by Andrew Cohen and Chance Cutrano

This past October, the Sierra Club and 159 other organizations — environmental and fishing groups, public health organizations, Native American tribes, water agencies and others — asked President Joe Biden to direct the EPA to establish discharge standards for ships' ballast water that comply with the Clean Water Act (CWA). For 50 years, the agency has refused to do so. 

Ships take up, transport and discharge ballast water to adjust for changes in cargo loads. This ballast water distributes between distant ports a wide variety of marine and freshwater organisms as well as human and animal pathogens, which have damaged ecosystems and fisheries, harmed economic activities, and sickened and killed people. 

For 36 years after the passage of the CWA, EPA illegally exempted ballast water discharges from regulation. The courts eventually forced EPA to regulate these discharges, only to have EPA issue regulations that were unlawfully lax. Ordered to revise these regulations to comply with the CWA, EPA is instead proposing to re-issue the same regulations that the court already rejected.

The letter to the President is the latest act in a national campaign to persuade EPA to obey the law on ballast discharges, which began in the Bay Area earlier this year. The San Francisco Bay/Delta ecosystem is the most invaded estuary in the world, and ballast water is the dominant vector introducing new species into the Estuary. Despite those facts, the 2022 Estuary Blueprint, the San Francisco Estuary Partnership's (SFEP) five-year plan for managing the Estuary, neglected to mention the need for effective ballast water regulation. SFEP is a program created and funded by the EPA. 

As reported in the Yodeler, the Bay Chapter, the Loma Prieta Chapter, Sierra Club's BAY ALIVE campaign and 28 other environmental organizations and leaders asked SFEP to add a statement on the need for ballast water regulation. SFEP refused, arguing that it would be inappropriate for the Blueprint to imply that EPA should adopt stronger regulations if EPA didn't want to, even though all editions of the Blueprint produced before the courts forced EPA to regulate ballast discharges had called for actions "to develop, implement, and enforce stringent regulations to control discharges of ship ballast water."

Around that time, Bay Chapter Chair Chance Cutrano raised this issue with Congressman Jared Huffman, and the Congressman agreed to write EPA. Encouraged by the Sierra Club and scores of other organizations, 33 members of Congress, including 13 from California, cosigned Congressman Huffman's letter. Delivered in late June, the letter asked EPA Administrator Michael Regan "to establish ballast water discharge standards that conform with the Clean Water Act," noting that EPA's failure to do so had "resulted in billions of dollars of environmental damage in marine, estuarine, and fresh waters of the United States."

It is startling to reflect that if EPA had just regulated ballast water discharges in the 1970s as the CWA directed, most of the ballast water invasions in the Estuary would have been prevented.

The EPA has not responded to the June letter from House members, nor has the President yet responded to last week's letter. Further efforts will no doubt be needed. Sierra Club members can help by writing EPA and their elected representatives and insisting that EPA follow the law and establish ballast discharge standards that comply with the Clean Water Act.