NC's Environmental Challenges

State of the environment - North Carolina's most urgent environmental challenge
JACK BETTS jbetts "at" charlotteobserver.com
From 2005



Not long ago, Environmental Defense wrote about Caroline Tyler, born in Charlotte in 2001, in an update on climate change. "When she was one year old, she took her first trip to the Outer Banks, where her mom and dad helped her build sand castles and chase crabs," the report by the nonprofit, science-based organization said. "When Caroline turns 30, the beaches she visited with her family may very well have disappeared. That's because sea level is likely to rise by about six inches by 2030, destroying much of the coast we know now. By the time Caroline's grandchildren are grown, sea level in North Carolina is expected to have risen by 19 inches."



If these and similar projections from coastal geologists, meteorologists and other scientific experts are even remotely accurate, North Carolina is in for significant change within our lifetimes -- all related to global climate change. And once again, climate change tops the list of the Observer's annual assessment of North Carolina's environment. The eastern face of the state -- battered by increasingly intense storms, ongoing pounding by tides and currents, and rising sea levels related to climate change -- will break up in spots we have long taken for granted. One estimate says 770 square miles of the coast -- about the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park -- could submerge.



Agriculture and forestry faces changes just as dramatic in what can be grown and where. Air quality may worsen as temperatures rise, and the health of many citizens could decline. Some will die of heat stroke. That's why the N.C. General Assembly created a global warming commission to assess the likely impact of dramatic climate change on North Carolina. Among its missions is figuring out how North Carolina should respond.



Environmental Defense, among others, has suggested a series of strategies the state should pursue to limit the harmful impact and prepare its residents to make some money off the changes in store. These are among the reasons the Observer's editorial board ranks climate change as the state's most pressing challenge in its 10th annual assessment of North Carolina's environment. The list changes each year as new problems arise and old ones ameliorate.



This year, air quality drops out of the top 10 problems because there were fewer bad air days than in years; scientists and regulators think one reason for fewer problems is that controls on smokestack pollution have begun to take effect. Each of these annual assessments is subjective, not scientific. Anyone who spends time pondering the subject could come up with a different set of challenges.



That's what the Observer aims to do each year -- promote debate and focus thoughtful attention on what steps the state ought to take in dealing with North Carolina's top environmental challenges.

The others:
2. Water
The online North Carolina Atlas notes a curious circumstance: While there is no discernible trend in annual rainfall, writes Peter Robinson, "the consistent annual totals mask an important change: summers have been getting drier, while falls have been getting wetter. As a consequence, North Carolinians tend to have less water available for their use than they did 100 years ago."The recent droughts in the Piedmont tend to confirm what many have long expected: a future with insufficient water in some areas as the state continues its dramatic urbanization.



Raleigh, the state's second-largest city, has problems with one of its key reservoirs, Falls Lake, which supplies water to at least eight other Wake County towns. For the past month or more, the lake has been well below normal level, forcing Raleigh to think about asking for an interbasin transfer from Kerr Lake on the Roanoke River near the Virginia border. Concord and Kannapolis have sought permission to drain some 38 million gallons a day from the Catawba River in another interbasin transfer. Worries about water quality continue to mount. Storm runoff, nutrients and sediment remain a top concern. The problem, says Bill Holman of the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund, is that development is overwhelming the ability of regulators to keep pollution out of water supplies.



The state has taken steps to preserve water quality, he writes in an upcoming issue of Warren Wilson College's journal "Heartstone," but "we're losing the war to protect water quality and the environment in North Carolina and America. The rapid pace of development is transforming our landscape."

3. Inappropriate growth
Rapid growth and inappropriate development embody every significant environmental problem North Carolina faces and has been near the top of this list for 10 years. Residential growth consumes farmland, green space and forests, putting new strains on air quality and water quality. Marion Cowell, retired vice president of First Union Corp. and a member of the state Board of Transportation, takes pride in the dynamic growth that has come to Charlotte. "But I've also become concerned that air pollution, along with traffic congestion, sprawling low-density development and related quality-of-life concerns, could interfere with our future prosperity," he wrote in the forward to a Southern Environmental Law Center report about air quality in Charlotte.



The fast pace of development is forcing a rethinking about zoning controls in mountain counties that long resisted government regulation of lands. But even in counties with zoning plans, surging population has led to inappropriate development. Growth and development has even threatened places where no one ever imagined overdevelopment. Because of residential encroachment around a jet base near Norfolk, the Pentagon wants to put a $186 million practice landing field next to the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, winter home to hundreds of thousands of large tundra swans and snow geese. Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group, calls the Pocosin Lakes refuge one of the nation's 10-most endangered.



