Green Factoid of the Day: Stormwater

An average of 140,000 pounds of toxic chemicals enters Puget Sound each day, according to the Department of Ecology of Washington state. An estimated 75 percent of those arrive in the Sound through stormwater that runs off roads, driveways and homes.

For generations we’ve been paving the country over while cleaning, making , fertilizing,  painting and flavoring everything with chemicals whose interactions with biological systems (including our bodies) we’re not sure of. Stormwater runoff is rising over the horizon of public consciousness as one of the too-many next big problems that we are going to have to confront.

For Puget Sound the runoff seems to be mostly chemical and from paved surfaces. For Chesapeake Bay the runoff problem has been attributed primarily to biological waste from factory farms. The vast dead zone in the Caribbean appears to be from fertilizer runoff from the vast corn, cotton and soybean farms of the midwest. Probably some of each is responsible for poisoning each of these bodies of water.

Okay. Now we know. The next stage should be to do something about it, to go up against the goliaths of agribusiness as well as our own accustomed business-as-usual and turn our environment back to a state where we can live in health again.