Ross Freeman, American Rivers

Ross Freeman is staff scientist at the Northwest regional office of American Rivers, a conservation organization that restores and protects river systems nationwide.

I can't recall when my fascination with flowing water began, but I know that my early childhood years involved a lot of muddy riverine creations in a neighbor's hillside flowerbed. We'd scrape out a channel, put "towns" alongside, and float hapless boats down the miniature river. Instream flows were provided by the seemingly inexhaustible garden hose. The neighbors didn't seem to mind.

Fifteen years later, during college, I elected to pursue a geology major because it seemed the most comprehensive and holistic natural science degree. Geography might have been the ideal choice, but my small liberal arts institution didn't offer it. Apart from the eccentric professors, the highlight of the degree was frequent weeklong field trips traversing the Southwestern U.S. After learning about a particular geologic event or concept, we'd go on the road to see it firsthand. Over the millennia, rivers and inland seas had a particularly strong influence on the rocks that we see in the Southwest today. After enough time baking in the relentless desert sun, I came to see a river not only as creator and restless renovator of the landscape, but also as integrator of all the ecological processes occurring across it. Few living things on the planet need no water at all. Rivers became my fascination ...

A river represents everything that occurs above it. If upstream users are dumping pesticides and car batteries into the water, we will see the effect downstream. If caring stewardship is the norm, all life downstream will benefit. This becomes more significant when you realize that 60 percent of this country's population gets drinking water from lakes and rivers. Most of those same residents are downstream of other people. That can mean a lot of costly water treatment -- or the cheaper alternative of simply treating watersheds sustainably. That might involve strict pollution standards, limits on clear-cut logging, reduced use of pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture, or land development that avoids the use of sprawling concrete, which funnels polluted runoff into rivers. (See our recent report on this issue: "Paving Our Way to Water Shortages.") A handful of cities across the country have managed to protect their drinking water supplies by preventing development in the source watershed.

But what if that's not an option? Then we turn to the regulations that protect our water. The Clean Water Act is the strongest law we have in that arena, but thanks to some incredibly shortsighted leadership in D.C., it is currently under attack. No surprise, it's rather a complicated story! For 30 years the Clean Water Act has led to great improvements in the health of our waters by preventing unregulated pollution, wetland filling, and general destruction. Before the act was passed, raw sewage was often piped into waterways and Ohio's Cuyahoga River even caught fire several times!

But earlier this year, the U.S. EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers announced that they plan to reassess what types of water bodies are covered by the Clean Water Act due to a recent Supreme Court decision. In the meantime, their field staff were told to stop protecting so-called "isolated" water bodies. In combination these two actions could lead to a worst-case scenario in which 20 percent of the remaining wetlands outside Alaska, and 60 percent of small streams, lose protection. And during the past few years of this administration, it has seemed that the worst case often comes true.

I've been working for months with D.C. colleagues and a variety of other nonprofits to craft a response to this threat. During the official comment period on the proposed changes, this coalition helped generate many of the 137,000 comments, as well as an authoritative 150-page legal and scientific response. Eighty-five stream ecologists wrote a joint letter to the EPA, and 39 states firmly objected to the idea of limiting the Clean Water Act. That may sound like overkill, but this situation may represent the biggest environmental threat in decades. We hope that all these comments will persuade the administration to drop its rulemaking effort entirely, but you always need several complementary solutions.

American Rivers is particularly concerned about the possible impacts to headwater streams, which often do not flow year-round. These are the small streams you might see on a hike up into the hills, or flowing through your backyard. Although they're often narrow enough to jump across, their ecological contribution is immense. Gravity only works one way: downhill. That means eliminating protections in the headwaters will cause a mess of problems to accumulate downstream. I've been working for months to get some unreleased data from a source at the U.S. Geological Survey that I can use to visually portray just how widespread these small, seasonal streams are.

A fix-it bill (the Clean Water Authority Restoration Act) was introduced by Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), and Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) in February to plug the holes in the current Clean Water Act. I spent the better part of a day urgently printing a poster-sized map I'd made of the potential threats to streams in Wisconsin and then overnighting it to Sen. Feingold for use at his press conference. We've also been presenting this issue to as broad an array of the concerned public as we can find -- this really could affect almost everyone. Last month, I spoke with a colleague from EarthJustice at the annual meeting of the EcoJustice Working Group of the National Council of Churches, hoping to spread awareness into other constituencies. At the meeting, working group members determine their influential advocacy agenda for the following year.

While this issue still trundles forward, I haven't devoted as much time as I should to some of my more extended projects. That's the daily triage in this type of work. But, crises permitting, later today I hope to catch up on our innovative computer visualization of the Lower Snake River.