My favorite word is "hibernacula." It means the secret, warm, hidden places in which animals hibernate - caves, burrows, muddy pond bottoms. I first encountered "hibernacula" in David Carroll's Swampwalker's Journal, and though I could guess at its meaning from its context, it was a word that intrigued and pleased me so much I just had to look it up.

Carroll, if you are not familiar with his work, is a naturalist-artist-writer who has, since he was a young boy, been fascinated with wetlands and all their flora and fauna. For decades, he has spent spring, summer and fall swampwalking near his home in Warner, observing and recording what he sees. In winter, when the wetlands are frozen, he turns those notes into books.

On the day I looked up hibernacula, I already owned the first two books in Carroll's "wet sneakers trilogy," The Year of the Turtle and Trout Reflections. But these I had bought mostly for their remarkable pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations (his formal training is as an artist). Swampwalker's Journal, however, though smattered with evocative black and white illustrations, had no gorgeous, lush watercolors to tempt me to part with the paltry funds in my book budget - I had borrowed it from the library.

But as I pulled the dusty dictionary down from the shelf and began paging through the H's, I decided that Carroll deserved a place on my list of "Favorite Writers Whose Books I Actually Buy and Keep and Reread." Swampwalker's Journal had gorgeous lush language. With it, Carroll had made a breakthrough as an author, securing himself a spot in the pantheon of great nature writers, right up there with Henry David Thoreau and Loren Eiseley. And so, when I had to return S.J. to the library, I headed straight over to Gibson's and bought myself a copy.

Indeed, Swampwalker's Journal proved to be Carroll's breakthrough book. In the 10 years since its publication, he's been honored with award after award. It was recently announced that he'll be receiving the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Hampshire Writers' Project in November. Perhaps even more exciting (well, at least more high-profile) was the news that his latest book, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook, has been nominated for the 2009 National Book Award in Nonfiction.

To my mind though, Carroll's most significant honor was his 2006 MacArthur Fellowship, a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant given to people of extraordinary talent and vision in hopes that they will "exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society." The so-called "Genius Award," a MacArthur grant frees up its recipients to do their important work without having to worry constantly about money.

I commend the MacArthur committee for its prescience in selecting Carroll for this honor, for we need his work now more than ever. The last decade has seen a devastating erosion in the enforcement of the Clean Water Act at both the federal and state level. As documented by New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg in his "Toxic Waters" series (projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters), in the past five years, fewer than 3 percent of the more than 500,000

recorded water pollution violations have been punished in any way.

Duhigg and his researchers took on the Sisyphean task of collecting, through freedom of information laws, all the data available on water pollution violations from every state in the nation - a task that the Environmental Protection Agency had never even attempted. In a move that I imagine will earn the Times and Duhigg the everlasting gratitude of environmentalists if not a Pulitzer Prize, every last speck of this information has been posted at the Times website (for New Hampshire's data, go to projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters/polluters/new-hampshire).

$86,000 fine

According to Duhigg, in New Hampshire for every 100 violations, 9.1 enforcement actions have been taken (the EPA is responsible for enforcement of federal clean water laws in New Hampshire, while the state Department of Environmental Services is in charge of state law enforcement). Several large fines have been levied by the EPA for the most egregious violations. For example, in June 2006 Little Bay Seafood in Newington, which had a long history of pollution citations, was finally hit with an $86,000 fine for releasing anhydrous ammonia and zinc cyanide into the Piscataqua River.

Locally, environmental groups have also documented the precipitous decline in the health of our waterways. In October, Environment New Hampshire released a report showing that tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals are dumped into New Hampshire's waterways each year and calling on the EPA to step up enforcement. The Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership just published a study revealing that 11 of 12 environmental indicators, such as toxic contaminants in shellfish, are moving in a negative or cautionary direction.

Closer to Concord, the jury is still out on the new scrubber being installed at PSNH's facility in Bow on the Merrimack River. Mandated by the Legislature partly in response to a spike in mercury pollution in New Hampshire's waterways, the scrubber is designed to keep most of the mercury and sulfur emitted by the coal-burning plant from getting into the atmosphere.

The problem is, post-scrubbing, PSNH will wind up with a whole lot of water with all that mercury and sulfur, in addition to many other toxins, dissolved in it. According to Siemens, the company designing the new scrubber's wastewater treatment system, PSNH will install state-of-the-art technology to remove as many of these toxins as possible.

The solid sludge that remains after cleaning the scrubber wastewater is, according to Times reporter Duhigg, extremely hazardous and has caused serious pollution problems in some parts of the country. It is typically stored in containers or put into landfills specially designed to keep the chemicals in it from seeping out into ground water.

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