Blog XI: Threats to Aquatic Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services, and Natural Capital in Narragansett Bay & The Northeast as a Modern Breadbasket
In last week’s blog post, the focus was on biodiversity loss from both species and ecosystem points of view. The subject in question for this week concerns the definitive underpinning of species and ecosystems: land and water. When we harm or heal any ecosystem or species, the core of such dynamics reflects our fundamental relationships with land and water, without which not much at all would exist on Earth as we know it. Chapter 11 of Living in the Environment deals with our aquatic ecosystems, and Chapter 12, our land environment. Being that we are in the Ocean State, let's start with the former.
The Atlantic Ocean is Rhode Island’s principal ecosystem service and supplier of natural capital. With each ocean current, the pollution we create is filtered out of our vicinity, the ocean itself also absorbs a substantial amount of the greenhouse gases we produce. Our unmatched beaches and top-tier seafood draws (to my annoyance) tourists from all over the globe. Clean energy is even on the list of natural capital we derive from the ocean, as we host the first off-shore wind farm in the United States, just off the coast of Block Island. Rhode Islanders are used to salt-water as much as the lobsters and quahogs we catch, but we also take our biggest ecosystem service for granted and put it in harm's way unnecessarily. We advertise our picturesque beaches and seaside colonial towns to tourists, and many people come to Rhode Island just to live in such an environment. What most people avert their eyes to are the obvious harm we do to the ecosystem which is nearly a namesake for our state. To see the harm Rhode Island does to the ecosystem its people and government claim to cherish, look no further than the Port of Providence.
In 2016, Governor, now Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, gained herself a great deal of praise when she helped facilitate the completion of the nation’s first off-shore wind project.
Three years later, she nixxed her own health department’s concerns for constructing a new natural gas liquefaction facility at the Port of Providence and greenlighted the project. For my senior thesis I spoke with journalist Steve Ahlquist who has done some work on the Port of Providence, and he revealed to me that we store things there that other states and other towns would never allow. Jet fuel for Boston’s Logan Airport is stored at the Port of Providence, of course, Boston would never allow jet fuel to be stored on their historic waterfront, but we do. It isn’t just jet fuel, scrap metal recycling, asphalt and cement processing, and recently an old Russian submarine (which sank and caused an oil spill) are among the many environmental harms and hazards of the Port of Providence. To top it all off, the city’s hurricane barrier doesn’t even protect it, so it is plausible that a chemical evacuation zone would have to be created in a radius surrounding the port, should we have another Hurricane of 1938 or Hurricane Carol. The port is also built on landfill, so all that is there amounts to a powder keg of oceanic pollution that threatens our estuary's ecosystem and the vast array of aquatic biodiversity within her.
It is appalling that a state that calls itself the Ocean State has such a disgraceful, wasteful, environmental ticking-time-bomb of a port. In hosting polluting industries at the port, Rhode Island as we know it is committing suicide each and every day. With Greenhouse gases comes ocean acidification, the types of things that are only widely known to happen in places like the Great Barrier Reef. Remember how I said that the ocean absorbs much of the greenhouse gases we produce, yeah, it does not come without a cost.
Ocean acidification means that Rhode Islanders will have to say goodbye to their beloved oysters and clams on the menus of their favorite restaurants, as their shells cannot handle acidic pH levels. Clam cakes and chowder will not be on the menu at Aunt Carries’ in Narragansett, and there will be no more backyard clambakes in Westerly, Newport, or Wickford.
The disappearance of just one species, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Ocean acidification induced by greenhouse gases constitutes a molecular nature of the ocean, with such a shift, keystone species and ecosystems will simply not exist here anymore. We can only predict the full scope of changes that will occur within the Narragansett Bay Estuary in the distant future, but the chain reaction of eroding ecosystems and plummeting biodiversity caused by ocean acidification will come at a steep price, not only economically, but also spiritually and culturally.
