn’t see, but knew about all too well, were the buried, perforated pipes 10 feet below the lush crops. More water was applied to the fields than the crops could use or that could percolate down through the San Joaquin Valley’s underground layer of hardpan clay. But for the subsurface pipes that carried the excess seepage from the fields into the main San Luis Drain, and thence to Kesterson, the root zone of crops would be completely saturated and the plants drowned.

Laced with dissolved salts and minerals, the tainted drainage was a lethal brew. Too saline to leave in the fields, it was being dumped into Kesterson as part of an experiment to convert pollution into providence. Ultimately, federal plans were to extend the San Luis Drain 72 miles further north so that it discharged into the sprawling Sacramento—San Joaquin Delta, just upstream of San Francisco Bay. In 1983, Kesterson was simply the interim terminus for the 84-mile-long cement-lined drain, a place where the saline drainage could temporarily be managed by reducing its volume through evaporation and percolation through unlined pond bottoms. But before the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could complete the plumbing and discharge those flows to the delta, it needed a discharge permit from California’s State Water Resources Control Board. And that agency had ordered a full round of water quality testing to look for adverse biological impacts from agricultural drainwater.

The bureau managers argued there would be benefit to all and adverse impact to none by using the tainted but nutrient-laden drainage to supply water for depleted marshes. It was a policy being implemented not just in California but throughout the semiarid West. Most of the irrigated farmlands there are carved out of beds of ancient lakes and inland seas and their fine-grained, nutrient-rich, clay sediments are also laced with salts left over from evaporation. Flows from the buried drains became a brew that all parties would live to regret.

The day we agreed to take their drainage for our water was the day we made a bargain with the devil, said Smith of the federal Reclamation Bureau’s maneuver. Biologists and environmentalists feared the drainage would be contaminated with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. Only a year before Smith and Ohlendorf glided peacefully across one of those managed wetlands, they had learned that the drainage also had leached from the soil such poisonous natural elements as arsenic, boron, chromium, and something few had ever heard of: selenium, a sulfurlike element that is almost a metal but officially classed as a metalloid.

Substituting tainted drainwater for natural snowmelt and rain was instinctively repugnant to biologists who studied or managed wildlife in the valley and most of their colleagues. But it didn’t change the fact that the bureau and its farmer-clients needed a place to put the waste and possessed the clout to override all objections. Nor did it alter the need of the Fish and Wildlife Service to offset dwindling supplies of clean water for its national wildlife refuge marshes.

Kesterson was ground zero for that experiment²

Tabletop flat and sloping only a degree or two northward, the San Joaquin Valley forms the growing fields for nearly half the nation’s supply of fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables . . . and a good share of its cotton. Once covered with marshes and home to birds, grizzly bears, and tule elk, it now is checkerboarded with huge factory farms owned by rich corporations and smaller but still substantial family holdings.

Drainage from only a fraction of the 2 million-plus acres of farmland had been eddying slowly through the constructed ponds of Kesterson for only three years, waiting for the rest of the master drain to be linked to the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. The vast river systems mingle and spread into a fertile 750,000-acre crescent after draining opposite ends of a tublike valley so large that it would reach from Boston to Norfolk if it were on the eastern seaboard.

The rich estuarine waters of San Francisco Bay provide critical corridors to upstream spawning grounds for tens of thousands of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, striped bass, and shad. They remain a crucial nursery to what is left of the migratory offspring and the spawn of crabs, shrimp, and other ocean species that seek out the shallow, protected waters to reproduce. Like the waterfowl populations, the numbers of migratory fish have declined dramatically in the last three decades—in the receding wake, that is, of the giant water project diversions. Spawning runs have been wiped out altogether on some rivers and declined 50 to 95 percent on others. Key stretches of the north-flowing San Joaquin River have dried up, while the south-flowing Sacramento has been converted to the unnatural and persistently high flows of a huge aqueduct.

About 60 miles south of where these two great river systems converge, Kesterson is an artifice of rectangulation. Its twelve machine-gouged basins were designed to let drainwater percolate from the bottom and evaporate from the top until the San Luis Drain could be completed and the drainage dumped into the meandering river delta. It was a mechanism of waste disposal by design and a wildlife refuge only by coincidence.

When environmentalists finally succeeded in blocking the last leg of the drain to the delta in the mid-1970s, because of its excessive salinity, the reclamation agency was desperate for some place to put the farm wastes. To gain time for political maneuvering, the Interior Department—and Congress—authorized Kesterson as a temporary terminus for the drain. To mute environmentalist opposition, the evaporation ponds were called managed wetlands where the aim was to prove that not only nature can create symbiotic relationships. Agribusiness would take the clean, untapped river water in one pipe and discharge a reliable yield of nutrient-laden but saline drainwater to the marshes in another. It was an arrangement they optimistically hoped would be the best of both worlds.

Instead, for Ohlendorf, Smith, and many, many others, Kesterson became the birthplace of a bizarre odyssey.

The experiment to swap drainage for clean water, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s ultimate plan to discharge drainage directly into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, called for detailed biological monitoring. That kind of sampling, to detect changes in the water quality of the marsh and the health of its aquatic-based food chain, was ordered by the State Water Resources Control Board before it would grant a delta discharge permit. It was that monitoring which brought the gregarious Smith and reserved Ohlendorf together at Kesterson. They checked nests and counted eggs, always on the lookout for anything abnormal that might need to be checked more closely back at Ohlendorf’s cramped lab on the University of California campus at Davis, more than 100 miles north. It was slow, tedious work: paddling, pausing, collecting samples of eggs and nestlings, making chart entries. Lead research biologist with the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center’s Pacific Field Station, Ohlendorf had a sense of what might be in store because of earlier analysis of tiny mosquito-eating fish called gambusia. Agency fishery biologist Mike Saiki had collected the finger-sized fish a year earlier, in 1982, when there was no sign of bigger game like bass and catfish reported to be thriving in the newly created 1,280-acre pond system. Since the ponds contained frightfully high levels of selenium and no other species were present, Ohlendorf had an ominous expectation that waterfowl reproduction might be similarly afflicted.

Saiki’s curiosity about the fate of the bigger fish had begun growing weeks before, when he spread his own test results out on his desk in Davis. The gambusia contained what were then the highest levels of the trace element selenium ever recorded in living tissue, concentrations reaching a maximum of 380 parts per million (ppm).³ To this day, no one knows why they lived at all, but their survival triggered an intense search for clues to the unusual soil element’s source, makeup, distribution, and toxicity. Ohlendorf had found some of the answers just weeks before his latest Kesterson sampling run. His office computer gave instant access to a detailed, if somewhat obscure, bibliography on selenium revealing a wide range of early scientific papers and test results, some more than fifty years