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You already know the facts about climate change. Now, we need cultural evolution. In this podcast, we apply cutting-edge insights from diverse fields to tackle climate change and environmental issues more effectively.
Climate Clear is powered by AreaHub, a climate and environmental hazards platform.
Note: Some expert guests on Climate Clear may be AreaHub advisors.
Alison Gregory: Hi, I'm Alison Gregory and you're listening to Climate Clear, powered by Area Hub. We help you discover climate and environmental issues in a clear, digestible way by talking to experts on these topics all in 15 minutes. Here with us today is Marc, Yagi, CEO, and Executive Director of Waterkeeper Alliance, the largest and fastest-growing nonprofit solely focused on clean water.
His previous roles include being a senior attorney and watershed program director for Riverkeeper Inc, and a staff attorney with the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC. Marc, we're so happy to have you here today.
Marc Yaggi: Alison, thank you so much for having me. I'm really grateful for all the work that you do to push for change on issues that are so important to our health and prosperity.
Alison Gregory: I could say the exact same to you. You've been dedicating your entire career to environmental advocacy and have a longstanding passion for clean, healthy, and abundant water for all people and the planet. Do you mind starting us off by sharing a bit about your journey and your work in the environmental field?
Marc Yaggi: My journey really started as a kid. My love for water began when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, Susquehanna River Watershed. I could step outside my back door and walk for miles. As a kid, I had a golden retriever named Ben, and my fondest memories were from swimming and fishing with him day in and day out in the nearby creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes.
And as a kid, I naively assumed that these types of experiences were shared by everyone. But as I got older, I quickly discovered how lucky I was to be able to go down to my local waterway, jump in and have a swim without fear of getting sick or how lucky I was to be able to turn on a tap and have cold, toxic free water come out.
I couldn't understand how such an important resource wasn't available to everyone, and that really propelled me to pursue a degree in environmental law and work in environmental advocacy, which I've been doing ever since.
Alison Gregory: Marc, thank you so much for sharing that beautiful image of you and your idyllic childhood.
I can relate to the love of water because of my exposure to water growing up now. I wish many more people were able to enjoy it the way we were able to. Years ago. You also brought up the Waterkeeper Alliance. It is doing remarkable work throughout the world from protecting waterways and communities to ensuring compliance with environmental laws and more.
Can you please tell us more about the Waterkeeper Alliance and its efforts around clean water?
Marc Yaggi: We are a global organization that unites more than 300 locally based clean water advocacy organizations and focuses citizen action on issues that affect our waterways from pollution to climate change. We were incorporated in 1999, but trace our roots back to 1966 on the Hudson River here in New York.
At that time, a group of blue collar, recreational and commercial fishermen banded together to use citizen action, science and law to protect a dying river and restore its health for the people of the Hudson Valley. And they patrolled the river. They identified pollution problems and they forced polluters to clean up their mess.
At that time, back in the 1960s, Penn Central Railroad was dumping millions of gallons of oil into the river. It blackened the beaches. It made the fish taste like diesel fuel, so the fishermen couldn't sell 'em at the Fulton Street Fish market. So rather than blindly accept the actions of others, these fishermen who ultimately became Hudson River Keeper, used citizen action, science and law to clean up that river.
And today, thanks to their work and the laws, they help pass. Hudson is recognized as an international icon of ecosystem revitalization, and today that community-based model they created is being replicated around the world. There are now 335 Waterkeeper groups found in 48 countries on six continents.
These are more than 1200 women and men who are united for clean, healthy, and abundant water for all people on the planet. At Waterkeeper Alliance, what we do is we strengthen the local Waterkeeper groups. We amplify their collective voices around the world, and we work together to fortify, defend, and enforce clean water laws and policies.
Alison Gregory: That is amazing work and I love to hear how something that started with a cleanup among several portions of the Hudson River grew to be such a tremendously impactful set of organizations overseen by Waterkeeper Alliance. You mentioned pollution as you know, one of the important things that your group and all of the associated groups work on.
I'd like to talk about something that's been prominent in the news lately, and that's PFAS often described as forever chemicals. PFAS has been associated with a number of negative health consequences. Research from Stockholm University found that rainwater around the world now contains unsafe levels of PFAS.
Can you break down, please, the concept of forever chemicals and the impacts they may have on people?
Marc Yaggi: PFAS are a big priority for us in strengthening the Clean Water Act. PFAS or PFAS stands for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances. These are a class of more than 9,000 manmade chemicals that were discovered by accident.
