These questions were formulated by Lindsay Hollister for Fred Tutman, Patuxent Riverkeeper…
1) What part of the Patuxent River does your work occur on?
I work in partnership with citizens and groups and others on the entire length and breadth of the Patuxent river. That’s seven counties and 110 linear miles.
2) Do you feel the “D-” state of the river deserves?
I cannot speak authoritatively about the science (because I am not a scientist) but I have no reason to doubt what researchers and water testers have told us and what our common sense observations reveal. D- Represents a sub-standard grade where the river is failing to sustain its natural ecology and is dying before our very eyes. Rivers where oysters and crabs cannot live and propagate, where in some places, swimmers might get sick if they come into contact with it, and where dead zones happen earlier each year. This really should be a societal embarrassment that one of the richest countries in the world with all of our technological resources and skill can spend 40 years and billions of dollars trying to clean up the waterways and still find ourselves worse off than ever. I don’t believe in “contradictions” only in flawed premises. So something is deeply broken and the hypocrisy embodied in these dreadful outcomes should give any thinking person a real cause to consider that we’ve been had, or that we’ve been kidding ourselves, or we’ve been doing too much of the wrong stuff. So yes, D- is deserving and especially if it gets people’s attention about a huge public health and economic catastrophe in the making. We’re failing the river, and the planet and we are failing ourselves.

3) What do you see day-to-day that are your biggest concerns to the Health of the waterway?
I see a regulatory ethic that is cracked. People think that we need to just pass good laws and not enforce them. Or we think that if we give a line item to a problem that it will be solved, or that we can see progress if we just work on the symptoms without touching the actual problems. For example expending our energy on restoring watersheds without ceasing the causes that wrecked them in the first place. Are we nuts? On one hand I see the public utterly confused by the political process surrounding the conflicting reports of progress and the notion that all any of us need to do is the stuff that is easiest, like cutting back on lawn fertilizer, installing rain gardens or picking up beer cans at a stream cleanup once a year. Sure these are good things, but they are not solutions. People have lost sight of these water resource issues as truly societal and deeply systemic problems. We wait expectantly each year for report card grades hoping to see an upturn when all we have had is steady downturns for years. We look at the short term fix instead of the long term trend. Meanwhile, I have yet to meet a waterfront landowner who did not think that their own role in the degradation of the river was minimal simply because they love and care about the river personally. The overall sense is that everybody wants to fix what is wrong with the river and nearly everybody thinks it somebody else’s fault or somebody else’s job. I don’t lump people of good faith in the same category with the corporate bad actors. I do not equate a guy with a 40 pound bag of lawn fertile in his garage that he uses once each spring, with the corporate giant profiting from a coal burning power plant who breaks the air quality laws nearly every day. These are different levels of culpability and it is a disservice to tell someone that we can’t blame the willful bad actors without also blaming everyone else at the same time. We are not all in the same boat really, that is a fantasy. Some are trying to commandeer it or sink her. And sure we all have a role to play but some roles are greater than others. We have to help people cut through the nonsense and the doubletalk and the spin and to learn to see exactly what is happening here. People need to see how their precious resources are being spirited away or privatized under their noses and challenge the crazy presumption that we are supposed to take it all in stride or as unavoidable outcomes (i.e. the natural outcomes of property rights). My biggest concern is that people seem to be losing the skills to spot the lies, or to apply their critical reasoning skills to attack deeply imbedded problems and implausible excuses. Many have accepted the biggest falsehood of all, which is the fiction that a pollution establishment worth billions will relinquish its grip on unsustainable practices and non compliance if we just educate them or try to get them to see the light, or continue to ask them for grants to do trash cleanups in our neighborhood. As water quality advocates the challenge is that we seem to be fighting battles just to keep people engaged, informed and focused enough to fight back and get what is rightfully their due. It’s hard to fight for people’s first amendment rights to free speech if half the time (or far less than half the citizens) won’t even stand up and say something on their behalf! The environmental is sick but our ability to deliberate as communities and interested parties have badly withered and need rejuvenation.

4) Do you see signs of hope that the state of the river might be Improved in the future?

