Act of Imagination

In fall 2007 three founding members of Waterkeeper Alliance — John Cronin (former Hudson Riverkeeper), Terry Backer (Long Island Soundkeeper) and Andy Willner (New York/New Jersey Baykeeper) — sat down with Waterkeeper to discuss the founding and future of the Waterkeeper movement.

Andy Willner: There was a reason, primarily John’s vision, that we decided to come together as Waterkeeper Alliance. People should know something about what that vision was and why we did it.

Terry Backer: If you skip over how John came to Hudson Riverkeeper and the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, then you skip over the heart of what Waterkeepers are all about — people and their sense of place, their sense of ownership.

John Cronin: Yes, but I can’t take credit for it. The idea that came out of the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association and Bob Boyle, who wrote about it in his first Hudson River book in the 1960s called Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History. Tom Whyatt was the first Hudson Riverkeeper in 1972. My first job on the Hudson was for the Clearwater organization. I worked with Tom on a project called Pipe Watch in 1973 investigating polluters to see if they were complying with their brand new Clean Water Act permits.

The Hudson River Fishermen discovered that when you called EPA or state authorities and asked for someone to talk to about the Hudson River, there was no one to talk to. They decided they needed their own person, somebody to pick up the phone and answer questions about the river or go look at a problem. Because the movement grew out of the minds of fishermen, it grew out of a strong sense of place and ownership.

Backer: It’s a sense of collective ownership. No one thought they owned it themselves, but they thought that as a community they owned it. I don’t think anyone said, “It’s mine.”

Cronin: It is a little bit of both. The idea behind the Public Trust Doctrine is not that anybody can do anything they want. The idea is that nobody can do anything that alienates anyone else. So, in that sense, it is a community right, but it is also an individual right that we’re not supposed to be tromping on.

Willner: It comes from a tradition in common law that your neighbors are not supposed to devalue your property by their actions. Waterways are public property. So when the public agencies, the trustees, don’t take care of the property then it is up to the public to take a stand. It’s a fairly straightforward concept.

Backer: But it comes back to the same theme. I live here and if I don’t have a right to do it, who does? If I don’t have a responsibility to do it, who does?

Willner: Responsibility is a big part of this. Not only are we enforcing our rights as citizens to access clean water and edible fish, we are also advocating for the public’s right to clean water. It’s pretty straightforward stuff.

What’s interesting is that a lot of us, without any training, managed to raise money and hire good people. We learned how to expand our influence and become more sophisticated politically. I was lucky because I had two great Waterkeepers close by to follow. So you guys were my model. I just did what I could to make my thing look like theirs, though New York Harbor is very different from the Hudson, which is very different from the Sound.

Cronin: When the Riverkeeper program started, all we had were all the horrors around us. We didn’t have any model.
I was at the Mohonk Preserve [New York] two weeks ago and up in the wall above kids’ drawings was a sign that read “pondkeepers.” Pondkeepers are school children who are looking after ponds in the Shawangunk Mountains. That was the Hudson Riverkeeper model. Basically, what we did is say nobody else is doing this, it’ll be a lot of fun to do, so let’s just get out there and see what happens. You always want to take advantage of the experience of programs around you, but I think our success largely comes from a strong sense of adventure and a belief that the unexpected would direct us more than the expected. We had a strong sense of ownership.

Willner: When I started doing this I just assumed that we were going to change the way that the harbor was managed. That in 20 years we would be able to swim in the harbor; that we could save 8,000 acres of the Meadowlands. People thought I was nuts. When I asked established environmental leaders for help they would say, “Why bother?” They wrote off Newark Bay, the Passaic River and the Gowanus Canal because those are not places that anybody cares about. So I said, “Fuck you then, I’ll do it.” I really didn’t have many people to go to for help, I could try John and Terry.

Backer: And we’d say, “How the hell do we know?”

Willner: Exactly. The best advice I ever got from these two was, don’t bother me anymore, just go figure it out. There are some things that we know work, having lawyers helps, having a good relationship with scientists helps. On the other hand, I was the one with experience running boats on the harbor.