In the 1930s, scientists were conducting some chemical reactions, and at the end of one of them, the testing chamber had a thin film on the inside of it, and they could not find any way to break the atoms apart of this film. So these chemicals turned out to be very useful because they repel water, oil, and grease.
So now we find them in our daily lives, in our waterproof jackets, non-stick cookware. Food wrappers, like microwave, popcorn bags, certain carpets and other household items, even some types of dental floss. The problem is that PFAS are being linked to certain types of cancer, liver and kidney disease, immunological problems, and reproductive and developmental harm, and they're water soluble.
So they've gotten into our water waste, our fish, and for most, if not all of us, in our blood. And as you mentioned before, that study from Stockholm founded in rainwater in far away places like Antarctica and the Tibetan plateau. So these dangerous forever chemicals are everywhere now.
Alison Gregory: The Waterkeeper Alliance tackled a nationwide initiative to test American water bodies for PFAS.
What's the importance of testing our drinking water. And can you please tell us more about this initiative?
Marc Yaggi: We were looking for different ways to attack the PFAS issue, and we realized there's a real lack of data about PFAS in our nation's waterways. If you don't know what's in the water, you can't fix it.
So in the summer of 2022, we partnered with Waterkeeper groups across the country to test 114 surface waterways for 55 different types of PFAS. Ultimately, the results unequivocally showed that dangerous PFAS pollution is widespread in surface waters across the country. 83% of the 114 waterways we tested across 34 states and the District of Columbia were found to be contaminated by at least one type of dangerous PFAS chemicals.
Given the limits on how low you can test, I'd argue the other 17% are probably contaminated as well. There were places in New York and Pennsylvania that we tested. They had levels that were thousands to hundreds of thousands of times higher than what EPA experts say is safe for drinking water. We were testing surface waters, not tap water, but 65% of Americans get their tap water from surface waters.
So that testing ultimately resulted in a report called Invisible, unbreakable, unnatural, and it gave our locally based groups compelling data to inform their communities about PFAS, investigate the sources and advocate for change. It also gave us a clearer picture of the data nationwide to advocate for change, and it set us up for the next phase of sampling, which now involves working with groups like the Hispanic Access Foundation and multiple local water keepers to monitor PFAS contamination and surface waters from wastewater treatment plants in environmental justice communities.
Right now, EPA is finalizing drinking water rules for certain types of PFAS that are gonna require our drinking water utilities to undertake expensive upgrades to their systems, which is great. We need to get PFAS out of our drinking water. But while they're doing that, roughly 30,000 industries right now, continue to discharge PFAS into the same waters where we get our drinking water.
You know, currently there are no discharge limits on those industries for PFAS. And so the responsibility falls to the water utilities and by extension to you and me to pay for PFAS to be removed from our drinking water. So one aspect of the sampling effort that we're doing in the report is to be a tool to push for limits on industrial discharges of PFAS into our waters.
And there's previously been legislation in Congress that would require those discharge limits, but it's stalled so far and it's gonna need to be reintroduced this year. And we will certainly be advocating for it.
Alison Gregory: That sounds very impactful and I'm really glad that you all are pursuing that effort to help equip our regulators as well as our legislators with all the information they may need.
Turning to climate change as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes and other types of storms. Storm water becomes an increasing threat to water quality because it can overwhelm the sewer system and send humid waste and other pollutants into waterways.
How can we protect our drinking water to keep it clean in the face of extreme weather events and industrial pollution activity?
Marc Yaggi: To me, climate change is a water issue. Typically, when I ask someone to name a way that climate change manifests itself, I'll hear things like drought, more intense storms, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and warming oceans, all water issues.
And we see that at Waterkeeper lines, who the experiences our water keepers on the ground are having in communities across the world. In Laak, India, for example, our Himalaya Waterkeeper will tell you that over the past decade, things have turned upside down. It snows when it shouldn't, and it doesn't rain when it should.
Some of their communities have had to be relocated due to drought, while others have been forced to rebuild after devastating floods. Puget Sound in Seattle is seeing ocean acidification threatening a $270 million a year shellfish industry. And our waterkeepers in Louisiana have seen the government remove more than 40 names from places on maps because those places no longer exist except for in the memories of those coastal residents who saw that land disappear.
But to your question, we have to make our communities more resilient Here in the US The bipartisan infrastructure law is hugely transformative because we've neglected our infrastructure for so long, inefficient and decaying infrastructure has an enormous impact on greenhouse gas emissions and on the safety and security of our water supplies.