4. Coastal overdevelopment
In 1994 Gov. Jim Hunt appointed a special commission to examine North Carolina's landmark 20-year-old Coastal Area Management Act and make recommendations for the future. But a growth surge in coastal counties has caused problems."Population growth is exploding, and the land use planning program for the coast is totally broken," says Todd Miller, founder and executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation. "It's probably time to do away with this program" and replace it with a system that gives incentives only to counties that enforce their plans. Michelle Duval, a scientist with Environmental Defense, calls it " `death by a thousand cuts' of our diverse coastal economies -- the working waterfronts that used to define the N.C. coast. Unfortunately, as land values increase and the McMansion economic model expands, this diversity is lost. The very people who depend on waterfront availability for their economic survival can no longer afford that access."



5. Energy
Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast -- and brought to North Carolina a vivid reminder of the absence of adequate, sustainable energy sources. Molly Diggins, state director for the N.C. chapter of the Sierra Club, ranks energy as North Carolina's top problem. "How North Carolina will meet its escalating energy needs at an affordable cost will dominate all other debate affecting the environment in 2006 and beyond," she said. While utilities are interested in building more nuclear plants, they involve both significant costs and environmental risks. Pressure grows for the state to rescind its official opposition to offshore natural gas exploration. Michael Short, senior policy analyst at Environmental Defense, believes North Carolina must make"huge investments in energy efficiencies," including more incentives to use advanced technologies such as hybrid cars.



6. Fish and shellfish depletion
While some fish stocks have made admirable recoveries in N.C. waters, others have declined in alarming ways. Observer outdoor writer Jack Horan reported in October on the virtual free-fall in river herring, once a staple of the Carolina coastal diet in late winter: "The silvery fish have become so depleted that, for the past four years, catches have failed to reach a quota limit." Biologists recommended a moratorium on all fishing, but the state Marine Fisheries commission rejected it.State officials also remain concerned about the stocks of southern flounder, spiny dogfish, Atlantic sturgeon, tautog and weakfish, all listed as "overfished" by the Division of Marine Fisheries. The division also lists oysters, bay scallops and blue crabs as species of "concern" because of low catches.



7. Waste disposal
A 1991 law sought solid waste reduction by 40 percent by 2001, but population growth has increased the amount going into landfills by more than 18 percent, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources said in March. At the same time, the state might begin importing garbage in landfills proposed for sparsely populated areas of eastern North Carolina. The Sierra Club's Molly Diggins says these "massive new landfills in sensitive areas" are a distinct environmental threat. Meanwhile, the state continues to search for solutions to large-scale hog farm waste, typically held in open lagoons that can spill over into the state's waterways before it is sprayed onto nearby fields. Researchers have identified promising technologies to replace lagoons, but the state appears to still be years away from making a transition.

8. Loss of scenic landscape
Just as city folk longing for a place in the hills have bought cottages clinging to mountainsides that once were part of the uncluttered view along the Blue Ridge Parkway, so have thousands more bought up the shoreline along the Intracoastal Waterway and built out-of-scale mansions to replace the modest fish camps and clapboard cottages that once dotted the coastal area inside the Outer Banks.Even in the urbanized areas of the west, Piedmont and the east, the loss of natural areas to upscale residential developments has changed what we North Carolinians see from our windows. Litter accumulates in startling volume along our highways, costing the state millions of dollars in collection costs and providing volunteers with more work than they can keep up with in many areas. Utility poles and wires mar the viewscape, too. Some urban areas have launched plans to replace overhead wires and traffic signals with buried utilities and less-obtrusive signs featuring fiberglass poles and efficient LED lighting, but the job has barely begun.



9. Ecosystem management
Environmental leaders have been thinking about environmental protection in a new way. Dave McNaught, senior policy analyst for Environmental Defense, puts it like this: "The frame of public discourse about matters environmental is consistently flawed" because it fails to consider long-term implications of decisions and doesn't recognize the "inherent interdependence of conservation and development." Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources Bill Ross hopes to kindle public interest in rethinking why we want to protect the environment, along the lines of Gretchen Daily and Katherine Ellison's 2002 book "The New Economy of Nature." "We still think of conservation basically as something to do for moral or aesthetic reasons -- not for survival and certainly not for profit," they wrote. "Nevertheless, the record clearly shows that conservation can't succeed by charity alone. It has a fighting chance, however, with well-designed appeals to self-interest."



10. Loss of natural areas
North Carolina has more than 17 million acres of forests -- fourth-highest in the nation -- and large stands of trees in national and state forests, parks and wildlife reserves. But once the area was part of a nearly unbroken canopy of forestland that extended from the coast to the Mississippi River. The huge stands of hardwoods and regal longleaf pines are now a small fraction of what they once were. That's why many worry about the Bush administration's efforts in 2005 to open some national forests to logging in roadless areas, including in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests in North Carolina. In a state where development has gobbled up an average of 100,000 acres of forested lands and natural areas per year, recent legislation may make it harder for local governments to preserve land at a time the state's population continues to grow -- and consume more natural areas.