WETA Television

Glen Echo Sign (left). Credit: Elizabeth Grove

Web Extras: April 2009

WETA Television & Earth Day 2009

WETA Television celebrates Earth Day with the broadcast this month of more than 15 television programs about the natural world, environmental change, and green technology. Earth Day is on April 22.

Of particular interest to our local community is a new program from Frontline called "Poisoned Waters." The program focuses on the Chesapeake Bay and can be watched online and on-air beginning April 21. Click below to watch a preview.

You'll also want to get young people in the spirit with videos and music with an environmental theme — including the very catchy Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — on the Share the Earth page on PBSKids.org.

Programs airing on WETA Television

More than three decades after the Clean Water Act, iconic American waterways like the Chesapeake Bay are in perilous condition and facing new sources of contamination. In FRONTLINE’s Poisoned Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith examines the growing hazards to human health and the ecosystem.

Smith reveals startling new evidence that today’s growing environmental threat comes not from the giant industrial polluters of old, but from chemicals in consumers’ face creams, deodorants, prescription medicines and household cleaners that find their way into sewers, storm drains, and eventually into America’s waterways and drinking water.

In Poisoned Waters, Smith speaks with researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who report finding genetically mutated marine life in the Potomac River. In addition to finding frogs with six legs and other mutations, the researchers have found male amphibians with ovaries and female frogs with male genitalia. Scientists tell FRONTLINE that the mutations are likely caused by exposure to “endocrine disruptors,” chemical compounds that mimic the body’s natural hormones.

The USGS research on the Potomac River poses some troubling questions for the 2 million people who rely on the Washington Aqueduct for their drinking water.

“The long-term, slow-motion risk is already being spelled out in epidemiologic data, studies—large population studies,” says Dr. Robert Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “There are 5 million people being exposed to endocrine disruptors just in the Mid-Atlantic region, and yet we don’t know precisely how many of them are going to develop premature breast cancer, going to have problems with reproduction, going to have all kinds of congenital anomalies of the male genitalia, things that are happening at a broad low level so that they don’t raise the alarm in the general public.”

Reversing decades of pollution and preventing the irreversible annihilation of the nation’s waterways, however, will require a seismic shift in the way Americans live their lives and use natural resources, experts say.