through the political deadlock to continue improving the Potomac’s health.
One of the earliest and most successful organizations doing this kind of work was the Alice Ferguson Foundation. Its namesake was an artist who in the 1920s bought the 130-acre Hard Bargain Farm in Accokeek about twelve miles south of Washington in Prince George’s. Ferguson managed the farm and later purchased hundreds of acres of nearby land, which she resold to conservation-minded individuals who built homes scattered throughout to block against intensive development. Alice’s husband, Henry, established a nonprofit foundation in her name in 1954 to protect the site’s environmental and cultural resources. In the 1960s, the bottom half of the now 330-acre site was deeded to the National Park Service as part of Piscataway National Park. In the early 1970s, the foundation established an educational center that offered classes for thousands of elementary and middle school students each year, encouraging them to develop a sense of environmental stewardship by visiting the Potomac waterfront and learning about its natural resources and farming history through hands-on activities. Programming was later added to support K–12 school curriculum and to bring high school students to the site. At present, the foundation serves four thousand elementary school students per year in one- and two-day environmental and agricultural programs at Hard Bargain Farm, reaches out to six thousand middle and high school students visiting national and state parks in the Washington area through its Bridging the Watershed program, and trains hundreds of teachers in outdoor environmental education.98
The Alice Ferguson Foundation is best known for its an annual springtime Potomac Watershed Cleanup. The first cleanup began in 1989 at Hard Bargain Farm with fifty volunteers. In 2000, the event had grown to three thousand people at 110 sites. By 2006, it had brought together over thirty-five thousand volunteers, many of them young people, to remove 2.5 million pounds of trash since its inception. The organization’s website proudly documents the number of volunteers, cleanup sites, total trash, and items found to showcase the tangible benefits of the cleanups.99
Over the past decade, the foundation has expanded its outreach about the harm of litter. In 2006, it hosted the First Potomac Watershed Trash Summit to better understand why trash volume increased year after year. Two years later, it published a survey of residents’ attitudes that found nearly two-thirds were bothered “a lot” by litter in the Potomac watershed and wanted to see government do more about it. Yet the survey also revealed that most people littered out of laziness and a mistaken belief that others will clean it up or that it would wash down a storm drain and be filtered.100
Admittedly, the amount of trash collected through public cleanup campaigns was a small part of the Potomac’s overall pollution. However, cleanups and environmental education could inspire a sense of environmental stewardship that reached beyond the typical white, middle-class, college-educated residents who traditionally engaged in environmental advocacy. This possibility was on display when a group of fifth graders from nearby Bowie, Maryland, took a two-day field trip to Hard Bargain Farm. While there, the group viewed the open space of the Potomac riverscape, observed plant and animal life, and learned about pollution through an exercise where they were given a gallon of water and fourteen different containers of pollutants commonly found in the Potomac to add to the bucket to understand the impact of pollution. They also enjoyed team-building exercises, socializing, and cooking out at night. The lessons learned about the pollution of the Potomac were clear. When asked, “Who polluted the Potomac?” one student aptly responded, “All of us did.”101
A growing sense of stewardship also manifested itself in more aggressive public surveillance of conditions along the Potomac and the threat of legal action to rectify concerns. The most notable organization undertaking this work was the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, founded in 2000. The group was part of a national and international network of water-keeper organizations dating to the 1960s, when commercial and recreational fishermen in New York organized to protect their way of life and save the Hudson River from industrial pollution. Like many groups, it sought enforcement of existing pollution laws governing the Potomac watershed through media campaigns, lobbying, and litigation. It also had a broad range of environmental concerns, including erosion and runoff, illegal dumping of trash and toxics, the loss of wetlands, air pollution, and changes in fish populations.102
In 2003, Ed Merrifield became the first Potomac Riverkeeper. A former chiropractor and longtime sailor of the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay, Merrifield joined the organization after reading a history of the river-keeper movement and being inspired by its argument that people had enjoyed the legal right to fish and enjoy waterways for centuries in America. As president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network from 2003 to 2012, Merrifield focused on fund-raising, building a leadership team, and cultivating alliances with Washington-area law schools and private law firms to secure discounted or pro bono legal aid to reinforce civic action. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network had nearly three thousand members across the watershed, including at least a couple hundred trained “riverwatchers” who regularly surveyed the Potomac’s water quality and investigated illegal pollution.103 Other groups also undertook this work, including the Potomac Conservancy and Arlington’s local government.104 As one environmentalist explained, “I think the stream monitoring program is a really good way for volunteers to take ownership for helping the environment.”105 In addition, the work of nonprofits like the Potomac Riverkeeper in some ways compensated for the decline of government monitoring over the past fifteen years that was a product of neoliberalism.
What distinguished Potomac Riverkeeper from other groups was its tenacity. Speaking to a Washington Post reporter about the group’s philosophy, Merrifield noted, “If it’s illegal pollution, we go after it as fast as we can to tell them you have to stop. We use all legal means necessary. We won’t back down.”106 Mike Bolinder, the current Anacostia Riverkeeper, affirmed Merrifield’s commitment to swift action and holding polluters accountable as an inspiring model of activism: “The thing I learned from Ed that will make me a better riverkeeper is never accept weasel words like ‘showing improvement’ or ‘making progress.’”107
In its first few years, the group’s biggest success was compelling the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to clean up lead pollution from an old shooting range. In 2003, it sued the agency for allowing members of the National Capital Skeet and Trap Club to operate a shooting range for half a century on state land that discharged lead bullets in and around the Great Seneca Creek, a tributary of the Potomac. The case generated a media investigation that publicized the CWA violations the group had identified. Four years later, the lawsuit was settled in an agreement that required the Maryland agency to clean up the lead pollution and to conduct testing for the next fifteen years to ensure its success.108
The Potomac Riverkeeper Network also publicized the impact of endocrine disruptors on fish and public health. Appearing in dozens of news stories and testifying before a congressional committee in 2006, Merrifield and the organization discussed how products like soaps and medications, cleaning agents, lawn fertilizers, and plastics contained toxic chemicals that sparked massive fish kills in the Potomac near West Virginia and produced intersex bass, rendering male bass as female. These chemicals in the Potomac also posed a public health concern for Washington-area residents, who received nearly 90 percent of their drinking water from the river, because they could not be filtered out using existing technologies and because the EPA does not yet regulate them. The public health impact of endocrine disruptors is not yet clear; however, there is research suggesting that these chemicals, for which there is no known safe level of exposure, can produce developmental, reproductive, and neurological conditions, with the greatest impact on fetuses and newborns.109
The Potomac Riverkeeper Network’s greatest success to date has been its litigation against a familiar foe: the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. In February 2014, it joined the Environmental Integrity Project and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to sue the WSSC for dumping millions of pounds of sediment, aluminum, and other pollutants into the Potomac in the process of purifying and supplying drinking water for homes
