How Can We Win the Fight for Clean Water? Only Together.

By Jared Mott, Executive Director

A couple things happened in recent weeks that I’ve been unable to stop thinking about. First, a long email thread with two other passionate conservationists about a seemingly disparate topic than this column included the question, “Who has been standing up for wetlands and clean water longer than duck hunters? Nobody. Not the soccer mom in Des Moines, not even the farmer.” Hard for me to disagree.

Duck hunting is what introduced me to the natural world and protecting wetlands drove me to this work. My origin story is boring enough: I was just another high school kid obsessed with all things waterfowl when I first heard about the Yazoo Pumps, an Army Corps project designed to drain the very wetlands where I had my first interactions with migrating mallards. So I swore that I’d fight back for as long as it took.

“As long as it took” turned out to be a lifetime.

But the neat thing about origin stories is that everybody’s is different. Anybody who follows the League closely enough to be reading these words knows about our Nitrate Watch campaign and all the work we’ve done to invite and expand participation by “soccer moms in Des Moines” in the fight for clean water. Learning that the water coming out of your tap, that your kids drink, is sourced from rivers with concentrations of cancer-causing nitrate in dizzyingly elevated levels above the federal safe drinking water standard, and knowing that standard is likely insufficient to protect human health? Well, that is a hell of a clean water origin story. I don’t care how many duck stamps you’ve bought.

The other thing I can’t stop wrestling with is the vote the Senate took in April allowing dangerous mining pollution in the watershed that feeds the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The House had already passed the measure and now the president will sign it. There’s a lot of fight left before shovels break dirt but make no mistake, this is an incredible setback to protecting this extraordinary place. That it passed by one vote in the Senate is gut-wrenching to me, an unrepentant duck hunter from the south Delta who has never cast eyes on the place, much less a fishing line. I’ve heard from many of you that felt the same way and were wondering, as I was, what else could we have done? Called our Senators one more time? Had one more meeting?

All I can say is I’ve found the best way to get over losing a fight is to win the next one.

The League is a lot of things to a lot of people with many priorities. But first and foremost, this is a clean water organization. Born on the upper Mississippi to combat dredging and drainage, with through lines running all the way to a crowd-sourced monitoring effort to protect drinking water running so hot that it can hardly keep up demand for testing, we’ve driven clean water action in countless communities across the country.

Some of us got here in waxed coats and camo waders, others with test strips or a penchant for macroinvertebrates, and still more with loon cries in our ears and achy shoulders from paddling the Boundary Waters. Whatever your origin story might be, there’s room for you here.

The League has never been about just duck hunters or anglers or water monitors because we’ve known all along that it’s all the same fight. The Yazoo Pumps is the same as the Boundary Waters is the same as nitrate levels in the Racoon and the Des Moines Rivers is the same as dying eelgrass in the Chesapeake Bay.

This is a clean water organization and I’m glad you’re here. Let’s go win the next one.