Guardian Model of Riverkeepers

Riverkeeper Grassroots Environmental Justice History 2013

In essence, Riverkeeper is an environmental "neighborhood watch" group maintained by concerned citizens.^[34] Its constituents are not public officials and are not swayed by politics, but include members who defend the public use and restrict the private alienation of the river's benefits.^[35] Thus, Riverkeeper has engaged environmental justice issues, such as community park access. For example, around 1990, the City of New York Parks Commissioner restricted greenspace access by banning bus and subway transit, frequented modes of transport for African Americans, from reaching certain parks.^[36] Riverkeeper sued Westchester County and forced it to reopen six county parks that were closed to meet the budget, but due to their proximity to a railway, were mainly used by minority communities. The County had not closed any golf courses used by affluent residents, even though they were greater strains on County funds than parks that offered some minorities their only access to the river.^[36] This was not the only occasion where land use policies threatened the health of the Hudson River watershed as a public resource. In 1990, a team of Riverkeeper attorneys took on developers and lackluster enforcement agencies to protect the reservoirs and streams that constitute the water supply for nine million New York City and Westchester County residents.^[37] Riverkeeper also united with a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), in Ossining. During the 1960s, this oldest stable African American residential community in the Hudson Valley was rezoned industrial and has suffered social decline ever since. In 1991, Riverkeeper and the Ossining NAACP effectively sued the Ossining Planning Board to repeal an expansion of a construction debris processing plant that would have worsened diesel fumes and house vibrations at adjacent households.^[38]
The Riverkeeper movement has redefined grassroots forces by democratizing resources for communities and has afforded a constant medium of participation for neighborhoods whose episodic battles can exhaust their passion. Local waterways are protected by citizen-led efforts to confront pollution in the courts, the media, and the political system with the aid of a network of local knowledge to prevent the failure of democratic processes by politically endowed industries.^[39] This movement restored communal ownership and control to the lives of its participants, many of which were transformed by efforts to embrace democratic rights to clean water and the redress of regulatory failures. Diana Leicht, a quiet mother from Newburgh, N.Y. turned irate when her municipal water supply became so polluted that it sickened her child.^[40] She contacted Riverkeeper, which informed her of her legal rights to clean water. They discovered her timidity had grown from a desire to be a good citizen and not for fear of conflict. With the aid of Riverkeeper, she organized sixty mothers to learn their rights under legislation such as the CWA and the Safe Drinking Water Act.^[40] They gained media interest, contacted state agencies directly and at hearings, sued the town of Newburgh, won their claims and forced the payment of damages. By empowering citizens to embrace their democratic rights, Riverkeeper helped stir the passion of two hundred residents to confront the town board at a local meeting resulting in the board's public statement to become more alert to local needs.^[40]

Importance

The American environmental movement spans several centuries and has been affected by past beliefs and modern ideologies.^[41][42] While first focused on wild lands outside of civilization, this movement now includes urban centers, production activities, and human health.^[43] Still, further cooperation is needed to unite mainstream and community-based concerns. Mainstream groups have been critiqued as elitist and overly Caucasian, and tend to focus on the current system of governance instead of alternative means to embrace issues of race, gender, class and social health.^[44] These organizations have become fixated on policy-making processes, forcing them to allow concessions on issues vital to alternative groups to create a cordial dialogue with industry and government.^[45]

Grassroots activism has begun to fill the void left by the institutionalization of the environmental movement. These groups foster mediums for environmental change, rely on voluntary action and stress citizen empowerment as well as pollution prevention instead of only technical controls.^[46] Their origins are distinct from mainstream groups and often appear to be descendent from earlier urban and industrial movements linked to the mobilization of concerned citizens, the growth of networks and a meaningful sense of place.^[46]