Cronin: One of the things that the early programs had in common was a tight focus on issues that were not already being tackled. So for us, directly confronting polluters, collecting evidence about violations of the law, responding to citizen complaints, these were things that weren’t being done. One of the most wonderful days was when we held a news conference at the SoNo seafood restaurant in Norwalk, Connecticut. The place was packed with media and lobstermen and fishermen. We announced our lawsuits against sewage treatment plants on Long Island Sound. It was earthshaking not just because of the evidence we had collected and the constituency that cropped up to support us, but because it was simply a new way of doing business — to confront polluters and bring lawsuits.

As obvious as it might sound now, the things that Andy is talking about were not part of the agenda of environmentalists at that time. What distinguished the Waterkeeper was our belief that it was time for hands on, direct action.

I got a phone call from Andy saying he wanted to come up and talk to me. He laid out this big idea, which took all of about a minute and a half to explain, that there should be a New York/New Jersey Baykeeper. It seemed obvious. He didn’t have any organizational plan or any money. Derry Bennett, the director of the American Littoral Society, and Riverkeeper supported Andy until he could get his program up and running.

Andy: I had read an article by Derry in The New York Times about protecting the bay.

Backer: There’s a subtle difference; I had never read The New York Times. First time I ever opened it was because someone said, “Hey Backer, you’re on the Metro page.” Andy approached John because he wrote me a letter and I threw it in the garbage. Then he wrote me another letter and I threw it in the garbage. He started calling but I didn’t call him back. Finally he just showed up. And I said, now that you’re here I guess you’re serious.

Andy: You said, go do things the best way for the harbor. That was the best advice that I ever got. I was left to my own devices. And we must have done something right because within a year I had a boat and, if you could call it that, a salary.

Cronin: Terry emerged out of nowhere. We got pulled into doing this work on sewage treatment plants on Long Island Sound in Connecticut. We held a press conference and immediately started talking about a Long Island Soundkeeper. Somewhere over the course of that work it became very obvious that Terry Backer should be the Soundkeeper. Terry emerged as a natural born activist who was willing to take on the commitment without a treasury or organization, with a boat that came to us under questionable circumstances.

Backer: I think I ended up having to pay for that boat, eventually. But it underscores the interconnectedness of these three bodies of water. The fish that move through here, the striped bass, many times they are the same individual fish. The people share a maritime history. So it was a natural fit for us.

We were dealing with a very dramatic human impact. We had sewage treatment plants with thousands of sewage violations. Those violations translated into shellfish closures, which translated into hundreds of men standing on the dock not being able to feed their families. Long Island Sound is an amusement for some people, they kayak, fish, have fun. To us it has sustained generations of people’s lives. It was not just fun for us.

Cronin: Remember the very first newspaper ad we took out? It was the weekend of the Norwalk boat show, full page —

IF POLLUTION PUT MAYORS
OUT OF WORK,
LONG ISLAND SOUND
WOULD BE CLEAN.

Backer: That bought me friends and enemies. They said we were ambulance chasers; we were just looking for headlines. But the public seemed to understand that we were talking about people’s lives. The truth could not be hidden.

At some point we ended up with four or five Waterkeeper groups. But the hallmark of the Waterkeeper movement is an individual stepping out in front and saying take me first. It’s not that anyone has to do this on their own, but someone needs to be the lightning rod, be the voice, be courageous. That’s why the public grabbed onto the idea. We aren’t a nebulous group. We are human beings whose life is intertwined with the environment; members of the community who not only counted for themselves but stand up for everyone. That’s why it works.

As we started to get more Waterkeepers we started to notice a lot of common things. We immediately realized we could do two things for someone in Puget Sound or San Diego: we could share our experience of what worked and we could support each other morally. Because when you stand out in front it can be a pretty scary place. It was Cronin’s idea to form an Alliance.

Cronin: It was the National Alliance of River, Sound and Bay Keepers.

Backer: I’m talking to John one day and he says, “Well, you should really get a computer.” And I said, “John, I really don’t know anything about computers.” I used to sit in that old oyster house at night with a mechanical Remington typewriter, a guy who couldn’t type, couldn’t spell and certainly couldn’t construct a grammatically correct sentence. I sat up there pecking away with two fingers. I remember there was some mayor who said to me, “You know Backer there’s a reason they say that you can’t fight City Hall.” I looked up and said, “Listen pal, with a box of 20 cent stamps and a typewriter I’ll make your life miserable.”

