EcoHealth Score Card for River Raisin: No Reason to Celebrate!

The River Raisin Watershed Council recently reported the results of the EcoCard Scoring by The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science as a success story. From my personal experience as a Biology Professor teaching Freshwater Ecology for the last 15 years, I do not find a score of 54% acceptable, and neither is the label "Moderate" or a C grade justified with a low percentage like 54%. In fact, in most college grading schedules, anything below 60% is a failing grade of E or F. As in education, weakening a meaningful scale just because a peer group scores evenly low is not an accurate quality measure.

Figure 1: Details of the 2024 scoring for the River Raisin. Source: The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, https://ecoreportcard.org/report-cards/river-raisin/ 

The dire situation of the River Raisin and many assessed watersheds and waterbodies becomes even more alarming when we disentangle the arbitrarily lumped categories of the scoring and exclude metrics that do not directly correspond to the environmental health of the water body, such as local ownership, affordable housing, beach access, walkability, household income, river economy, and even air quality. As much as these categories are essential in the quality of living, diversity, equity and inclusion, and environmental justice, they distract from even lower scores of metrics directly reflecting water quality, such as 17% for bacteria, 12% for nitrogen, and protected lands, and low scores around 20% for turbidity leading to widespread smothering and embeddedment, low tree and forest cover and high heat vulnerability and risks when consuming fish from the river.  

Sure, we need some good news in all the doomsday scenarios of climate change, societal disconnect, manipulation of information, genocide, and rising totalitarianism. However, celebrating severe impairment and shortcomings as success keeps us from realizing that we are in a severe environmental crisis and need to address the root causes of the issues, which require systemic changes rather than small voluntary efforts of individuals. We need to curb the influx of fertilizer from corn and soy monocultures and runoff from industrial cattle and hog farms by converting industrial farming to regenerative and agroecological practices rather than trying to reduce the issues with voluntary buffer strips and precision agriculture. We must transform our energy-intensive economy and lifestyles depending on fossil fuels to energy-conserving, humble lifestyles, and efficient economies based on clean, renewable energy instead of trying to reduce our footprints using personally owned electric vehicles and solar panels while maintaining or increasing our high-energy demanding lifestyles.