By: Carrie La Seur,
FLOW Legal Director
Rivers tell tales. They remember what’s been done to them, decades back. They report on what happened this morning. They don’t lie or hold back the truth. It’s all there, in sediments and suspended solids, temperature, pH, chemical load. Sit a minute and listen to what the Pine River in central Michigan has to say.
Thanks to the Clean Water Act, we have a list of “impaired waters” and why they’re impaired. Michigan has one of these 303(d) lists, organized by watershed. Within the rows and columns of dry government spreadsheets, you can learn a lot about the waters you dip your feet or your paddle into, waters the kids play in. If you’re under fifty and live along the Kalamazoo River, for example, you learn that the fish coming out of your river have been contaminated all your life. It’s a cancerous price we’re all paying for the glories of modern civilization. For the Pine River watershed, stretching from Remus to Midland, Michigan, the 303(d) list (download Excel .xls) is a rap sheet of evolving pollution loads.
Download spreadsheet: Michigan 303(d) list https://www.michigan.gov/egle/-/media/Project/Websites/egle/Documents/Programs/WRD/GLWARM/IR/IR-2024-AppC.xlsx
If the print looks small, it’s because there’s so much legacy and present-day pollution to list. Upstream, it’s DDT and PCBs – poisons that were banned in the 1970s because they devastated wildlife (read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring if you haven’t already) and contaminated the human food chain. They’re still showing up in fish tissue as recently as 2024.
The main offender these days, though, is nutrient pollution from factory farms, pouring into the watershed as livestock sewage. It’s applied to fields as fertilizers, discharging through tile drains, leaching from clay-lined storage pits, and percolating into the high water table where it meets our lakes and streams. New kinds of impairments show up on the
CLICK TO ENLARGE: Agricultural fields in central Michigan that receive waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).
2024 ‘newly impaired waters’ list. Now in addition to DDT and PCBs, the Pine carries E. coli, toxic algae, and low dissolved oxygen – making it unsuitable for aquatic species and other living things. Long stretches of the river and its tributaries are listed as “not supporting” fish consumption, partial body contact or total body contact recreation, indigenous aquatic life and wildlife.
The reason is graphically represented in the state’s map of livestock confinements – and the fields where they apply livestock sewage – in the Pine River watershed.
Compare this sorry state of affairs in just one obscure stretch of rural river to the bold guarantees enshrined at Article IV, Section 52 of the Michigan Constitution of 1963:
The conservation and development of the natural resources of the state are hereby declared to be of paramount public concern in the interest of the health, safety and general welfare of the people. The legislature shall provide for the protection of the air, water and other natural resources of the state from pollution, impairment and destruction.
Sadly, our legislature has often failed to live up to the constitution’s ambitious mission. The effects of legacy pollution are persistent, but our memories are short. We repeat the same mistakes over and over again, as we trade drinkable, swimmable, fishable water for cheap cheeseburgers and corporate profits. It’s not a bargain Michiganders consciously or deliberately made, but it’s the arrangement we find ourselves in nonetheless.
Our waters and our health are being damaged by an industrial model of agriculture that treats animals as grain-to-bacon conversion machines, and pretends that the resulting waste is anything other than poison hidden in plain sight – and flowing downstream.
Early season algae getting started on the Alma Impoundment. By mid-summer, it will be a blanket on a pond that used to be a popular summer swimming hole. (PHOTO: Carrie La Seur)
