GBH Daily: Into the bog

🌤️Warm, with fewer clouds and highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 6:25 p.m.

Twenty-three years after American troops deployed to Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military withdrew its last troops from the country yesterday. 

Being sent to war in Iraq “showed me the scale of what it looks like when the United States gets involved in these conflicts,” Andrew Coville, a Marine who grew up on Cape Cod, told GBH’s Gitana Savage. “You take a 19-, 20-, 21-year-old kid who’s barely left home and now you’re in the Middle East in this war-torn country, it’s a massive culture shock. It really opened my eyes to the reality of America’s footprint in the world.” Coville released two books telling the stories of American veterans and is working on a documentary about his friend, Nick Xiarhos, who died in Afghanistan. You can hear from him and more Iraq war veterans here.

Four Things to Know

1. Catholic church abuse investigation: Investigators with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office found evidence that 270 Catholic clerics abused almost 1,000 children in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester. The investigators have been looking into these cases since 2019.

But only three of the cases were referred to local district attorneys so far, and criminal charges have been brought in only one case. Some cases are decades old, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said. Some of the accused priests have died, and some cases are not recent enough to prosecute under current state law. “These legal limits do not change what the investigation found,” Campbell said. “They do not make the abuse less serious, and they certainly do not diminish the harm that was done to children and survivors.”

2. Is your college closing? State officials want private colleges to give more notice if their leaders believe they might shut down. The state has had two schools announce closures this year: Anna Maria College in Paxton and Hampshire College in Amherst. Both schools closed because they did not have enough money to keep operating.

“All of this is really meant to be in service of making sure that students aren’t stranded, that faculty and staff get a reasonable notice period by which they can seek other employment and that communities have the least negative impact possible,” Gabrieli said.

3. Worcester rallies against bullying: Worcester held a rally for high school students this week, telling them the district wants to protect student-athletes from the racist online harassment that members of the South High School girls’ basketball team faced after a tournament in Andover.

“You have stepped onto the fields, courts and tracks to represent your school and the city of Worcester with pride, skill and heart, only to be met with cowardly racist slurs from the sidelines or posts on social media,” schools Superintendent Brian Allen told 700 students this week.

4. Pilgrim’s nuclear option: After the state’s Department of Environmental Protection said the owners of the defunct Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth cannot release 800,000 gallons of industrial wastewater into Cape Cod Bay, the plant owners are considering taking their case to federal court. 

Going to federal court would allow the company, Holtec International, to play by federal laws, not state laws. Right now the decommissioned plant contains water contaminated by both radioactive and non-radioactive materials. Treating the water removes some contaminants, but not all of them. In the meantime, some of the water is evaporating into the air.

The latest tool to reduce nitrogen pollution: restoring retired cranberry bogs to natural wetlands

Take a look at the photo above, which CAI’s Amy Kolb Noyes recently took in Marstons Mills. On the left is a working cranberry bog. On the right is a bog restoration project. “We have a nutrient pollution problem on Cape Cod,” Barnstable Clean Water Coalition Field Operations Manager Luke Cadrin said. That nutrient is nitrogen, which trickles (ahem) out of human urine in septic systems. Too much nitrogen can kill eelgrass beds and affect the rest of the local ecosystems.

Barnstable Clean Water Coalition bought 64 acres of cranberry bogs in 2023. Now they’re running experiments to see what they can do to remove nitrogen from the environment. “We’re gonna have a shallow marsh with mostly cattails,” Cadrin said. “We’re gonna have a deep marsh with more like pickerelweed and things like that. We’re gonna see side-by-side exactly how much [nitrogen] each attenuates and then have a better idea of which does best.”

“Hardly anything is as successful at removing contaminants of any kind as wetlands,” said Zenas Crocker, executive director of the Barnstable Clean Water Coalition. “Wetlands, wetland plants, the biological microscopic activity that happens in wetlands — nothing works better at removing everything from heavy metals to pharmaceuticals to nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus.”

They’re also trying other methods, like ponds in which nutrients and contaminants can settle before they have a chance to make their way to the bay.

“We’re going to have a combination of ponds,” Crocker said. “And if you look at a regular wastewater treatment system, there are settling tanks. And we’ll have wetlands, and the wetlands will do a lot of the biological activity that would be occurring in a municipal plant using other approaches. But we can do that naturally.”

You can see more photos from Kolb Noyes’ tour of the bogs here.