A guardian for troubled waters.

• Author: Kennedy, Jr., Robert F.
• Position: Waterkeeper Alliance and waterways protection

As far back as I can remember, I was drawn to nature. My father brought us to some of the most beautiful and wildest places in America, to go mountaineering and whitewater rafting. He understood these were part of the public trust, a critical part of America's legacy--that the source of our values and our virtues and our character as a people was the American wilderness, and we had an obligation to protect it for the next generations.

If you look at the statements by my father and my uncle Jack, both of them were strong environmentalists. President Kennedy came down against his own Department of Agriculture to side with Rachel Carson when USDA and the Farm Bureau were trying to discredit her. He appointed a special commission to independently investigate the claims in Silent Spring, and that commission in 1962 produced a report that completely vindicated Carson and criticized the USDA. Then, in 1963, President Kennedy worked with [Senator] Gaylord Nelson on the concept for the first Earth Day.

The Waterkeeper Concept Begins

My father took a trip up the Hudson River in 1965, and said that the pollution he saw was a disgrace to our country and we had to clean it up. The next year, a coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen mobilized to rescue the Hudson from its polluters. That was the beginning of the Waterkeeper concept. I got involved with the Hudson River Fishermen's Association in 1984. I already had a law degree, but I went back to night school at Pace University and got a Master's degree in environmental law, so I could be a better advocate for the Association. When I graduated, some of the professors came to me and said, "We are interested in starting a litigation clinic, and would you like to run it?" I said I'd do it on one condition, that this could happen in conjunction with the Hudson Riverkeeper as the client.

It's worked out very well. On the Hudson, we've won more than 300 legal actions and we've forced polluters to spend about $3 billion in remediation. Today, the Hudson River is an international model for ecosystem protection. And our Waterkeeper Alliance now has 99 programs located across the country, and even in Mexico and Central America. It's really a kind of environmental "neighborhood watch" program, a citizens' patrol to protect communities and the waters they depend on. Most Waterkeepers use boats, ranging in size from canoes to research vessels, to patrol their waterways.

A new Waterkeeper program, through the Conservation Law Foundation, has just been approved for Lake Champlain. That's been a really important priority for us. For one thing, it's one of the places in the United States where there's a very strong sense of community and commitment to sustainability. Vermont has probably the best environmental ethic of any state in the country. And CLF is the most effective environmental organization in New England. [It] pioneered the litigious approach to enforcement and environmental protection that is such a strong component of the Waterkeeper philosophy.

We have more than 300 applications to become part of our program. We don't go out and recruit people; this is a grassroots, bottom-up organization. One of our first programs, and a very successful one, has been the Casco Baykeeper in Maine. In the late 1980s, this bay was on the brink of becoming one of the most polluted water bodies in New England. The Friends of Casco Bay, along with their tenacious Baykeeper Joe Payne, have managed to reduce substantially the flow of sewage, toxic chemicals, and industrial discharges. Our Long Island Soundkeeper, based out of Norwalk, Connecticut, recently initiated a hatchery program to restore an oyster population that was nearly wiped out by the MSX parasite. In Massachusetts, we have Waterkeepers now for Buzzards Bay and the Housatonic River. One of the biggest fights at the moment is in the backyard of the Narragansett Baykeeper. Pacific Gas & Electric's Brayton Point Station in Somerset, Massachusetts, is the largest, dirtiest power plant in the region. It's been responsible for an 87% reduction in fish in the Mount Hope Bay estuary, and this summer the EPA finally...