Holding government to account: empowering citizens and ensuring clean water.

• Position: CLEAN WATER & HEALTHY FORESTS

Ensuring clean water in New England and protecting the region's forests requires holding government accountable for its actions--or lack of them. Over the last year, CLF has been taking the government to task throughout the region.

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In some cases, such efforts by CLF involved making sure that state governments were living up to their obligations to abide by good science and law in its actions. CLF filed comments on rules, pursued lawsuits over permits that did not protect natural resources adequately, and alerted lawmakers when legislation ensuring public access was needed. In other cases, when state governments were failing to do their work, it meant CLF stood ready to bring these instances to the attention of federal agencies.

In Vermont, CLF successfully pushed for passage of a bill granting citizens and conservation groups the right to know about, to comment on, and, in some cases, to intervene in, environmental enforcement settlements reached with polluters. Using its status as a region-wide organization, CLF is leading a coalition pushing for implementation of stricter permit limits for sewage discharges in the Blackstone River and is opposing the state of Massachusetts's efforts to delay those limits, which would come at the detriment of downstream neighbors, including in Rhode Island. At the same time, CLF is demanding that the U.S. Dept. of Energy give full consideration to all of the impacts of Canadian hydropower and the proposed massive Northern Pass power line through the forests of northern New Hampshire.

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Over the 12 months, these issues each posed unique difficulties and required unique solutions. But they had one very important thing in common: demanding good government and protecting a healthy environment went hand-in-hand.

HIGHLIGHTS

* As part of its effort to get up-to-date permit limits for the Upper Blackstone Water Pollution Abatement District, CLF has opposed efforts by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection to delay their implementation. By claiming there needs to be more study of the effect of the district's discharges--as much as 54 million gallons a day--on the Blackstone River and Narragansett Bay, the state was attempting to delay those more protective limits.

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* During Tropical Storm Irene, protections for Vermont rivers and streams disappeared nearly as quickly as some of the state's iconic covered bridges. CLF worked to...