Lake Winnipeg. Satellite photo by European Space Agency.
The intensity of summer algal blooms has increased over the past three decades, according to a first-ever global survey of dozens of large, freshwater lakes. Story here.
Microplastics in sediments from the rivers Elbe (A), Mosel (B), Neckar (C), and Rhine (D).Note the diverse shapes (filaments, fragments, and spheres) and that not all items are microplastics (e.g., aluminum foil (C) and glass spheres and sand (D), white arrowheads). The white bars represent 1 mm. PhotoS by Martin Wagner et al.
As small as a grain of dust—but of great global significance. The word microplastics is familiar to many, but the dangers are virtually unexplored. In recent years, plastic pollution has become an ever-increasing burden on the environment. Countless videos and media reports draw attention to this problem. While the dangers of large plastic pieces for animals are impossible to overlook, there is practically nothing about the dangers posed by microplastics. But what are microplastics anyway? Get the answer here.
Just 90 minutes from Toronto, residents of a First Nations community try to improve the water situation as the beverage company extracts from their land. Story here.
Last October, just before the provincial government relaxed
regulations to allow for many more hogs to be produced in this province, George
Matheson, Chair of the industry group, “Manitoba Pork,” testified before
a legislative committee.
In an astonishing display of corporate hype, Matheson seemed to
think he could, with a single statement, obliterate years of solid scientific
research, conducted in his own province.
“Hog manure is not getting into our rivers and
lakes,” he declared. “The vast majority…about 85 per cent, is injected into the
soil of farmland or immediately incorporated into the soil. This method of
application essentially stops manure from running off the land. I cannot
overemphasize this point. This means manure does not get into rivers and lakes.
In fact, it is illegal for manure to leave a field.”
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In her long career with the University of Winnipeg’s biology
department, Dr. Eva Pip (below)
has come to a dramatically different conclusion. After visiting more than 400
sites in Manitoba and publishing a series of meticulous, detailed studies, the
veteran water quality expert has found, “The two land use categories with the
highest nitrate concentrations bleeding into adjacent surface waters were urban sewage
and livestock/poultry operations.”
Dr. Eva Pip taught biology at the U of W for more than 50 years before retiring in 2016. She has published almost 100 peer-reviewed articles in her career. More than 800 scientists in serious academic circles around the world have cited her work, as a building block for their own.
Nitrates
act as nutrients which promote the rapid growth of harmful and often poisonous
algae. As Dr. Pip explains, “These mar beaches, overgrow submerged surfaces,
clog filters and fishing nets, and foul drinking water with objectionable
tastes, odours and toxins. Local fish and invertebrate kills have occurred
both in summer and under winter ice.”
Many
big livestock operations, including hog “mega-barns,” have been operating in
southern Manitoba for years. This doesn’t make sense to Dr. Pip. “Our
provincial government was irresponsibly allowing barns where periodic flooding
was very likely, even certain. Since floodwaters flow into Lake Winnipeg, and
also to Lake Manitoba via the Portage Diversion, this means that waste affects
a very large area, not just the immediately adjacent waters.” Epic flooding in
the Red River Valley in 1997 washed a host of human-related contaminants into
those lakes, including waste from hog lagoons.
A study Dr. Pip
supervised in 2006, confirmed that three substances harmful to
water quality “increased significantly during flooding.” They were, dissolved
solids and different forms of the two main nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous. And
human and animal waste were also “major factors” directly
affecting water quality near the shore at 90 sites she surveyed along the
southern half of Lake Winnipeg. Communities of mollusks (snails and native
freshwater mussels), considered important indicators of environmental
health, were dwindling, and many are endangered. She recommended another
look be taken at management policies affecting the lake, in order to “reduce
further habitat decline.”
In 2012, she published another study showing
even more clearly, just how baseless Matheson’s testimony was. For an entire
ice-free season, she and one of her students took water samples both upstream
and downstream of a small hog and poultry operation in southeastern Manitoba.
The farm, complete with waste lagoons and fields where the waste was sprayed,
was located between the Brokenhead River and one of its tributaries, Hazel
Creek. The study detected significantly higher levels of several substances
harmful to water quality in the downstream samples, compared to upstream. These
included phosphorous, some nitrogen, solids and fecal coliform bacteria, which
increased when it rained. “ The study suggested that environmental loading
of livestock waste adversely altered natural stream water quality.” And it
called for producers to spread manure “during drier weather conditions, to
minimize the large-scale escape events.”
“Our study demonstrated unequivocally," explains
Dr. Pip, "that manure was
getting into those waterways from the spread fields after the manure had been
spread, and not just small amounts either.”
The
Brokenhead River flows into Lake Winnipeg, the subject of another
study published in 2012. Entitled, “The rapid eutrophication
of Lake Winnipeg,” it was conducted by a team of researchers headed by another
water quality expert, Dr. David Schindler of the University of Alberta (above). It
concluded that toxic blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) “have nearly doubled
in size in that lake since the mid 1990s,” thanks to rapid increases in
phosphorous levels." (See graph.)
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What is eutrophication? Harmful algal blooms, dead zones and fish kills
are the results of a process called eutrophication, which begins with increased load
of nutrients to estuaries and coastal waters. (A NOAA video.)
In 2007, Manitoba's Clean Environment Commission found that hog wastes
spread on fields as a nutrient, “constitute the most serious environmental
sustainability issues facing the industry.”
But,
could human health be at risk here, too?
