There are times when our enviro advocacy seems to have little effect, but the stakes are still high
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. . . and the prospects for success as strong as our commitment.
National Wildlife @NWF (Larry J. Schweiger President & Chief Executive Officer) 26m
Trout are returned to a once-polluted Pennsylvania waterway: http://goo.gl/V0zSV
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE to do the impossible? I ponder this question because many of the challenges conservationists face today seem overwhelming and, at times, impossible to solve. The U.S. Navy Seabee Memorial at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia preserves a World War II motto: “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.” I was reminded of the motto when I learned that trout were being stocked this spring in the 33 miles of the Bennett Branch Sinnemahoning Creek, a once heavily polluted waterway partly in central Pennsylvania’s Elk County.
I first visited the county when I was 15 to see a small elk herd. I stopped at the village of Grant, so named because former President Ulysses S. Grant fished at this spot in the 1880s. He must have enjoyed the pristine waters as the river wound its way through the virgin forests covering the Allegheny Plateau. When I stopped by, I was struck by the orange color of polluted Bennett Branch.
Not long after Grant’s visit, loggers cut down the forests, leaving desolated hillsides in their wake. At about the same time, a number of “drift mine” operators began extracting the area’s bituminous coal to fuel Pittsburgh iron mills. During the next 100 years, the mines produced nearly a half-billion gallons a day of highly acidic wastewater, contaminating the entire Bennett Branch.
After many of the miners abandoned their operations, conservationists purchased about 70 percent of the local watershed, reclaiming it as state forests and game lands. Armed with a $500-million-dollar bond fund, Pennsylvania sportsmen and women waged a successful campaign in the 1960s and 1970s to regulate active mines and to begin removing scars from abandoned sites. Engineers studying the extensive mining damage concluded that restoring the Bennett Branch would be impossible. But some citizens refused to give in.
With the passage in 2003 of a statewide restoration program called the Growing Greener Coalition, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, along with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, acquired old mine sites and worked with the Bennett Branch Watershed Association and P&N Coal Company to restore a major tributary to the Bennett. The following year Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation began working with these and other nonprofit partners to restore water quality in the region. Since then, more than 1,000 acres of the area’s old mining sites have been reclaimed, and an upgraded water-treatment plant has been restoring the Bennett Branch to conditions not seen since President Grant fished there . . .
read more: http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/News-and-Views/Archives/2013/NWF-View-Doing-the-Impossible.aspx
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