At What Price Progress?
Mobile’s explosive growth may damage the areas fragile ecosystem.
By Chip Drago

Like the weatherman forecasting rain for the garden party, Dr. George Crozier knows his voice is not the most popular one in Mobile these days.
            Amid the applause over Mobile’s recent successes in the economic development arena, Crozier, among others, has cautioned that breakaway growth imperils the very quality of life that makes the Mobile/Baldwin area an attractive place to work and live.  
             “I’m seriously worried about it,” says Crozier, a marine biologist who recently retired as executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. “We may see an economic boom, but I’m afraid we may flush the goose that laid the golden egg right down the toilet. There is great jeopardy here in terms of our quality of life and it worries me greatly.”
            For their part, community business leaders insist that balancing growth with environmental protection is at the forefront of the strategy for bringing new industry to the region. Chamber of Commerce director Win Hallett says the environment doesn’t get short shrift these days, even among economic development interests. He points to the 10-year-old Envision Coastal Alabama program that has sought to bring together disparate elements in the region with four goals—education, environment, economic development and equity. “The environment is so integral, so closely tied to our quality of life that we could hardly afford to put it in jeopardy,” said Hallett. “Why would economic development interests care about the environment? You live here, obviously, so you care about it. And it’s not just lip service.”  
            A hopeful but skeptical Crozier says it would be unconscionable to surrender the gains in improved water quality here over the past 40 years. The Mobile Bay area has made steady progress toward corralling pollution and improving water quality since the passage of the Clean Water Act about 40 years ago, says Crozier. But that trend is already shifting.
            “We had done a decent job of improving water quality; keeping at bay the problems we believe follow urban sprawl and human development. But we’re losing habitat. It starts with a [residential development] deal and we build septic tanks. That works until there are so many [residents] and we can no longer maintain them adequately and we see the water quality decline. So we build a sewer system and the sewer system sparks human habitation and we lose more habitat and we sprawl and water quality goes down again.”
            Crozier points to development in the Chesapeake Bay and Tampa Bay areas as examples that local officials and others might learn from. “The curve of improving water quality has already flattened,” he explains. “We’ve been on the verge of nutrient problems because of nitrogen, phosphorous, and certainly dirt from poor construction practices. It worries me if we continue this way. If we don’t change our ways of managing growth, we will be where we were 50 years ago. The water quality will be degraded, and the source [for much of it] is automobiles. The Mobile Bay area has got to get away from trying to pave its way out of congestion. I hate the idea of this new bridge [on I-10 over the Mobile River] and doubling the width of the bay way.  You’re just asking for trouble. That’s operating under a 1950’s mentality.”
            Visitors to the now-cleared site of the double Thyssen-Krupp steel plants (one carbon, the other stainless) to the north have expressed awe and a better appreciation for its scope and potential for change on many levels.
            “The TK footprint, wow, it’s an incredible footprint,” says Crozier. “I floated the idea to TK and asked if they had considered green roofs, hurricane-proof green roofs. (The TK operation will have up to 7 million square feet under roof.) At our last meeting, we talked seriously about harvesting rainwater. That acreage [3,500] is going to collect a lot of water.”
            Casi Callaway, executive director of Mobile Bay Keeper, said her gripe is less with the industries locating in the Mobile Bay area and more with the state of Alabama, which values jobs more than the environment. “We are slowly bringing protections down to the level of actual public health,” she said. “Plants like TK are getting in under the wire of [strengthened regulations], especially with a state like ours. Alabama’s environmental regulations make Texas look like California.”
            “TK will not have to abide by the new particulate rules,” Callaway continues. “The regs are not written yet, so TK will be able to emit particulates and dusts at the old levels. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management is part of the economic development apparatus.”   
            Callaway adds Thyssen Krupp will be a good corporate citizen, of that she has little doubt. However, she says, they will only be as good as the law requires them to be. And she admits that TK is an easy example to criticize because of the nature of its operation.
            EADS and the tanker project get much higher scores from Mobile Bay Keeper. “EADS is much cleaner, with a higher jobs-to-pollution ratio,” Callaway explains, “Better paid, higher quality. It’s great. [Citizens are] right to insist [both companies] do better. That we haven’t is disappointing.”