Earth Day is a time to reflect on our connection with the natural world. In Spokane, we live with the Spokane River. As the Riverkeeper, I offer this reflection in 2023.
Laws express and define our relationships and values. In 1972, sweeping federal legislation called the Clean Water Act signaled a national shift toward valuing diverse human uses of our waterways. Examples include recreation and aesthetic enjoyment. Fifty years on, the CWA has provided regulatory frameworks to improve the health of the Spokane River and keep water flowing over the falls for all to enjoy. It delivered a dissolved oxygen cleanup plan that provided the legal teeth to impel five large dischargers to significantly clean up their pollution. Latah Creek has also seen improvements because of the CWA.
Despite these successes, the CWA hasn’t gone far enough in that it hasn’t changed our fundamental relationship with rivers or their lives. We continue to see their ecosystems failing. The goal of the CWA was to end water pollution by 1987. That has not happened because we continue to value and protect rivers as owned possessions to exploit for industry and enjoyment. Because of this utilitarian approach, rivers remain vulnerable to new threats.
First, we don’t consider the rivers we live with when we are developing chemicals that drain through our households and streets to those same rivers. Researcher G. Allen Burton recently opined in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, University of Michigan: “The United States Toxic Substances Control Act is ill-equipped to properly evaluate whether significant environmental concerns are associated with this flood of chemicals into our marketplace.” Neither is the CWA able to cope. We are confronting PBDEs (fire retardants), dioxin, pharmaceuticals and plastics, to name a few chemicals, entering our river. In fact, last year Spokane Riverkeeper discovered chemicals called PFAS in the Spokane River below the pipe at a wastewater treatment plant. These do not affect our ability to swim , but they do harm fish and the river’s ecosystem.
Second, the weakening of the CWA itself. The government and society have now rigged the CWA to allow flexing the standards so that polluted water can be legally discharged. For example, two years ago in Washington state, when confronted with a new, protective standard regulating toxic PCBs coming out of their wastewater pipes, five wastewater dischargers applied for “discharger variances.” Variances are exceptions that loosen state standards for polluted wastewater to be discharged. Fortunately, the applications were shelved – for now. But they could come back to life and haunt the efforts to remove toxic pollutants from water and fish.
Finally, the CWA has fallen short because the legal assumption is that rivers are common property whose human “uses” are protected. Common human uses like fishing and swimming are pitted against lucrative, and legally protected economic uses like dumping pollution and generating power. Under economic pressure, pollution limits (for listed pollutants) and temperature become acceptable, and flexible norms rather than ecologically worst-case, red-lines. Society simply determines (sometimes with an economic finger on the scale) how many insults can be visited upon a river, and then approves those insults with a permit to protect the liability of the permittee. Our legal system does not ask us to be responsible to ensure the healthiest Spokane River possible. This upside-down framework has normalized degrading the life of rivers. It is time for a paradigm shift that builds an additional legal framework based on being in right-relationship with rivers. A relationship that is not merely utilitarian and ownership-based but recognizes and values the life of rivers for their own sake. Our reflection this year is that the Spokane River is in fact, a community member.
As such, Spokane Riverkeeper has signed the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers reinforcing our belief that the Spokane River should be healthy for its own benefit. In that spirit, the next 20-year horizon for this community should be to meet the 1987 CWA goal of ending water pollution and afford the river a legal right to exist and thrive.
Laws reflect values. Our relationship with and our value of the natural world should reveal that nature is not separate from us. Nature does not exist solely as a toy, for power generation or as a sewer. The natural world is our community and deserves our responsibility as such. Happy Earth Day.
Jerry White Jr. is executive director of Spokane Riverkeeper.