Orian Grant: Why upstream decisions matter for ultimate ocean health

By Orian Grant

We are going to take a trip downhill.

Say you’re a cup of water. You are pure H2O and you’re excited to start your journey. As you slip out of your natural spring you start your way downhill towards the ocean. You join the watershed, becoming runoff through a small stream bubbling in a remote forest. You are clean.

Early on in your journey, the stream that you are traveling along passes an intensive industrial farm where you pick up some fertilizer, a little nitrogen, and even a little bacteria from animal waste. You keep moving because, after all, you are water, and water moves. Next, a little more downstream you pass by a town, which has some other streams that mix into your stream. As this stream mixes with your stream, you mix. You’re now joined by phosphates, industrial soaps/detergents and even household cleaners. You’re starting to look and feel very different!

Finally, you can see the wide-open ocean, it’s right there! But before reaching it, you pass by an offshore drilling rig, and you pick up a few heavy metals: cadmium, arsenic, nickel and lead. Now, you’re pretty weighed down, you’ve acquired other things than just the H20 you started as. But you’re in the ocean now and you’ve made it to the deep blue! But, so has the fertilizer, nitrogen, animal waste, phosphates, cadmium, arsenic, nickel and lead.

The small cup of water did not have any choice in the fact all of these chemicals hitched a ride – the water just wanted to get to the ocean! But, along the way, forces beyond the water’s control ended up hitching a ride and now the ocean you so desperately wanted to get to is deeply affected by the chemicals added.

Runoff pollution is a massive part of why the ocean is at risk. And with climate change intensifying, we can’t afford to place more stress on the ocean. It’s one of our greatest climate buffers, having absorbed 90% of the heat and ⅓ of the carbon emissions from the industrial era. But if we treat it right, the ocean can be a powerful source of climate solutions – like carbon storage in coastal ecosystems and ocean-based renewable energy – that have the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions that we need globally to limit temperature rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, what can we do to help reduce the effects of watershed runoff?

Everyday actions like, choosing ‘clean’ products in your home, using less plastic, and buying environmentally responsible produce are really helpful. But just as the cup of water did not choose to carry the pollutants along their journey, we as individuals did not choose to put harmful chemicals in our cleaning products, create plastics that cannot be effectively recycled, or fertilize our store-bought veggies with high-levels of nitrogen. The problem is larger than just us.

Take for example the chemical compound 6PPD. Never heard of it? That’s because scientists just found out how deadly it is. 6PPD is a chemical compound that is found in almost all major tires, it is a tire preservative of sorts. While we drive on these chemicals, small particles fall off the tires, end up in the water runoff, and ultimately mix with the millions of small cups of water coming down from the mountain springs. Now, 6PPD is now being found not only in coastal ecosystems throughout the west coast, but it is having catastrophic effects on the mortality rate of Coho Salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

So, beyond the important choices you make in your daily life, what else can you do? You can support elected officials that hold the manufacturers, like those who choose to put chemicals like 6PPD into their products, accountable for their contribution to runoff. Protecting the ocean means we must protect what eventually flows into it and the most effective way to make sure our runoff water is clean is to make changes on the scale of the root problems.

Treating the root problem of a polluted watershed doesn’t just mean only cleaning up after the fact. Protecting the ocean from being exposed to polluted watersheds means taking action such as pausing new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters, reducing the pollution that threatens ocean health through placing restrictions on how the production of those plastics and consumer products are made, and finding ways to sustainably filter the watershed before it hits the ocean.

We are not as helpless as the cup of water running downstream. For decades, we have been told that it is our responsibility to save the planet, but now, as we begin to trace pollutants to their source we can all agree that we must also demand action by polluters. And our elected officials can hold them accountable. The responsibility of preserving our ocean doesn’t start with the decisions we make at the grocery store – it starts with our decision makers. That means Congress and the Biden Administration must act to protect our ocean and all that it provides – before it’s too late.

Orian Grant is a field naturalist/marine biologist and permaculturist from Tacoma. Having studied Sustainability Research & Design as an undergraduate at Pacific Lutheran University, their focus has been on connecting relationships between community and nature. The conditions of their work have shed light on the importance of social and environmental justice for all, and the unique relationship we share to the nearshore and ocean.