A growing sense of stewardship also manifested itself in more aggressive public surveillance of conditions along the Potomac and the threat of legal action to rectify concerns. The most notable organization undertaking this work was the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, founded in 2000. The group was part of a national and international network of water-keeper organizations dating to the 1960s, when commercial and recreational fishermen in New York organized to protect their way of life and save the Hudson River from industrial pollution. Like many groups, it sought enforcement of existing pollution laws governing the Potomac watershed through media campaigns, lobbying, and litigation. It also had a broad range of environmental concerns, including erosion and runoff, illegal dumping of trash and toxics, the loss of wetlands, air pollution, and changes in fish populations.102
In 2003, Ed Merrifield became the first Potomac Riverkeeper. A former chiropractor and longtime sailor of the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay, Merrifield joined the organization after reading a history of the river-keeper movement and being inspired by its argument that people had enjoyed the legal right to fish and enjoy waterways for centuries in America. As president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network from 2003 to 2012, Merrifield focused on fund-raising, building a leadership team, and cultivating alliances with Washington-area law schools and private law firms to secure discounted or pro bono legal aid to reinforce civic action. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network had nearly three thousand members across the watershed, including at least a couple hundred trained “riverwatchers” who regularly surveyed the Potomac’s water quality and investigated illegal pollution.103 Other groups also undertook this work, including the Potomac Conservancy and Arlington’s local government.104 As one environmentalist explained, “I think the stream monitoring program is a really good way for volunteers to take ownership for helping the environment.”105 In addition, the work of nonprofits like the Potomac Riverkeeper in some ways compensated for the decline of government monitoring over the past fifteen years that was a product of neoliberalism.
What distinguished Potomac Riverkeeper from other groups was its tenacity. Speaking to a Washington Post reporter about the group’s philosophy, Merrifield noted, “If it’s illegal pollution, we go after it as fast as we can to tell them you have to stop. We use all legal means necessary. We won’t back down.”106 Mike Bolinder, the current Anacostia Riverkeeper, affirmed Merrifield’s commitment to swift action and holding polluters accountable as an inspiring model of activism: “The thing I learned from Ed that will make me a better riverkeeper is never accept weasel words like ‘showing improvement’ or ‘making progress.’”107
In its first few years, the group’s biggest success was compelling the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to clean up lead pollution from an old shooting range. In 2003, it sued the agency for allowing members of the National Capital Skeet and Trap Club to operate a shooting range for half a century on state land that discharged lead bullets in and around the Great Seneca Creek, a tributary of the Potomac. The case generated a media investigation that publicized the CWA violations the group had identified. Four years later, the lawsuit was settled in an agreement that required the Maryland agency to clean up the lead pollution and to conduct testing for the next fifteen years to ensure its success.108
The Potomac Riverkeeper Network also publicized the impact of endocrine disruptors on fish and public health. Appearing in dozens of news stories and testifying before a congressional committee in 2006, Merrifield and the organization discussed how products like soaps and medications, cleaning agents, lawn fertilizers, and plastics contained toxic chemicals that sparked massive fish kills in the Potomac near West Virginia and produced intersex bass, rendering male bass as female. These chemicals in the Potomac also posed a public health concern for Washington-area residents, who received nearly 90 percent of their drinking water from the river, because they could not be filtered out using existing technologies and because the EPA does not yet regulate them. The public health impact of endocrine disruptors is not yet clear; however, there is research suggesting that these chemicals, for which there is no known safe level of exposure, can produce developmental, reproductive, and neurological conditions, with the greatest impact on fetuses and newborns.109
The Potomac Riverkeeper Network’s greatest success to date has been its litigation against a familiar foe: the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. In February 2014, it joined the Environmental Integrity Project and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to sue the WSSC for dumping millions of pounds of sediment, aluminum, and other pollutants into the Potomac in the process of purifying and supplying drinking water for homes and businesses in suburban Maryland. Their claim argued that excessive amounts of pollution harmed fish, underwater grasses, and other aquatic species, although the public health impact was not clear. These activities, along with failure to properly monitor pollutants, had been ongoing for nearly twenty years and were in violation of the commission’s federal water control permit. To add insult to injury, the commission’s permit had expired in 2002 but was continued without being updated. The Maryland Department of the Environment joined grassroots activists in their lawsuit to get the WSSC to clean up its act.110
Twenty months after the lawsuit was filed, the parties negotiated a consent decree. The WSSC agreed to make long-term improvements to comply with the conditions of its permit and relevant federal and state clean water policies. The terms required WSSC to overhaul or replace its water filtration plant, to immediately undertake $8.5 million in pollution control projects at the existing plant, including $1 million to reduce sediment pollution, better monitor pollution, and find ways to minimize the need to discharge pollution. The improvements will reduce pollution by over two million pounds in the first year and greater amounts in later years. The agreement also included $100,000 in civil penalties to be paid to the state. According to the agreement, which has to be ratified by the U.S. attorney general and the U.S. District Court, the WSSC would have up to ten years to comply or face an additional $1 million in fines.111
The legal director of Potomac Riverkeeper noted, “the work of restoring the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay will take a big step forward with this agreement,” as the settlement “ensures that years of unmitigated pollution discharges into the Potomac are at an end.”112 In thinking about how to use the money, an attorney for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation recommended farm conservation projects in western Maryland to prevent runoff at its source rather than trying to clean it up later.113 The WSSC’s general manager, however, worried about the high costs of long-term improvements to the existing plant, built in the 1960s, which he estimated could exceed $100 million.114 This was in addition to the commission’s struggle to pay for $1.5 billion of work to reduce sewer spills required under a 2005 agreement as well as undertaking an independent program to replace aging water pipes. Forty years after agreeing to rein in its pollution, the WSSC continued to face sharp criticism for polluting the Potomac, suggesting that perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today, the Potomac is healthier than it has been in decades. In part, this is due to the CWA and federal lawsuits to force compliance with cleanup and water quality standards. The bulk of the river’s cleanup, however, has been the result of state and local action on the ground. Upgrading wastewater treatment facilities was the primary way in which public officials at these levels have acted to clean up the Potomac. Environmentalists during the 1970s contested these efforts out of concern that they would catalyze growth, which they did, although the scale of the Potomac’s pollution certainly warranted cleanup. The emergence of nonpoint pollution as a more significant issue in the late 1980s accentuated the importance of efforts to curb runoff through land use regulations that reduced erosion, preserved open space, or limited the scale of development. Unlike the command-and-control regulations of CWA, improving land use planning and restoring local habitats has varied in scope and success across communities.