We've gotta do a few things with that infrastructure spending. First, we've gotta make sure that we're planning and building the infrastructure we need for the next a hundred years. Rather than spending it on the kind of infrastructure we built over the last century, it can't be business as usual. That includes resiliency and making sure that the infrastructure is energy and water efficient, and we need to make sure it's spent equitably as billions of dollars are spent.
We have to ensure that those dollars are going to the communities that are most in need, that it's supporting water affordability programs, that we are supporting underfunded water infrastructure projects and historically marginalized communities, and that we deploy nature-based solutions wherever we can.
It's a big task, but we have to do it, or we're gonna set ourselves up for failure.
Alison Gregory: That is a big task and I'm so glad that you're thinking about it in such a holistic way. Are there any other projects, efforts, or issues that we haven't mentioned that the Waterkeeper Alliance is currently tackling and that you would like to share with us?
Marc Yaggi: I'd like to mention just a little bit about some of the work in our climate and safe energy campaign. We're now building on our work at the most recent COP 28 in Dubai to advance our goals of this campaign, which are really knowing that we need to immediately cease development of all new coal, oil, and gas sources as they're incompatible with international goals to limit climate change impacts.
Well, we need to secondly, wind down existing fossil fuel production in accordance with a just energy transition. And third, we need to increase investment in adaptation to impacts of climate change, to build resilience in our food systems, in our water systems, and biodiversity and community health. I. And one other point I wanna make about the climate and safe energy too, is that we're supporting a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which is calling on all nations to negotiate a mandate for a treaty as a necessary step to limit and end the root cause of climate emergency.
And this proposal is now backed by 12 Nation states from four different continents, and it's designed to really fill loopholes in this climate deal that was just reached at COP 28. You know at COP 28, they included a transition away from fossil fuels for the first time in an official COP agreement. But there are big loopholes.
Anything short of a full phase out is highly problematic and unlikely to achieve necessary accountability for fossil fuel nations and top fossil fuel-producing nations, including the US need to immediately shift to a managed shutdown of fossil fuel extraction as a necessary component to any serious commitment.
There are a lot of other problems with that. That COP 28 deal, it gives nods to unproven fossil fuel abatement technologies. It has woefully inadequate action on loss and damage payments for the hardest hit countries with climate impacts. And there's really a lack of clear interim targets that align with the science for a credible pathway to limit climate change to 1.5 Celsius.
So our Climate Safe Energy campaign is really designed to be pushing towards those overarching goals.
Alison Gregory: Thank you so much, Marc, this has been wonderful and we would like to wrap up this episode as we do every episode by highlighting what people can do to tackle the environmental issues we've been discussing.
What would you recommend to everyone listening today? What can we as individuals do so our local areas have safe drinking water, and is there anything we should be keeping an eye out for?
Marc Yaggi: Get educated about the water and climate issues in your community and the positions of your local representatives.
And then vote. Vote for officials who are gonna walk the walk and stand up to polluters rather than being puppets for them. We'd also encourage people to go to waterkeeper.org. You can sign up for action alerts to learn more about issues affecting waterways across the world, and information about how you can take action.
And on our site you can find your local waterkeeper and get involved in issues where you live.
Alison Gregory: And lastly, what is the one message that listeners should take away from our conversation today?
Marc Yaggi: The one message is it takes all of us to be part of the solution to make a true difference. We have to get personal.
You know, I have an 11-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son who mean everything to me, and I want their lives to be full of clean water, clean air, clean energy, equality, good jobs in a strong economy. I don't wanna ask myself 20 years from now why I didn't do more to ensure that they have a safe and healthy future.
I don't want them to look back with bewilderment and contempt at their parents' generation and ask, how could you have left us with contaminated rivers, dying oceans, dirty air? None of us want that world for ourselves, for our children, or for future generations, and that means all of us must be part of giving them a bountiful, livable, sustainable environment.
We owe it to future generations to give them a better world than what we inherited. So the bottom line is it takes all of us to do that.
Alison Gregory: That was great. Marc, thank you so much for your words for sharing and informing us about Waterkeeper Alliance. Your work has been extraordinary throughout your career, and obviously, you're working with many other phenomenal people who are all making a significant impact in a variety of different local ways, as well as in an aggregate way across many parts of the globe.
You're listening to Climate Clear. And we encourage you to check out Area Hub to learn about your area's climate and environmental health. Thank you for joining us and stay tuned for new episodes.