This summer, we here at the Spokane Riverkeeper have undertaken a “River Journey”. Simple enough in name, it offers endless implications for the meaning and relevance to us as people, as advocates, as a community, and as an organization. The Journey is a descent down the Spokane River and it has been designed to communicate several things to folks who watch the River and care deeply about its future.
First and the subject of this blog, the Journey is in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Clean Water Act (CWA). We wanted to take a trip and use our travels to discuss the dramatic nature of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and its impact on the Spokane River. Passed in the same year as the first Earth Day, the CWA ensured that laws would be passed limiting the amount and type of pollution that could be legally dumped into the waters of the State and by extension, your Spokane River. Raw sewage was a common and persistent form of pollution that was dumped into the River by cities that simply used the waterway like a piece of infrastructure to rid themselves of garbage. From Coeur d’ Alene Lake to the Columbia River, the River was forced to make this unpleasantry disappear.
I recall standing in the Peaceful Valley section of the Spokane River, below downtown, when an elderly gentleman stopped my water gazing, and we began to chat. He regaled me with stories of foul-smelling, toilet-papered willows during times of low water. The river struggled with dissolved oxygen issues due to the excessive nutrients poured into it by municipal sewers and storm drains affecting aquatic life. But when the nation passed the CWA, all jurisdictions had to face the issues and begin to meet “Water Quality Standards”. These are our “gold” standards that determine when a waterway is legally polluted or legally clean. While Spokane passed municipal bonds in the 1950s to improve sewage treatment, it was after the CWA passed and federal monies became available that Spokane received pass-through grants to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant. The city put in place secondary treatment in 1977, the year Abba topped the charts with Dancing Queen. In fact, my father-in-law, a wastewater engineer, and official at the Washington State Department of Ecology (WDOE), was in town at Riverside, for the ribbon-cutting of that event. But very importantly the third-party lawsuits were and are included as a provision of the CWA under the permitted pollution program. This means that if citizens with standing could show harm due to permitted pollution, they could sue the offender under the CWA. Famously in Spokane, Carl Maxy represented the first plaintiffs against the City for polluting their River and harming their legal, designated “uses”. They won a settlement of $245,000 and showed that the new legal system worked.
Since then there have been numerous lawsuits to protect your waterways. In 2015, the Spokane Riverkeeper went to work using the CWA to litigate over a deficient clean-up plan in the Hangman Basin. We prevailed, signed a landmark settlement with the WDOE, and the Hangman is now a Statewide High Priority watershed where millions of state funds are being funneled into the watershed for restoration, and laws to protect clean water are being upheld.
We have sued Darigold over stormwater violations and they have cleaned up their act, removing pollution from your River and awarding a large cash project fund to the Coeur d’Alene Tribe for clean water projects to contribute to the restoration of the upper Hangman Creek Watershed.
Currently, we are engaged in several pieces of CWA litigation that continue to 1) provide substantive solutions to removing pollution from our rivers and 2) send a strong signal and message to those who pollute our Rivers – it is not OK, and the public river-users will not tolerate it.
Notably, the Sierra Club has just finished a novel suit that has been underway for ten years. As a result, the Spokane River will now get a newly minted clean-up plan for PCB toxins.
The Clean Water Act is a marvel of legal protection. We celebrate it and look to the future to improve and begin initiating new legal understandings that will help protect our waterways, our fish, our aquifer, and our Spokane River.
On June 1st, this year, Spokane Riverkeeper began our River Journey at Coeur d’ Alene Lake. On that beautiful, rainy day we paddled with friends to Post Falls and Q’emiln Park. We have finished nearly 40 miles of the journey, with nearly 60 more miles to go. We celebrate those who came before and, we celebrate that in their wisdom, they saw that we needed a new set of laws to protect human health and River health.
The CWA uses an early English legal paradigm to protect human uses… it is based on the concept of property ownership and infringement on that “ownership”. This is now an outdated paradigm and will need to be improved and/or replaced with a larger, more inclusive vision in the future. Our view is that we will need to move passed an “anthropocentric world view” that is silent on the sentient nature of the River and lacks legal standing for the waters and creatures who should have a right to health and existence apart from their utility to humans. Nature, herself, should have legal standing, legal recognition and rights in our courts. More to come on this subject.
So, get out and love your river. We will certainly be out there on the Spokane River paddling, grokking your River – Our River – and letting the thousands of beautiful and wondrous sights and smells of the Spokane River inspire us to think about the bold new social and legal horizons to work towards in recovering and protecting your River.
