It's easy to create a market for exploiting the environment, especially when the individual contribution to the whole of the exploitation is small. Sadly it's very difficult to create a market for preservation, especially when the individual impact is just as small.

I ask this non-rhetorically: how the hell does anyone turn that on its head, especially without government involvement?

The Ocean Research and Conservation Association is a nonprofit that's trying to promote the visibility of this problem (hypoxia caused by harmful blooms). They're doing this through the use of very low cost in situ sensor networks [1] and broad spectrum toxicology assays [2]. It's headed by Dr. Edie Widder [3], the scientist who got the first footage of the giant squid on last year's Discovery Channel cruise.

In combination with measuring physical/chemical parameters, they can automatically measure biological parameters of the environment. They've done this by miniaturizing and cost-reducing bathyphotometer [4] technology.

To the best of my very limited knowledge nobody else is looking at the problem this way. Everybody else measures physical/chemical parameters, and either infer what's happening to the biology, or they do point or small area biological sampling on an infrequent basis. And because it's so damn expensive there's always a big tradeoff between temporal and spatial resolution. With techniques like that everything is aggregate and there's little ability to tie specific action to specific consequences, let alone enforce any kind of feedback loop.

One of ORCA's biggest goals is to create a realtime water health gradient map that's promoted to and accessible by the general public. In a perfect world this would be used on the news right alongside the weather report.

I hate to cast a light of negativity but frankly I doubt they'll ever pull this off. Not because of lack of technical ability or people with the passion to do the work, but because of lack of stable funding. What's crazy is their technology is downright cheap, especially compared to the magnitude of the problem. If they could ever pull together the funding to engineer for manufacturability and do a full volume run, it'd be orders of magnitude less expensive.

I freely admit that I suck at marketing, so the best I can offer is a shameless plea. If this problem is important to you do something to solve it. Read up on nutrient limiting and how it impacts hypoxia. Find a polite way to tell your neighbor that their super green lawn might be sucking the life out of the waterways. Spend a bit more to buy your meat and produce from farms that limit runoff. If you have loose change, donate to organizations like ORCA or perhaps to someone more local to you.

1: http://www.teamorca.org/cfiles/kilroy_technical.cfm 2: http://www.teamorca.org/cfiles/fast.cfm 3: http://www.ted.com/speakers/edith_widder.html 4: http://www.teamorca.org/cfiles/biolum_study.cfm

Disclosure: I'm a former ORCA employee, but otherwise I'm no longer affiliated.

Edit:

Bathyphotometer link [4] refers to a larger, more expensive model Edie designed for the US Navy. See edited [1] for reference to smaller cost-reduced version.

Some sources of more information, for those interested:

Summary of the mechanisms behind hypoxia (site also includes data sets and other information): http://www.gulfhypoxia.net/Overview/

NOAA Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Watch: http://www.ncddc.noaa.gov/hypoxia/

Interactive map of eutropic and hypoxic zones worldwide, w/ data set from 2011: http://www.wri.org/project/eutrophication/map

This article doesn't mention it, but I've heard the suggestion that far more of the runoff is from over-fertilized suburban lawns than from agriculture.

At least commercial agriculture tends to be a bit more concerned about wasteful inputs, etc. (At least where subsidies haven't distorted it too much.)

But I see some incredibly excessively perfectly green lawns which are such a waste of resources unless you're playing golf or lawn bowling.

You actually wanted:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2013/20130618_deadzone.h...

http://www.gulfhypoxia.net/News/default.asp?XMLFilename=2013...

I'm curious if the dispersants used in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 may have been a contributing factor in addition to fertilizers and agricultural runoff? Or should I consider the Deepwater Horizon aftereffects water under the bridge by now?

Is something like this an accepted tradeoff when using fertilizers for farming?

so will the farmers get the shit sued out of them like BP did?

Now we know how things affect the environment, I'm curious on what people will do about it.