Watching Our Water Ways

Hedrick Smith talks about Puget Sound and film “Poisoned Waters”

April 15th, 2009 by cdunagan

Next week’s Frontline program on PBS allows viewers to race along with killer whales in the San Juan Islands, explore Seattle’s Elliott Bay with scuba divers and watch crab fishermen work their pots on Chesapeake Bay.

<i>Hedrick Smith</i><br> <small>PBS photo</small>

Hedrick Smith // PBS photo

Along the way, reporter Hedrick Smith peers into more stormwater outfalls than I could count, as he goes about asking scientists, politicians and environmental activists why Puget Sound and Chesapeake Bay are dying.

The two-hour documentary, titled “Poisoned Waters” (Tuesday, 9 p.m., KCTS) features stunning visuals that remind us why we love our waterways. More importantly, the program confronts questions about why we allowed these estuaries to be used as a toilet, unraveling the food web and even threatening our revered orcas with extinction.

When I talked to Hedrick Smith this afternoon, he said this project was unlike any he had done before.

“As a reporter, I loved it,” he told me. “I’m an outdoor kind of person. I have sailed both bodies of water. I was passionate about the outdoors, but I didn’t realize how bad the situation was. This has been an enormous education for me.”

Smith worked for the New York Times for 26 years, serving as a national and foreign correspondent. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 as part of the team that broke the Pentagon Papers, revealing government lies about the Vietnam War. He won the prize again in 1974 for his coverage of Russia and Eastern Europe.

Smith has authored several best-selling books and produced 20 award-winning programs for PBS.

With a house on Orcas Island, he said he has visited Kitsap County numerous times, attending festivals and such.

The secret to good journalism, he told me, is to tell fascinating stories that use captivating pictures while explaining the “nitty gritty” of government policy and regulation.

“We want the topics to be interesting and entertaining and educational for people while pushing the frontier of their knowledge,” he said.

One of the problems with pollution in both Puget Sound and Chesapeake Bay, he said, is that the waters remain beautiful. They’re nothing like the famous waterways of the 1970s, when “people could see, smell and touch pollution,” Smith said.

When rivers were oozing slime and catching on fire, people were motivated to do something, he said. As a result, Congress passed the Clean Water Act and appropriated huge amounts of money to deal with the problems.

Today, the pollution is invisible. The job of public education is tougher.

“The environment is in a slow-motion crisis,” he said. “It has a hard time competing for media coverage with things like the financial meltdown.”

Smith and I agreed that there seems to be a “communications gap” between average people and many of the scientists and policymakers who have a technical understanding of the problems and a language of their own.

While I’ve always made it a goal in my writing to bridge the gap between technical people and average readers, Hedrick Smith is a master at it.

I later talked about this with Paul Bergman, communications director for Puget Sound Partnership. We agreed there are real lessons to be learned by carefully watching “Poisoned Waters.”

As the announcer on the program, Smith speaks softly and gently. In on-screen interviews, he lets his subjects’ own words create the drama. While generally avoiding confrontation, Smith seems to ask the right questions at the right time, seemingly out of curiosity, but I suspect he knows many of the answers.

Some of the topics explored in the program:

Evolution of the Clean Water Act with Bill Ruckelshaus, first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and now leader of the Puget Sound Partnership.
Dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and how industrial chicken farms contribute to the problem.
How chemicals that mimic human hormones get into drinking water and cause known and suspected human health problems.
Pollution in Seattle’s Duwamish River and the political power that can be brought to bear when a community becomes motivated.
The problems of stormwater, which can mobilize pollution and carry it into sensitive water bodies.
King County’s struggles to protect watersheds with land-use regulations and the resulting anger from property owners.
Transitioning back to the Chesapeake, the program explores urban sprawl, “smart growth” and other land-use battles with effects on the waterway.

Smith told me that land-use conflicts are among the most difficult issues to resolve, because they pit notions of freedom to manage one’s land against the life-saving benefits of protecting ecosystems.

“The prevailing scientific opinion is that if you are going to preserve our waterways, you need to preserve as much natural area as you can,” Smith said. “Put growth where it already is. But people are going to balk at that, and each area is going to have to come to its own decision.”

Smith told me that one of his more profound revelations was learning that many common products contain potentially dangerous chemicals, known as endocrine disruptors. Such chemicals, which mimic human hormones, are suspected of increasing the rate of breast cancer and decreasing men’s sperm count, along with other effects.

Smith says his wife became interested in this issue and found deodorants and toothpaste that contained little or no harmful chemicals. Together, they made the small, but significant change in their own household purchases.

Harmful chemicals should be regulated, Smith said, but the first step is to require labeling of household products so that people know what chemicals they use and begin questioning whether they may affect their health and the environment.

I couldn’t let Smith go without asking his views about the Navy’s use of sonar and its effects on marine mammals. The documentary shows Smith out on the water following killer whales with orca researcher Brad Hanson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It is very hard for the public to judge this issue because the military and the government are often secretive about why it needs to do specific things,” Smith said.

Smith has a long history of dealing with classified information, including the Pentagon Papers. Issues like sonar, he said, should be discussed openly.

“I’m not inclined to buy the argument that information of that kind should be classified,” he added. “If you are going to test sonar, why can’t you test it beyond our islands?”

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