Spring 2000
Clams? A New Community Organizing Tool!
Richard McMurtry
Clams may be tiny, but they can sure organize! In fact, they have tremendous potential for advancing community awareness of toxics in the environment.
These little organisms have long rhythmic Latin names like, po-tam-a-cor-bu-la or cor-bic-u-la or ma-co-ma. The names sound like Roman senators on their way to the forum.
They are NO SLOUCHES! When deployed in the Guadalupe River watershed as SVTC plans to do for several months next year, they will filter hundreds of gallons of creek water through their bodies, extracting food and toxins such as deadly PCBs. Luckily, they are resistant to PCBs and so can survive exposure as they function as inexpensive biological monitoring devices. By placing them at several locations along the creek, they can tell us where PCBs are entering the system. Pinpointing problem areas in this way, we can work with governmental agencies to sample creek sediments and look for land-based sources such as PG&E substations or machine shops or railroad and bus transformer repair facilities. These sources need to be cleaned up so that the ongoing discharges of PCBs to our creeks and creek creatures are stopped.
The research is one piece; fostering community activism is another. Initially, we will be working with students from Pioneer High School, located on Guadalupe Creek. Students will visit the creek repeatedly, deploying the clams in plastic net bags, returning several times to clean algae off the bags, and retrieving the clams for laboratory analysis. Some will develop a sense of connection to the livingness of the creek and the imperative to rid it of toxins – toxins that compromise the life of the creek and poison the fish that people catch and eat.
The students will also be involved with community education. They will attend meetings of local watershed agencies, describing their research and pleading the case for ACTION to clean up the creek and prevent further discharge from industrial and commercial sources.
It may be possible to build on our successes with this pilot project and expand this work to include other community groups – churches, neighborhood organizations, and service clubs – located along the various reaches of the river and its tributary creeks. To the extent that citizens make a personal visceral connection to the creek and develop an awareness of the toxics issues, some may choose to become active in efforts to reduce toxics usage and promote toxics cleanup.
Our monitoring work in the watershed will be input into the California Regional Water Quality Control Board’s recently initiated baywide effort to reduce PCBs in fish. With citizen suits and the enforcement authority of the federal Clean Water Act fueling the state efforts, we hope this process will be effective at addressing PCBs.
Richard McMurtry is SVTC’s Environmental Engineer
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