The public trust doctrine separates private ownership from resources held in common by the public. This legal right, recognized in New York's Constitution, holds that the people own the Hudson River and all citizens have a right to its use, but none can abuse this privilege to degrade its use by others.^[47] This democratic value was offset during the Industrial Revolution when courts and legislatures overlooked the public trust and gave more power to industry.^[48] A similar erosion of another common law, nuisance law, occurred in the same era. Nuisance law bars private land uses that injure the community or disrupt the rights of others to enjoy their property.^[48] In response, millions of Americans demanded greater protection for environmental and community health. As such, these rights were rewritten with greater emphasis in our federal statutory system. They declare no one has the right to pollute public resources and everyone has the right to a clean environment. Only by democratic representation has industry been given permits to pollute so long as the activity benefits society and causes no harm. This created the field of risk assessment and questions what society risks in allocating our common rights to industry.^[49]

The origins and propagation of the Riverkeeper movement involve citizen ownership and empowerment. Democracies can be assessed by how fairly they distribute natural wealth and whether the bodies politic have equal access to it.^[50] When government fails to secure these goals, our legal structure offers ways to reassert our claims as citizens. Right-to-know laws such as the Freedom of Information Act afford citizens the power to demand knowledge of government and corporate activity in their communities. If these acts violate environmental laws, they can prosecute polluters in the place of the U.S. Attorney General under citizen-suit provisions that are part of every major federal environmental statute. These laws give the public democratic rights to regain ownership over their neighborhoods.^[50]

Riverkeeper's success stirred other citizens to defend their own waterways. Such groups work across the nation and emulate Riverkeeper's tactics of empowerment by the enforcement of democratic rights and ecological quality.^[51] Riverkeeper was joined by Pace University Law School in its struggles, providing it and the Hudson Valley legal resources to combat corporate power. Many law schools have forged similar alliances; becoming arsenals for citizen enforcement suits for Keeper organizations. This has educated communities, giving them a means to exercise their rights, and has taught new generations of law students the value of community-based activism in environmental law.^[52] Not long after these new groups began to take shape, Riverkeeper was offered funding to become a national organization with local chapters around the nation. Riverkeeper declined the offer since it believed in grassroots action as a means to empower the disenfranchised from the bottom-up, instead of by national forces.^[52] In 1992, the current set of Keeper programs created the National Alliance of River, Sound and Baykeepers, led by Riverkeeper. This organization became "a national community of Keepers" where members network, share resources, and license new groups as accredited Keeper programs.^[52]

Current activities

Today, these organizations have built a global network, the Waterkeeper Alliance, and include more than one hundred eighty Keepers, modeled after and supported by Riverkeeper.^[53] Despite the national and global transformation of the Keeper movement, Riverkeeper's mission remains local. Their efforts still focus on reducing fish kills and water pollution, maintaining the quality of New York City's drinking water, and increasing public access and appreciation for the Hudson River.^[53] At any given time, Riverkeeper is involved in many actions to protect the integrity of the river, its tributaries, the Croton watershed, or other waters that affect New York City’s water supply. These actions take the form of litigation; investigations; environmental review of development projects; citizen empowerment projects; regulatory review and comment; and local, state, and federal policy issues.^[54]

Riverkeeper maintains a 36-foot (11-m) wooden patrol and research vessel, the R. Ian Fletcher, operated by Boat Captain, John Lipscomb. Riverkeeper’s full-time presence on the river enables it to respond to and investigate new reports of illegal discharges, facilitate scientific research on the Hudson, and provide access to the river to its members, public officials, students and the media.^[55]

Keeper programs not only defend natural lands for their own sake, but preserve the quality of these environments for the cultural and social enrichment of those that call these locales home, and importantly, for those who will do so in the future.^[56] Riverkeeper reveals the value of not only engaging in environmental conflicts over broad national or international issues, but also in those occurring in our own backyards. By reasserting public ownership of common resources and that any harm incurred to them is an act of thievery against every community member; Riverkeeper protects Hudson Valley communities, its environment and the democratic rights of its citizens.^[57] Through outreach as well as active citizen enforcement of legal standards, Riverkeeper has empowered individuals to oppose corporate control. These citizens have retaken control of their lives by reestablishing the core principles of democratic environmental governance in their communities.^[58]