Cronin: The people who start Waterkeeper programs make substantial sacrifices to do it. It was risky, we didn’t know if we were going to have a job in six months or a year. As a result, maybe even more important than dedication and commitment, was a sense of fun; a sense of being a joyful warrior. That was very characteristic of all the early programs. There wasn’t a lot of worrying about success or failure. It was more, let’s go out and clobber the bad guys.

Andy: I remember the first time I stood up at a public meeting and said, “I’m Andy Willner and I’m the Baykeeper.” The place went silent. “What the hell is that?”

Cronin: In those days when Terry introduced himself as the Long Island Soundkeeper or Andy as the New York/New Jersey Baykeeper, it was the first time anyone had ever heard the work “keeper” attached to water. When we first went through the trademark process for our names there were some challenges, but it was easy to prove that the first time “Riverkeeper” entered the American lexicon was on the Hudson River. But it sounds like something that has been around for generations. What’s terrific is when you fast-forward to 2008 it has mainstream acceptance.

Backer: To me it seemed like almost too much to claim to be. I called John and asked him if I should use my title and he says, “Well yes, you have to.”

Cronin: That’s like calling yourself the pope. It’s a mouthful. At the heart of that dilemma is also the success of the idea. It’s citizens declaring that they have the right to appoint someone to be their eyes and ears, to be their witness, to represent them and to enforce the law. It is one of the simplest, most elegant ideas to ever come out of the environmental movement.

Andy: I’ve had very few people in the community question the title and organization. It was the agencies who would say, well who appointed you? And I would say, essentially, I appointed myself. But after a couple years I had a posse, I had people who backed me up.

Backer: When you do the job right, and you don’t exaggerate — and usually you don’t have to because the truth is bad enough — you take on an air of credibility that people prescribe to government. Why they would prescribe it to government I don’t know, but they do.

Cronin: I can’t imagine what it was like taking two paragraphs from Bob’s book, which is what started this whole thing, and making a movement out of it. Looking back, it’s remarkable.

If there’s one lesson I learned from my years at Riverkeeper, it’s that every great idea, every great movement, every great revolution starts out with an act of the imagination. The beginning of anything great that has ever happened is that someone first imagined it. So you have to imagine yourself as the Waterkeeper. Imagine your waterway clean. If you can imagine it, that’s your first step. Then don’t quibble with your imagination.

Willner: So where will Waterkeeper Alliance go from here? The selfish answer is that it is up to someone else. We form the basis of the tradition, but we can’t tell the next leaders where to go. Waterkeeper will fail or succeed, and I think it’s going to be extraordinarily successful.

Backer: If in ten years it’s the same as it is today, then I would suspect that it’s a failure. But my sense is that there’s a guiding principle: It’s about people’s lives; it’s about making this a better place.

Something that’s happened over 20 years is that while my sense of place here on Long Island Sound remains as strong as ever, it now extends to small villages in Mexico, in Colombia, in Russia, in India, in China. My sense of place, after getting to know those human beings and their struggles, has become much more global. I will never stop doing this, because my blood is in this water for 300 years, but my sense of place has grown. I belong to all those places and what I can do for them I will.

Cronin: History judges the success of revolution by whether the revolution becomes the mainstream. The challenge for any revolutionary idea is whether it can still have the imagination and courage it had when it imagined the revolution in the first place.

In the 1960s we had a visionary group of people who imagined the river that we have today. The challenge that we face is what river do we imagine now? Are we willing to imagine zero discharge of pollutants? Are we willing to imagine a commercial fishery that’s open again? Are we willing to imagine a technological revolution with information delivered about the river just like the weather is delivered? The big challenge in a revolutionary movement like this one is identifying the new acts of imagination that will form the legacy we leave to the next generation of Waterkeepers.

Today, in Ulster County, New York, there are school kids who want to be Pondkeepers and in some ways that is the biggest success of all. Because when all of us started we didn’t think that what we were doing would become mainstream, part of the education of a schoolchild. But now it’s happening. So the biggest success of all would be to have the moral legacy Terry talked about, the activist legacy Andy talked about. That gives me extraordinary hope for the future.