Riverkeeper - Importance

Importance

The American environmental movement spans several centuries and has been affected by past beliefs and modern ideologies. While first focused on wild lands outside of civilization, this movement now includes urban centers, production activities, and human health. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. This democratic value was offset during the Industrial Revolution when courts and legislatures overlooked the public trust and gave more power to industry. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.