Cost-shifting occurs when an industry sheds a portion of its production costs onto others to maximize profits.
Its most egregious form occurs when these costs are borne of others through the degradation of their health and safety, especially so if these costs are thrown off on future generations.
Such is the case of poultry farmers in the Potomac Highlands, especially those industrial-scale operations that are known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
According to the EPA and conservation organizations, these operations are polluting the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay with levels of animal waste that are killing aquatic life in downstream waterways.
One pending lawsuit charges that these CAFOs should be regulated through new wastewater discharge permitting processes.
And from a lay perspective, that seems reasonable as established science holds that the nitrates, phosphorus and bacteria from waste runoff results in algae blooms that wreak havoc on entire ecosystems while literally poisoning the waters for humans.
What is debatable is to what degree smaller upstream farms pollute tributary waterways and at what scale of operation there should be new regulations.
After all, it could be argued that the greatest threat to both the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay is not from airborne dander and fecal matter, but from a wide range of little understood chemicals known as endocrine disruptors.
According to the EPA, "Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) ... interfere with the production, release, transport, metabolism, binding, action, or elimination of the natural hormones in the body responsible for the maintenance of homeostasis and the regulation of developmental processes.
"EDCs can include man-made chemicals such as pesticides and plasticizers, natural chemicals found in plants (phytoestrogens), pharmaceuticals, or hormones that are excreted in animal or human waste."
One study by the prestigious Endocrine Society found links between exposure to EDCs and human "male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity and cardiovascular endocrinology."
The science is complex, but EDCs are also the chemicals believed to be responsible for causing mutations in fish in the Potomac River and may also be causing similar destruction in other wildlife habitat near and in the Chesapeake Bay.
In addition to the aforementioned sources, EDCs are also found in a dizzying array of household cleaning and personal hygiene products, and virtually all of these chemicals end up in wastewater with their synergistic effects combined downstream simply unknown.
And as is the case with most American rivers, the Potomac has a series of outdated sewage treatment plants situated between intakes for outdated municipal drinking water systems for downstream communities.
So bad have EDC and other pollutants become in the Potomac River that it tops the list of most endangered rivers in the United States by the watchdog American Rivers organization (that also lists the Coal River No. 9 in southern West Virginia because of mountaintop removal mining).
This is history repeating itself for in the decades preceding the 1960s the Potomac River was so heavily polluted that President Johnson stated that it was a "national disgrace."
Efforts then began in earnest to limit industrial and sewage wastewater pollution, and with measurable success came the Potomac's informal designation as the Nation's River.
And fittingly so, as the river has held a prominent place in early American commerce and industrialization, paving the way for George Washington to select her banks to situate our "federal city."
The Chesapeake Bay was once so abundantly rich in natural resource diversity that Native Americans once held that the estuary contained fully 10 feet of bottom-dwelling seafood.
Today it has large swaths of aquatic dead zones.
But just as the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay were once partially mitigated from earlier threats of pollution so, too, can we redouble our efforts to protect them from new sources of chemical threats that we all bear some level of responsibility.
Rather than countenance Congressional efforts to gut the Clean Water Act, every West Virginian should instead vigorously and actively support the strengthening of existing laws that govern wastewater pollution and insist on the adoption of industry best practices.
Further we should support the expansion of EPA regulatory oversight of EDCs while individually learning more about the household chemicals we use and how we may alternatively modify our own behavior.
The Potomac may be our National River, but it should also be regarded as West Virginia's River, too, for we are its origin, what with the North Branch beginning at the Fairfax Stone and the confluence with the South Branch in Hampshire County, and home to a massive portion of its watershed.
As West Virginians, let's take the lead and assume greater responsibility for a cleaner Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.
- Swint is a commercial property broker and political activist from Charleston.