Fishable Waters

All water everywhere—even that contained in Simple Simon’s pail—is “fishable,” but when Congress used the word in the Clean Water Act of 1972 it meant catching and, if one insisted, safely eating. In this context the Clean Water Act was supposed to make all water bodies in the US fishable by July 1, 1983, but 18 years after the deadline about a third don’t qualify. Twenty thousand are still considered “polluted,” including 300,000 river and shoreline miles and five million lake acres. On some fronts we’re even backsliding. In the past 15 years, for example, rivers impaired by such “non-point” pollution sources as runoff from livestock operations and overflow from open pipes that carry both sewage and storm water have increased from 26 percent of all rivers to 36 percent.

The Clean Water Act has succeeded reasonably well in controlling point-source pollution—that which issues from industry and from sewage treatment plants, for example—but it has failed at controlling non-point. It’s one thing to force a rich paper company to stop making a salmon river smell like rotten New England boiled dinner. It’s quite another to go after, say, a dairy farmer who is barely making the payments on his manure spreader. That strategy doesn’t work and doesn’t play—especially with the kind of Congresses we’ve had in recent years.

So four years ago some of the nation’s most respected fisheries scientist/activists — practical, politically savvy professionals who wanted to strike a major blow for fish restoration before they closed out their careers—convened at Craig, Montana, on the banks of the Missouri River. There was talk of hatching a new statute, but then Jim Range, the Washington, DC attorney who helped write the Clean Water Act and who was hosting the meeting at his ranch, said: “Hell, we’ve already got a law that calls for fishable waters; let’s make it work.”

Out of this meeting and many others with more fisheries people throughout the country, and with steady input from a coalition of nine conservation organizations and two farm-support groups, there emerged a Clean Water Act amendment introduced in April 2000 by Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) and Rep. John Tanner (D-TN). The “Fishable Waters Act,” as the bill is called, didn’t go anywhere because Congress got tangled up with appropriations, but by the time you read this Bond and Tanner will have reintroduced it. Traditionally, fish advocates haven’t been much involved in debate about the Clean Water Act. That’s why EPA and state enforcers have concentrated on chemical purity rather than biological integrity, and that’s why they’ve set a “worst first” priority for cleanup. Grossly polluted urban waterways should, of course, be aggressively worked on, but so should marginally polluted ones in beautiful settings where modest effort can quickly produce dramatic results measurable by more fish.

While conservation groups traditionally have not been able to use federal money as matches to qualify for other federal funds, an exception would be made here. Councils could use Fishable Waters Act dollars as part of the required local matches for projects approved under Wallop-Breaux, Conservation Reserve, Wetland Reserve, Environmental Quality Incentives, Wildlife Habitat Incentives, Cooperative Forestry Assistance and 13 other programs. If a state or tribe didn’t want to make a commitment to the Fishable Waters Act, it wouldn’t have to. It just wouldn’t have access to the new funds.

Perhaps the best recommendation for the legislation is a list of the conservation organizations backing it: the American Sportfishing Assoc. (ASA), Trout Unlimited, Izaak Walton League of America, American Rivers, Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, American Fisheries Society, International Assoc. of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, American Fly-Fishing Trade Assoc. and Pacific Rivers Council. Not a front or fringe group in the lot—just mainstream conservation outfits that slug it out in the trenches and get things done; they call themselves “the Fishable Waters Coalition.” “The strength of the Fishable Waters Act is the depth and range of its support,” declares Mike Hayden, leader of the coalition and ASA president. “Farmers, anglers, conservationists, private citizens, even industry . . . . They all think that this common-sense approach is the way to go about improving our water and fish resources.”

The coalition’s two agricultural-interest members are the National Corn Growers Assoc. and the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. “Any time we unite 20 million sportsmen and two million farmers we have an alliance so unusual that it breaks through the clutter of the normal rhetoric in Washington,” says Bruce Knight, of the National Corn Growers Assoc. “When Trout Unlimited and the Corn Growers walk into a room and say, ‘We want this and we have worked out the differences for you,’ suddenly politicians pay attention.” Ag interests are attracted to the bill because it doesn’t rely on what they call traditional “command and control,” but the important thing for environmentalists to remember is that existing provisions for command and control would in no way be replaced or weakened. There will always be bad actors who need to be punished, and while the existing Clean Water Act has few teeth to deal with them effectively, such teeth should be inserted.

That, however, might not happen in our lifetimes. Although the Clean Water Act is supposed to be reauthorized every five years, it’s such political nitroglycerin that no one’s touched it since 1987. And six years ago the House of Representatives tried to do away with it by voting 240 to 185 to support HR 961, introduced by Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman Bud Shuster (R-PA) and known in environmental circles as “the Dirty Water Act.” Should we just wait to see what Congress might or might not insert into the Clean Water Act to force non-point polluters into line? And should we hold off on Fishable-Waters-Act-style legislation because politicians who don’t do anything now might seize upon it as an excuse for not doing anything in the future? I put the question to Jim Range, who likes to describe himself as a “fisherman with a law degree.” “Well, we talked about it,” he told me, “and we all said, ‘That’s crazy as hell.’ Why in the world should we sit around and wait for something that all of us think realistically is not going to happen for the next 10 years when we’ve got a program that we know can produce humongous on-the-ground benefits right now?”

But what about the local watershed councils? Can they really be effective? Can they be trusted to fix their lakes and rivers? Won’t they just haul out a few shopping carts, organize a few canoe trips and, in the process of whooping it up for their river or lake, convince the public that non-point polluters are doing good things when they’re not? No. Because, for the first time, the watershed councils will have the means to really accomplish something. Moreover, they won’t have to fight anyone, because your average non-point polluters have a lot to gain by participating. Not only will most of the cost be picked up for them, but they already know that the best way to avoid the penalties associated with command-and-control regs is to stop polluting.

On a recent trip to Lake Apopka, in central Florida, I was reminded both of the work that confronts watershed councils and their potential to get it done. Jim Thomas, the wildlife biologist who founded the 400-member Friends of Lake Apopka, showed me around the 31,000-acre lake. Apopka used to be the second largest lake in Florida, offering a trophy bass fishery that supported 29 fishing lodges and attracted anglers from all over the world. The water was crystalline, the bottom carpeted with grasses and other native vegetation. Then, in 1942, farmers were allowed to dike off and drain sections of the lake, converting the exposed bottom to “muck farms” where the farmers grew vegetables, soon with massive fixes of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. Eventually, muck farms metastasized across 19,000 acres of lake bottom, shrinking Apopka to the fourth largest lake in Florida. Because the farms were lower than the lake surface, pumps were continually employed to suck up a vile cocktail of seepage, nutrients and poison and spew it into Apopka.