Today’s news that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has withdrawn a half-baked scheme to regulate the discharge of phosphorus and other pollutants into the Spokane River is a remarkable accomplishment for Sierra Club and the Center for Justice. As a very small part of the team that worked on this project, I’ve been grumpy for a couple years about the failure of the so-called Spokane River TMDL Collaboration. It seemed, for so long, that we were not only losing ground in the “collaboration,” but being played for fools.
Today offered a ray of hope. The sum of it is that EPA headquarters came to agree with a central criticism that we’ve laid before EPA regional officials and Washington Department of Ecology officials for the past two years. We would have gone to court over this. But we didn’t have to. The reason we didn’t have to is because our argument was a good one and because CFJ attorney Bonne Beavers laid it out brilliantly in a letter she sent to EPA headquarters in June. It wasn’t just the Spokane River that was threatened by the gimmick of trying to make river pollution disappear at the Washington/Idaho border, Bonne explained, it was rivers and watersheds throughout America that span state boundaries.
We’re not done by any means. But before I turned in tonight I just wanted to remind everybody who follows the Spokane River story about Drea Traeumer, the former Washington Department of Ecology scientist who resigned her job a year ago rather than sign-off on the dishonest regulatory device that was finally withdrawn today.
The river is the river and it will ultimately reflect what we, collectively, are willing to do to restore it and protect it. Drea’s story is bigger than the river. It’s about integrity in government. It’s about someone who believed she was working for us, who turned her back on the pressure of a powerful agency and her own economic security to say no, this is wrong, and you can’t have my name on that. Drea was not the only scientist to object to the flawed Spokane River plan. Her predecessor, Ken Merrill, tried to deliver the same messages, but was basically told to shut up. He left Ecology and now works as a water quality expert for the Kalispel tribe. It’s also a matter of record that EPA regional official Dave Ragsdale was instructed not to be publicly critical of the now-revoked policy.
The problem is that if we have any chance, at any level, to make and then implement smart decisions on complex problems, we can’t be gagging and shucking agency scientists for doing what scientists are supposed to do. Drea did what she was supposed to do. Today’s news is a vindication of her integrity and courage.
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