The core case study of Chapter 11 explains what will certainly be on the menu, however: jellyfish. Although they are considered delicacies in Asia, they have not caught on in North America, which is about to change. The book mentions that Chinese oceanographer Wei Hao brought attention to the consequential implications of booming jellyfish populations on marine ecosystems, indicating that as they grow they will be here to stay for millions of years. This has grave implications for the future of aquatic biodiversity. As jellyfish populations grow, and the populations of other marine species dwindle, flee, or disappear, they are surely going to be a regular face on the menu. Instead of bragging about having the best lobsters, clams, or oysters in the country, Rhode Islanders and our fellow New Englanders will be bragging about having the best jellyfish.
I have even noticed more jellyfish when I went swimming at numerous beaches last summer. In 2019, Rhode Islanders I knew theorized that we were getting a lot more tourists from Massachusetts that year because rising water temperatures meant shark and jellyfish populations were making their presence known in places like Provincetown, Hyannisport, and Nantucket. While Rhode Island hasn’t seen any sharks yet to my knowledge, I can say with certainty that the jellyfish are out to play. At Misquamicut State Beach I nearly dove headfirst into a jellyfish’s tentacles when I was body surfing the waves. At Second Beach in Middletown, my friend Alex and I swam to Purgatory Chasm to go cliff jumping. On our way to Purgatory Chasm, we were literally wading through moon jellyfish, with each stroke forward we could feel them across the length of our arms.
When all is said and done, however, we are extraordinarily blessed that we do not yet have to bear the more dire consequences of climate change that billions all over the world are already feeling today. All that this blog has been about so far is some changes to the menus of restaurants. I have the blessing of not having to speak as the son of a fisherman, a restaurant owner, or a resident abutting the Port of Providence. Being aware of these issues from the outside is not enough though, and I fully intend to take what I’ve learned to the state’s foremost environmental organization, Save the Bay, and ask them: Why the hell aren’t you doing anything about this?
The Providence neighborhood of Washington Park is home to the Port of Providence, which hosts some of the egregious, toxic, and harmful pollutants and polluting industries likely at some of the highest concentrations in the state. Save the Bay happens to be headquartered at the very edge of the Port of Providence. Monica Huertas, a local environmental justice activist from Washington Park pointed out to me that Save the Bay headquarters has big windows that give one hundred eighty degree views of the Narragansett Bay; yet there are no windows to the heaps of asphalt, jet fuel storage tanks, and natural gas liquefaction facilities that are only feet away––constituting a powder keg of environmental destruction. Save the Bay headquarters is a remarkably sustainable property, complete with green roofs, bioswales, and even restored marshlands; it represents what the Port of Providence could and should look like if not for the occupation of powerful, polluting industries. I find it baffling that there is not a single mention of the Port of Providence on Save the Bay’s website. Save the Bay says: “Our mission is to protect and improve Narragansett Bay. Our vision is a fully swimmable, fishable, healthy Narragansett Bay, accessible to all… We watch over the government and citizenry for proposals or activities that will degrade the environmental quality of the Bay, basin, and watershed… We actively work in the field to rebuild and restore habitats compromised by pollution, outdated infrastructure, storms, and sea-level rise.” Is the fossil fuel infrastructure at the Port of Providence not outdated? What about the eight-lane highway that runs adjacent to the Bay? Do piles of asphalt that lay mere feet away from the Bay not constitute degradation of the environment?
Save the Bay fetishizes a pristine, almost romantic version of Narragansett Bay. These images are so ingrained that portions of the Bay are virtually unrecognizable as part of the “natural” environment, such as the Port of Providence. This makes for pernicious blind spots which obscure the human costs of environmental harm and the blindly accrued human causes of environmental destruction, such as transportation. Every window opens up to Narragansett Bay, but there are no windows facing what is arguably Narragansett Bay’s pressing environmental problem: The Port of Providence. If the port floods, and the equipment or structures upon it is damaged, it spells grave danger for the aquatic biodiversity of the estuary.