I’d like to think so. Waterkeepers are fighting actual on the ground battles instead of arguing over the science. There are some communities and citizens that are doing great things and wining courageous fights. We don’t hear enough about these gains. Meanwhile, the new Obama Executive Order related to the Bay holds some promise and has some real possibilities if carried to its ultimate potential to have the Federal government back the efforts by citizens and others to hold the State and other regulators to their obligations to protect these waterways. It may produce a new governmental culture where we can make terrific changes in the courts, and in other ways to at least slow down the long slide toward water quality oblivion. Right now even diligent regulators operate in a climate of indifference and paper pushing. If we push the right papers and fill in the blanks properly you can get a permit to pollute. My gosh. Yet we have some good policymakers in Maryland who mean well but we need to hold them to some vision or benchmarks for improvement or change otherwise we will just get more of the same in spite of their best intentions. For example, merely the acknowledgement by the new administration that the Federal facilities on our waterways need to clean up their own act and actually comply with the “Clean Water Act” provides the incentive for citizens to push for major reforms and tangible gains. The government can’t do it alone, it will take an informed citizenry with real advocacy skills to overwhelm the advances that special interests have achieved over the rest of us in order to get away with stuff. Steal little, steal big, that’s the standard mode for these others. Our economy for too long has been built on plunder and the natural resources are often a casualty. We fight wars over oil, dump fly ash on people who can’t fight back, blow the tops off mountains to get the coal within, knock down old growth forests to build shopping malls, create government funded slums leaving the occupants without open space, clean water and with high mortality rates, we build urban center next to Wildlife Refuges, while paving and demolishing our coastal areas, filling the waterways with silt and mud-and then offer the bankrupted watermen watermen jobs hanging sheetrock or something. It’s a brutal cartoon where the environmental and human mayhem is like real life vaudeville act, and yet it’s real and the stakes are the biggest ones around. Too many of us think these business interests are just making a living or working for their stockholders but if you follow their deeds and their policies to a natural conclusion anyone can see that some are criminals and some are socio-paths who are all the more dangerous because they look just like the rest of us sometimes. Economic tough times may have given pause in some ways to the terrific tide of waste and despoiling of our waterways. In hard times maybe people will throw away less, find ways to conserve and economize as a result. We have to make do with what we have, and get better value from our scarce resources. We have to advance the idea, the principle that while we have to heal the economy we don’t need to get back to the inflated (and inflationary) growth rates and the status quo of before. Our social and economic policies were unsustainable and so, SURPRISE! So is our environment. These economic setbacks are an opportunity for us to right size and reformulate the way our society deals with its remaining resource wealth. Conversely, our opponents will use these times to leverage more public fear and control so they can grab more for themselves. It’s a battle, with real opponents and real stakes. If anybody things we can fix what’s wrong with our water supply and not make at least somebody angry or inconvenienced in the process then they are deluded.

5) What are your recommended top 3 ways politicians can spur the Improvement of the river?
I don’t accept necessarily that the politicians alone are the cause for the root problems. We do have some ethics problems in some quarters and I think the burden should be very high nowadays on elected officials to conduct themselves in a transparent manner. We need to be quick to censure misconduct and collusion where it exists because it implicates everyone, including those who are innocent of any wrongdoing. Bad apples ruin the whole bunch. I think we as voters and major stakeholders need to hold our elected officials to really stringent stands or ethical conduct and to deliver far sighted environmental thinking. While people often vote for legislators they like personally, the truth is we have some very likeable but awfully vapid legislators at times who have done little or nothing to advance the cause of the environment. Granted it is hard to sanction in a practical way electing people on a single platform such as the environment, but that is a fundamental one. I’ll wager that people who have strong environmental credentials are mostly pretty solid and progressive in most other areas as well. Let’s not elect people based on their fuzzy sympathies or platitudes but for their vision and courage to lead by offering concrete platforms and solutions we can hold them to. We can’t afford to elect by “right think” anymore. Those who are progressive and forward looking on the environment will likely be good problem solvers, and consensus builders. That’s what we need to look for. People who look like us, who don’t give offense and who are simply “electable” are just not good enough. So the environmental movement needs to nurture and mentor new champions toward this aim. We need a new crop of people willing to answer the call to public service who are not just saying the things we like them to say, but instead are capable of governing and who are electable. I think our new President in the White House may have great credentials as a grassroots organizer from earlier in his career. Too many people have overlooked that this President and his personal call to public service reflects a journey from the ground up in terms of basic community service and grassroots activism in his past . That’s where our leadership incubators or the next crop of great leaders should come from. Not privilege and party patronage and special interests, or soft money but by, for and of the people. We need to work really hard to build the present and next generation of leaders and hold them to high and higher standards of statesmanship. We need problem solvers, not nest builders.