Connecticut, the Environmental Wasteland?
Talk to the Animals

March 20, 2008

All over Connecticut, big, furry beasts are stirring.

It’s time for the state’s black bears to rouse from their winter slumber. With an estimated population of only 30 in 1992, as many as 500 specimens of Ursus americanus now reside in the Nutmeg State. Once confined to towns in the northwest corner, in the last few years bears have been spotted in every Connecticut county. (The animals are so ubiquitous, there’s even talk of following New Jersey’s lead, and allowing limited hunting.)

The state’s ursine health is probably the most striking example of just how hospitable Connecticut is to species that were once driven from the state -- and even a few species that were never indigenous.

The fisher is another impressive mammal that now thrives here. (Members of the weasel family, fishers are reclusive, smelly, agile, and aggressive. They eat just about anything.) Coyotes, once unknown east of the Mississippi River, began moving into Connecticut in the 1950s. Half a century later, their population is in the thousands -- and they’re making a habit of preying on suburbanites’ small pets. In 2002, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) determined that moose had moved back to the state. There’s evidence that bobcat numbers are up. The effort to reintroduce wild turkeys to Connecticut has perhaps been too successful, with the birds’ numbers now in the tens of thousands.

While it’s controversial -- government wildlife officials say it just can’t be -- many residents of the most remote parts of the state insist that mountain lions have returned. An abundance of deer and smaller animals provides ample food. And more and more credible witnesses have reported encounters with felines that are simply too big to be bobcats. (At a recent standing-room-only lecture on the subject in Somers, nine hands were raised in the response to the question, “How many here have seen a mountain lion in Connecticut?”)

There’s no debate over the reappearance of the nation’s symbol. Bald eagles vanished from the state in the 1950s, but by the early 1990s, they were back. The goal of 20 breeding pairs set by the Northern States Bald Eagle Recovery Plan was met in 2005. According to the DEP’s Council on Environmental Quality, “the eagle is representative of species, especially predators, that share similar habitat requirements: large areas of relatively undisturbed land near rivers or lakes where the birds can find adequate supplies of prey that are -- very importantly -- only minimally contaminated.”

The fortunes of the osprey, a big bird that winters in South America but comes north between March and August, have also undergone what a DEP biologist called “a wonderful reversal.” In the 1970s, only six nesting pairs were left in the state. Thirty years later, hundreds of male and female ospreys are observed raising their chicks.

How can this be possible? How, in a state hand-wringing elites constantly tell us is being overrun by “sprawl,” can wildlife be thriving in Connecticut?

Contrary to the claims of politicians and activists who peddle the notion that “big box” retailers and “McMansions” are turning the Nutmeg State into a unsightly wasteland, Connecticut is full of forest. “Few places on earth,” a U.S. Forest Service official observed in 2001, “are likely to have as many people living among so much forest.” Sixty percent of the state is forested -- quite a change from a century ago, when nearly every tree had been chopped down for fuel and farmland.

Other Connecticut environmental indicators are strong, too. In the last two decades, the DEP’s index of six air pollutants (carbon monoxide, ground-level ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide, particulates, and sulfur dioxide) improved by over a third. Sewage overflows into the state’s rivers have declined substantially. The reports submitted by water utilities to the state’s Department of Public Health show 99 percent compliance with purity standards. And nine out of every 10 inspections performed by the DEP finds industrial facilities in “full compliance” with environmental mandates.

In Connecticut, as in the nation, pollution has declined so precipitously -- and wildlife has rebounded so strongly -- that environmental bureaucrats and hysterical eco-activists have turned their attention to imaginary problems. (For example, the inevitable calamity of “global climate change,” the “farmland crisis,” and the “risks” from pesticides and genetically modified foods.)

Connecticut will always face environmental challenges. And few would argue that government should play no role in improving air quality and keeping water supplies safe. But if the Nutmeg State is the ecological nightmare alarmists claim it is, someone forgot to tell the animals.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. He can be reached at muskacolumn@cox.net.

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