It may sound redundant to say that food comes from land, but somehow, I believe that it is necessary. In a market economy we often forget that our food does not originate from a market, it comes from stewardship of the soil. Chapter 12 of Living in the Environment sits at the juxtaposition between the environmentally destructive ways we grow the food many of us consume today and malnutrition. The post-war era brought with it the mystique of modernity, and the mirage of its so-called “progress.” Modernity brought with it radically different approaches in which we produce and consume food. Corporations in the United States developed industrialized agricultural technologies like pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers and techniques that require high inputs of water and energy, creating massive surpluses of food.
The United States exported these techniques and technologies to the rest of the world, notably through philanthropic efforts like the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. The Green Revolution became the North Star for these philanthropists. They assumed people who used traditional means of agriculture, growing their own food and perhaps dabbling in markets without being reliant upon them were poor. If you can provide the basic necessities of life for yourself, it does not make one poor no matter how one goes about it. Western philanthropists thought that former subsistence farmers would live an urban-western lifestyle in that they would no longer have to produce their own food with the immense scope and scale of industrialized agriculture. The agricultural techniques of tomorrow back then are showing their age. Industrialized agriculture stripped vital nutrients and minerals from the soil, and intensive irrigation has led to waterlogging. Weeds and pests have built resistance to pesticides and herbicides, and fertilizers no longer produce what they used to. As a result, countries that were once testing grounds for the Green Revolution are reverting back to traditional agricultural techniques and even using the seeds that industrialized agriculture sought to replace, adding more genetic biodiversity into the agricultural patrimony.
In the twenty-first century, I think we are rethinking where modernity has brought us, in seeking to find a solution to all our problems, it has become the problem. The United States has been at the forefront of agricultural modernity for generations. Agricultural modernity essentially rendered small breadbaskets like New England and Upstate New York redundant. Having the rugged land, soil, and variable weather conditions we have up here, producing food was not as conducive to profit as it was in the Midwest, but I believe that is changing. Entire blocks in Upper South Providence have been converted to food production. The hippest and happening restaurants source all their food locally, with Rhode Island being as small as it is, that often means food is sourced just down the street.
The Northeast is an interesting place geographically. When French geographer Jean Gottmann wrote his book Northeast Megalopolis he noted that just outside of our major cities were vast swaths of farms. In any other region, such parts would be considered rural, but we have achieved such immense population densities that the “rural” folks of our region’s breadbaskets live an urban-esque existence. As a life-long northeasterner, I can attest to this. About 500 feet away from my house is a community farm where my family often gets food during the summer months. Within a five-mile radius of where I live there are at least a dozen farms. My town only has a year-round population of about 2,500. Yet if I drive for half an hour, I’m in Providence, a city of about 200,000, if I drive an hour, I’m in Boston, which has a population of 700,000. If I were in any town similar to mine in another region I would be in a rural setting, the nearest city would be a road trip by Rhode Island standards.
I think that the Northeast has great potential to grow a regional network of sustainable agriculture forming strong urban-rural food networks in which cities and the rural parts of their metropolitan areas source what food they can directly from their metro area. Perhaps states could encourage this through tax incentives upon restaurants and grocery stores to buy local products from small independent farms and thereby put money in the pockets of the surrounding area. Of course, cities should start growing their own food, but we already have such a good framework here in the Northeast for creating sustainable agriculture networks, and if we can do that, while also filling in the food production gaps within cities–– we could become a model for the rest of the country.
Most importantly, by empowering small local farms, we can ensure a larger genetic consortium of biodiversity in our foodstuffs. Biodiversity underpins food security. With just a few varieties of the types of foods that we eat, we are betting a lot that said food will be highly resilient to what nature throws at it and not fall victim to disease or death, two things we ought to think a lot more about considering the current pandemic we are coming out of, but can just as easily fall back into.
Question: How do we convince people that we will have enough food if we ease up on industrial agriculture?