42nd of a series

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

- Mark Twain

In recent years, scientists have developed the knowledge and tools to restore our waterways to more natural conditions. It will not be cheap. Who should pay?

Here are three ways of thinking about it.

1. Justice. There is nothing remotely equal about our access to the nations’ streams and rivers. A few large users extract most of the water and discharge most of the waste – and they spend billions on lobbyists and politicians for the privilege. We need to stop catering to the economic and political power of those who do the most harm and listen more to the voices of those who leave the smallest footprints and – not coincidentally – have the least power. It seems so simple: the largest users should pay the largest fees and the biggest polluters should pay the biggest fines. We need to penalize bad practices, but, just as importantly, we need to reward innovative methods and technologies that improve the health our rivers.

   We can do it. Shortly after 9/11, Kenneth Fineburg devised a method for distributing over $7 billion to the Victims Compensation Fund, and he has arbitrated other large and complicated cases. In “The Bargaining Problem,” a short essay published in 1950, a Princeton graduate student named John Nash, of “A Beautiful Mind” fame, described a process in which participants are able to reach an agreement on allocating costs in complex situations, a concept for which he would win the Nobel Prize in economics and one which is widely applied today.

2. Federal Support. Rivers are a critical part of our national infrastructure. Because they do not recognize state – or any other political – boundaries, the federal government has the legal and ethical responsibility to protect them in perpetuity and to ensure that everyone pays their fair share. Under the Public Trust Doctrine, writes legal scholar Richard Frank, “certain natural resources are held by the government in a special status – in ‘trust’ – for current and future generations . . . and government officials have an affirmative, ongoing duty to safeguard the long-term preservation of those resources for the benefit of the general public.” It’s an investment in future generation, one we have deferred for far too long. And it’s hardly a new role for the federal government, which has been effectively intervening to protect natural resources for all Americans at least since Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” in the early 20th century.

3. Local Initiatives. In the end, the most effective stewards of our water are ordinary citizens, often volunteers, working in their own watersheds. Right now, local groups across the country have removed hundreds of dams, restored thousands of miles of stream habitat, and planted millions of trees, in a web of efforts that resonate far beyond their own watersheds. Elinor Ostrom challenged the conventional view that people inevitably pursue their own self-interest at the expense of the common good. She discovered several instances of people working together to establish rules to protect both the economic and ecological sustainability of the commons – not out of altruism but out of mutual self-interest. For those insights, she became, in 2009, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.

A river is not simply a collection of goods and services to be exploited by humans; it’s an ecosystem of which humans are a part. But there is also something deeper at work. There are no wildflowers in Garrett Hardin’s infamous pasture, and by treating the commons only as a resource to be exploited, we confine its benefits to their utilitarian value. But what of other values? What of beauty? A sense of peace? An awakening of wonder? What of all the people who do little damage to a river’s health and for whom the river’s importance cannot be measured in economic terms? What of the wildlife that also depend on the river? What of the river itself?

We don’t own the commons. We are only the stewards. The health of our rivers – and of ourselves – requires the reawakening of public stewardship.