If I remember my Sunday School lessons correctly, “clean living” should result in a lot of good things in addition to a heavenly reward: a strong character, an orderly home, and a healthy body and environment. Ironically for the Amish, a clean living group if there ever was one, clean living also produces dirty waters.
As yesterday’s New York Times article reminds us, Amish farms in Lancaster county generate more than 61 million pounds of manure a year – much of which ends up in waterways that run straight into the Chesapeake Bay. Dealing with the farmers in Lancaster county is a challenge: How do you encourage a population that resists change to adopt new farming practices? Impose stronger regulations? Do what we usually do with farmers, which is to pay them using grant dollars to change?
The challenge is even greater when you consider how strongly the Amish value self-sufficiency and distrust government. Unlike many who loudly profess such values, the Amish practice what they preach: they live genuinely self-sustainable lives, and they don’t take government benefits, refusing even Social Security. I was struck in the article by a farmer declaring he had vowed never to take a government grant – quite a different mindset from our culture of subsidies for agribusiness, corporate welfare, and bank bailouts.
So what program would work? Although CPR Member Scholar Bob Adler doesn’t address the Amish in his recent article, Priceline for Pollution: Auctions to Allocate Public Pollution Control Dollars, he does propose a program for the Chesapeake Bay that might appeal to the Amish farmer precisely because the funds generated and distributed for improved pollution reduction practices are not “handouts.” Based on his work with the Colorado River, Adler proposes that Bay restoration grants and subsidies be auctioned instead of being distributed based on political or other factors. The bids proposing the most cost-effective methods of meaningful pollution control would be offered implementation dollars. It worked well for the Colorado River Basin Salinity Program; it could also work well for the Bay.
“Farming is getting expensive,” said another Amish farmer in the article, and indeed it is – both for the farmer and for the Bay. Many of the methods to control agricultural pollution – fences to keep cows out of streams, stream buffers, and even manure storage systems – are relatively cheap, particularly in comparison to, say, upgrading a sewage treatment plant. Under an auctioning program like the one Professor Adler proposes, a market could be created to pay Amish farmers with the most cost-effective proposals for providing environmentally protective services. It’s not a handout or a regulation: it’s a competitive bidding process for a valued activity. Clean living might result in clean waters after all.
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Shana Campbell Jones | June 10, 2010
If I remember my Sunday School lessons correctly, “clean living” should result in a lot of good things in addition to a heavenly reward: a strong character, an orderly home, and a healthy body and environment. Ironically for the Amish, a clean living group if there ever was one, clean living also produces dirty waters. As […]
Shana Campbell Jones | June 9, 2010
We’ve all seen the dramatic headlines recently concerning large-scale environmental disruptions, including a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf and mining disasters killing workers from West Virginia to China. Meanwhile, in Congress, climate change bills are proposed, altered, weakened, and eventually shelved, and the United States still fails to take action on climate change. CPR’s Member Scholars […]
Yee Huang | June 8, 2010
Hundreds of offshore extraction platforms dot the world’s oceans, funneling millions of gallons each day of oil, natural gas, and other extracted resources to the surface. While these operations are regulated by the country where they’re located, they have the potential to cause international environmental disasters when located near boundary waters or near large currents. The New […]
Rebecca Bratspies | June 7, 2010
Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls Ever since the Deepwater Horizon began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has been dazzling the American people with a series of colorfully named “solutions:” the dome; top hat, junk shot, top kill. However, as the days turned into week, and the weeks turned into months, one thing has become […]
Victor Flatt | June 4, 2010
In the little-followed but hugely important “joint federalism” system through which our environmental laws are implemented, a seismic change may be afoot that could vastly improve environmental compliance and environmental quality in the future. Last week, Al Armendariz, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region VI, indicated that unless significant changes are made by […]
Ben Somberg | June 3, 2010
ProPublica teamed with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to put out an important investigative piece on drywall a few days ago — “Tainted Chinese Drywall Concerns Went Unreported for Two Years.” The article, by Joaquin Sapien and Aaron Kessler, reports that: A leading East Coast homebuilder learned four years ago that the Chinese-manufactured drywall it had installed […]
Yee Huang | June 3, 2010
EPA and a coalition of environmental groups recently settled ongoing litigation related to the regulation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The litigation dates back to 2003, when EPA finally proposed comprehensive regulation of CAFOs, and it centers on what actually constitutes a CAFO. The original Clean Water Act labeled CAFOs as point sources that require a […]
Alyson Flournoy | June 2, 2010
In following the oil spill disaster, it can be hard to think beyond the control effort du jour to the bigger picture. I was riveted by the latest of BP’s seven failed efforts to stop the flow of oil, hoping it would succeed and that the underwater tornado of oil devastating the Gulf, the coast, […]
Daniel Farber | June 1, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. We’ve known all along that offshore drilling in the Gulf placed at risk exceptionally valuable and sensitive coastal areas. We need look no further than a forty-year-old court decision on Gulf oil drilling, which made the dangers abundantly clear. In 1971, President Nixon announced a new energy plan involving greatly expanded […]