Smarter Growth. John H. Spiers
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into which the Potomac drains, began to garner attention in Greater Washington and the eastern shore of Maryland. The context for cleaning up the bay, however, was rather different from the Potomac. While environmental concerns were key for the latter, economic concerns centered on the declining stocks of seafood for Maryland’s fishing industry drove the former’s cleanup. The political landscape had also changed. The bay cleanup began as conservative opposition to environmental protection privileged voluntary agreements over regulations.64 The governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C., signed two agreements during the 1980s for cleaning up the bay. While they helped improve water quality for wildlife, expansive regional growth and lax accountability limited their effectiveness. Although the bay’s cleanup was less successful than that of the Potomac in the prior decade, it laid the groundwork for treating the river as a regional resource to be protected.65
At a more local scale, the cleanup of the Anacostia River shifted the conversation about water pollution in Greater Washington from wastewater treatment to more diffuse and difficult-to-control sources. The Anacostia, a tributary of the Potomac, flowed through primarily urban communities in Southeast Washington and Prince George’s. Nearly half of the river’s watershed consisted of impermeable surfaces like streets and rooftops that fostered runoff, while the river itself, according to one account, was a “silted wasteland of mud, stench, murk, trash, and sparse aquatic life” that was far more polluted than the Potomac.66
Despite environmental conservatism within the federal government, the 1980s and early 1990s became an opportune time for cleaning up urban rivers and waterfronts. In 1987, Congress amended the CWA to better regulate storm water and related pollution, but the standards were more limited than for wastewater treatment and were not fully implemented until the end of the century.67 Federal investment in cleaning up water pollution had also receded. Cleaning up the Potomac cost about $5 billion between 1970 and 1990, but federal grants subsidized much of the expense. As the EPA’s grant program for wastewater treatment facilities wound down, few sources of federal money were available to clean up the Anacostia and other urban rivers.68
State and local actors stepped into the void to craft a new model of environmental stewardship. The governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., signed two agreements in the 1980s to address combined sewer overflows in the District of Columbia as well as heavy erosion and sedimentation in Maryland, which came primarily from quarrying operations.69 An unusual combination of civic, environmental, and business interests also joined forces to broaden the scope of river cleanup from pollution control to watershed and wildlife restoration.70
Compared to the Potomac, the Anacostia garnered little attention for cleanup until the late 1980s because of the geography of the region’s population. The Potomac flowed through mostly middle- and upper-income suburbs, where many environmentalists and supportive public officials lived, and featured expanses of open space or low-density development along the waterfront. The Anacostia, however, flowed through industrial sites like the Navy Yard and mostly poor urban communities, whose access to the river was mostly blocked off by highways and whose residents faced far more immediate shortcomings in housing, schools, and police than their suburb peers.71 District residents, for their part, had been largely absent from discussions about the Potomac. In contrast, they became more involved with the Anacostia as part of a nascent environmental justice movement concerned about the location and disproportionate impact of polluting facilities on poorer communities and those of color.72
In 1989, a handful of Washington residents established the Anacostia Watershed Society to encourage citizens to become caretakers of the river.73 The group’s leading figure was Robert Boone, who moved to Washington in the mid-1980s. Boone worked for an environmental agency tasked with monitoring the Anacostia and was outraged about all of the trash, sewage, and toxic chemicals that poured into the river. He turned his frustrations into action, joining lawsuits to contest runoff from the Navy Yard and leaking sewage in D.C. and Maryland. Boone was also an avid outdoorsman, hosting boat trips for schoolchildren, D.C. politicians, and members of Congress to learn more about the river. In a 2008 article reflecting on two decades of service for the society, Boone, now a “grey-haired former hippie with a temper like a wasp,” offered a prescient statement on the importance of the public’s investment in the river, “We are here to be stewards of this … and we have let down our mantle.”74
The Anacostia’s early cleanup featured more hands-on public involvement and educational efforts than with the Potomac. By late 1991, dozens of projects were under way to clean up storm water and trash, reach out to students through environmental education, plant trees along the shoreline, and build hundreds of acres of new wetlands. Between 1987 and 1994, fish populations and underwater grasses increased significantly.75 One of the most successful projects built a thirty-two-acre marsh to fill in a mudflat near Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, which restored aquatic life after years of neglect. New recreational opportunities for boating and biking also became more prominent as conditions improved.76 By the mid-1990s, local concern about the river had reached a high point. A survey by the D.C. Coalition for Environmental Justice found that three-quarters of registered voters wanted more done to clean up sewage and trash in the Anacostia, while 20 percent identified a medical problem caused or worsened by pollution.77
The long-delayed cleanup of the Anacostia offered a new approach to improving the health of rivers in Greater Washington. While wastewater treatment had been the focus during the 1970s and 1980s, nonpoint sources such as runoff now received more attention. There were two consequences of this shift. First, the scope of activities to improve river health expanded from pollution cleanup to ecosystem improvement. While passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 had conferred federal protection on certain rare species to block harmful actions, restoration activities such as building wetlands offered a more holistic approach to sustaining habitats, not just individual species.78 Second, members of the public became key partners in cleanup and restoration in concert with lobbying to improve policy making for water pollution.
This new paradigm was evident in the campaign to restore the shad population to the Potomac, which was historically the river’s most abundant and commercially important fish. The construction of Little Falls Dam in the late 1950s, overfishing, and pollution had destroyed shad habitats and nearly depleted the fish’s ranks.79 Beginning in 1995, biologist Jim Cummins harvested and fertilized eggs from shad during the spring spawning season in order to replenish the Potomac. Over the next seven years, thousands of volunteers worked day and night and through inhospitable weather to stock 15.8 million shad and create a self-sustaining population.80 Many participants were local students who participated through educational programs sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Anacostia Watershed Society, whose mostly white, middle-class members had begun to engage a broader cross-section of the river’s community in its stewardship. To support the restocking, a new fishway was created through Little Falls Dam. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1999, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt remarked on the broader potential of restoring the Potomac: “For seven years, I’ve watched hundreds of cities restore their communities by restoring their rivers. Now it’s our turn.”81
The shad restoration project was also an example of new efforts to compensate for the impact of large-scale development in Greater Washington.82 Another example was the expansion of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge between Alexandria and Prince George’s, which eliminated two hundred acres of forests, wetlands, and underwater grasses. Government agencies and environmental groups carried out a series of compensatory projects that included transplanting twelve thousand native plants and trees to replace invasive species at a one-acre site in Alexandria; planting twenty-two acres of underwater grasses in the lower Potomac and Chesapeake Bay; protecting an eighty-four-acre bald eagle sanctuary in Prince George’s County, and constructing ladders to help spawning fish traverse Rock Creek and tributaries of the Anacostia River.83 As the sources of pollution became more diffuse, and government willingness (and ability) to regulate them eroded, public investment in the Potomac became more critical to the river’s health. The challenge would be to scale up from individual projects to an ecosystem-based approach that transcended political boundaries.84