Further research by Dr. Pip less than four years ago,
shows that indeed, it could be. It found a dangerous neurotoxin called BMAA at
three places near the shore of Lake Winnipeg’s south basin. Levels of it were
found to increase significantly after heavy “blooms” of the blue-green algae
and when solids were suspended in the water. BMAA is found worldwide, wherever
the algae are found. It has been linked to human ailments including Parkinson’s
and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). It has also been found in the hair and brain
tissue of Canadian Alzheimer’s patients.
There are several troubling pathways humans could be exposed to this
toxin. These include consuming the milk or meat of livestock or waterfowl who’ve
drunk tainted water in dugouts or wetlands, or even bathing in it! Of the three
locations studied, the highest levels were found at Patricia Beach, a popular
spot for bathers.
As bad as they sound, BMAA toxins are not the end of the story, as Dr.
Pip explains. “We found other more important algal toxins in Lake Winnipeg
(microcystins, anatoxins) that are much more immediate and potent, and these
should be mentioned. We found that microcystins were related to phosphorus and
nitrogen in the water. They can be inhaled, absorbed through skin, or ingested.
A dog swims in a poison
soup of blue-green algae.
They've been known to sicken people and kill animals. Many
communities as well as cottagers draw their drinking water from the lake.” Coliform
bacteria (such as E coli) were also associated with phosphorus levels.
Despite
all this, Premier Brian Pallister, like the industry, seems more than
willing to simply write off all those years of collective scientific wisdom.
When announcing last spring his government would relax important environmental
regulations so thousands more hogs could be produced in Manitoba, he told reporters,“There’s no compelling evidence that any
of these changes will put water at risk."
Lake Winnipeg with Reindeer Island at bottom right.
European Space Agency.
Meanwhile,
Lake Winnipeg (above), the world's 10th largest freshwater lake, gets increasingly
polluted with algal blooms that can be seen from space.
And, a report commissioned
by the Government of Manitoba in 2011 concluded that phosphorous levels in the
lake were “three times higher than they were in Lake Erie when that lake was
described as dead!”
What about water
quantity?
Quite
apart from the role big hog operations play in harming the quality of our
water, is the question of the volumes needed to water the livestock and clean
the barns. The amounts are staggering. Figures on volumes already being
consumed are hard to come by. But we are already getting a taste of what an
expanded industry will look like. Applications are now pouring in for new barns
and permission to expanded existing ones. The big pork processing company,
HyLife alone, has applied to build no less than 16 big barns, housing some
50,000 hogs in the RM of Killarney, in the southwest. The company estimates all
those barns, together, will require something like 48,000,000 imperial gallons
per year! (218,212,320 litres!) The hogs will produce well over 31
million gallons of slurry, to be stored in several new earthen lagoons the company
proposes to dig. The water will come from new wells. The barns are to be
located in the Pembina River watershed and built on land which is currently in
crop production.
While
Canada is not at the top of the list of the many countries now threatened by
water shortages, can we afford to ignore the warning signs? As the Guardian newspaper reports, “Across the
globe, huge areas are in crisis today as reservoirs and aquifers dry up.”
And almost everywhere, animal agriculture plays a
role. As the Dutch-based “Water Footprint Network”puts it, “Animal products
generally have a larger water footprint than crop products.” While cattle
require the most water of all livestock, pigs still need almost six thousand
(5,988) litres to produce a single kilogram of pork!
What about the stink?
But
are the threats being posed by the Pallister government's crusade to expand the
hog industry, confined to our waterways only? What about the stench produced by
massive quantities of hog manure? The industry claims, expansion will do little
to worsen that problem.
Yet
odours from intensive livestock operations nationwide, have been recognized as
a problem in Canada for well over 20 years.In
its “Handbook on Health
Impacts,” (2004), Health Canada notes, “Among all the
animal production sectors, hog farming, given its constant growth since the
1970s and its expansion in many rural and even near-urban areas, is often
publicly perceived as one of the most polluting agricultural activities. The
number of complaints about odours from animal production operations has
increased sharply since the 1970s, mainly because of the transition from solid
(manure) to liquid (slurry) waste management. As a result, in 1995, odours from
buildings and slurry storage facilities were 5.2 times stronger than they were
in 1961; and odours from spreading activities were 8.2 times stronger.”
But
hog barn odours can be more than just a nuisance. The Handbook warns that gases
including ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and methane can not only irritate the eyes
and upper respiratory tract, they can, in high enough concentrations, be
lethal. “Half of all cases of severe manure gas poisoning are fatal,” it
states. “And a few farm workers in Canada die from such poisoning each year,”
usually while cleaning out confined spaces such as manure gutters below the barns.
Hard figures are not available. But it's believed, in Manitoba, more slurry is now injected directly into the ground, rather than being spread above-ground, as is being done here on farmland near Lake Erie, US in 2014.
As the ice melts, the organic carbon found in permafrost is being released once again after ages of confinement in the soil. It is making its way into Arctic and subarctic lakes and ponds, and modifying their composition. More here. Arctic Lake. A US Fish & Wildlife photo.
Oil from the stricken oil tanker Sanchi, which exploded and sank in the East China Sea, may have now reached the shores of Japan, according to the country's Coast Guard. More here.
Several cattle producers along the Wood River in south-central Saskatchewan have to move about 1,000 head to different pastures after water quality in the river declined unexpectedly. Story here.
The hot summer weather in Manitoba has brought along another reminder that all is not well in our great Lake Winnipeg, the 10th largest freshwater lake in the world. Story here.
