When pollution and poverty meet

October 11, 2013

By Wally Gordon

Clear Lake, at 68 square miles the biggest fresh water lake in California, gleams serenely all the way east to the distant mountains. Beside me, ducks waddle on a strip of lush grass stretching along the shore, and more ducks dive for lunch in the warm shallow water. A boat slides into the lake from the dock. A long-haired Native American sitting at a picnic table paints vivid scenes on smooth rocks he has harvested from the shore. He shyly asks me to buy one for $5.

It all seems so pretty, so peaceful, so healthy, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all what I had been lead to expect.

After all, this lake, at 480,000 years the oldest lake in the United States, is the world’s worst case of mercury poisoning.

It periodically suffers onslaughts of millions of insects, which were unsuccessfully doused with DDD, a vicious relative of DDT. The lake was so notorious that Rachel Carson used it as an object lesson in her path-breaking environmental study, Silent Spring.

The attacks on the lake do not stop there. The nearby mercury mine was declared a superfund site and the federal government has spent at least $40 million trying to clean it up; yet mercury continues to seep into the lake and poison the fish and make those (mainly Native Americans and the very poor) who eat it regularly ill.

Perhaps due to agricultural chemicals washed into the lake, Clear Lake has outbreaks of toxic glue-green algae, and there have been reports of fish kills in parts of the lake.

Even the insects have returned in some areas.

Evidence of social dysfunction is ubiquitous. Many of the houses are poorly maintained. The convenience store at a gas station sells mostly lottery tickets and bottles of liquor, two ways to escape. The head of the chamber of commerce is defensive in discussing the mercury, the algae and other environmental ills: “It’s not really that bad.” But a tourist center in Calistoga, just to the south, advised me against swimming or even boating in the lake.

Yet the lake remains a beautiful place and reportedly the county it dominates, Lake County, has the cleanest air in California.

Go figure. If you’re looking for clarity, avoid Clear Lake like the plague. Even its name is unclear. Despite rhapsodic accounts of its beauty stretching back to 1835, the water has always been murky due to its black mud bottom.
What happens to Clear Lake, however, is not an insignificant matter. California’s only larger bodies of water are the Salton Sea in the south, which is saline due to agricultural runoff, and Lake Tahoe, in the east, much of which lies in Nevada.

For the 50,000 or so people living in two dozen small communities around the lake, it is their only resource in a poor county. Their life spans are shorter, they have more poverty, crime is higher and more workers are unemployed than in the state as a whole.

Clear Lake has a couple of lessons to teach us all. One is the difficulty of cleaning the human nest once we have fouled it. They have been trying for more than half a century at Clear Lake.

The other lesson is the intractable, symbiotic relationship between poverty and pollution. Poverty exacerbates pollution, and pollution increase poverty. It’s that simple. If you are poor you mistreat your environment in order to survive. If the air, water and soil are dirty, only the poor are willing to live there and economic development recedes into the northern California’s famous fog.

In Clear County, people needed the jobs in the mercury mine and in the silver mines that used the mercury to refine ore. They desperately need tourist revenue from the lake that was threatened by insects. They need to use chemicals to raise crops and grapes in the surrounding countryside. In 1970, the state resettled 200 Native Americans at a rancheria on the lakeshore, so they would have fish to eat and to sell. Fewer than 60 of the tribe remain there.

Those professionals who work either to heal the environment or to reduce poverty live in two different worlds, with different goals and tools. They almost never join forces. Yet until they do, places like Clear Lake will never be what they once were and could be again, and both the people and their environment will continue to suffer.

This piece was written by:

Wally Gordon

Wally Gordon, who was for 12 years owner and editor of The Independent in Edgewood, began his career with three summer jobs at The New York Times while he was a student at Brown University. He spent a decade with the Baltimore Sun, including stints as national investigative reporter and Washington Bureau manager. He has freelanced or been a staff writer and editor for dozens of newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Extensive travels have taken him to all 50 states and more than 60 foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, served in the U.S. Army in Iran and taught for two years at a university in West Africa.

He is the author of A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The new nonfiction book is a collection of essays, columns, and magazine and newspaper stories published during his journalistic career spanning more than half a century. Many of the pieces were first published in The Independent or in other New Mexico newspapers and magazines. The book includes profiles of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous, travel and adventure yarns, and essays on the major issues and emotions of our times.

A native of Atlanta, he has lived in New Mexico since 1978 and in the East Mountains since 1990. He has been married for 28 years to Thelma Bowles, a native New Mexican who is a photographer and French teacher. They have one son, Sergei.