 Buzzards Bay have been attracting visitors since Grover Cleveland moved his summer White House to the bay back in 1893. The population of roughly 20,000 doubles in the summer months, clogging the roads with cars, the rivers with boats, and the small cottages that pack the shores with clam-loving people.
Back in the early 1990s, however, the thick beds of quahogs and soft-shells in the town's Broad Marsh River were closed to shellfishing for years, thanks to high fecal coliform counts from runoff that poured off the streets directly into the river. That prompted Sawyer, who also samples the waters of five nearby villages, to dangle a carrot in front of town officials: Remediate the runoff, get the bacteria counts down, and he might be able to open 65 acres (26 hectares) of shellfish area.
Mark Clifford, head of the town's public works department, took the bait, and with help from the Buzzards Bay National Estuary Project, and a few state and federal grants, he began tearing up the old roads along the river and installing sand galleys—big perforated concrete boxes that work like septic tanks for the roads. It wasn't easy. He had to stick the things down between old gas, water, and sewer lines, and deal with a whole new wad of paperwork to get the grants. But the galleys worked. By 1998 the entire river was open to shellfishing.
"All you need to do is get that first inch of water into the sand galleys," Sawyer says, "because that contains the most contaminants and fecal coliform. You get that filtered out, you're ahead of the game."
After that it became something of an addiction. Gifford has installed hundreds of the galleys in Wareham, with the neighboring town of Bourne following suit. Such galleys didn't work for the heavier soils of nearby Marion, so that town put in a man-made wetland instead, with the help of hundreds of volunteers. What used to be a ditch that routinely had fecal coliform levels in the thousands is now a meandering stream full of rushes and boulders, where counts are barely detectable at the outfall. The water is so clean you can eat the clams at the end of pipe.
Just last year, Wareham bit a big bullet and spent more than 20 million dollars to upgrade its sewer treatment plant to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus levels entering the watershed, the prime drivers behind algal blooms. Though sewer bills almost doubled, the town now has the cleanest wastewater treatment facility in the state.
"We're picking away at it," Gifford says. "We couldn't have done it without state and federal grants, or the help of guys like Greg."
It's a never-ending process, especially as the population grows. Last year New England suffered its worst red tide outbreak in decades, prompting the closure of nearly 80 percent of the Massachusetts coast to shellfishing. It was the first ever occurrence of red tide in Buzzards Bay. Though a natural phenomenon, the algal bloom was exacerbated by last year's heavy spring runoff. But Sawyer believes that there is a growing public awareness in the area about the importance of protecting aquatic resources. Recently a Boston multimillionaire bought a "McMansion" in a nearby town and filled in a small marsh so his manicured lawn could run down to his tennis court. He wanted to donate $400,000 to the town as mitigation money to go build another salt marsh elsewhere. "The town said no, you will put back that marsh exactly where it was," Sawyer says with a chuckle.
And perhaps that's the ultimate lesson of the U.S. and Pew oceans commissions. Aside from a slew of ocean policy reforms recommended by the two commissions, ultimately if we want safe beaches, abundant wildlife, stable fisheries, healthy seafood, and vibrant coastal communities, says Oregon State's Jane Lubchenco, we're going to need a new ocean ethic.
"There's no single silver bullet that's going to fix the problem," Lubchenco says. "The problems are complex and come from things we've been doing on land for a long time that are coming back to haunt us. But we need to understand that oceans are both valuable and vulnerable, and they