![]()
Part One
Techniques
Like any activity devoted to social change, saving a river involves a host of separate techniques and specialized processes which have proven effective for organizing and planning a campaign, building public support, and getting the work done. The techniques outlined below could clearly be adapted to any activist effortâon behalf of rivers or forests, wolves or whales, or the homeless and the helpless in human society. The rules of organizing are universal, but they are arrayed and explained here from the unique perspective of rivers, and they are illustrated from examples of river campaigns that worked.
![]()
Chapter 1
Getting Organized
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth . . . that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in oneâs favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way.
W. H. MURRAY
Get Committed
On a summer afternoon in 1988, Wendy Wilson and Tom Watts were sitting in their kayaks in an eddy on the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho. Wendy was upset. A wealthy Idaho potato farmer had announced plans to finance a hydropower project that would drain the river. The water would go through pipes to an underground generating plant, the power would go to California, and the river would, in a manner of speaking, go to hell.
As Wendy complained about this disturbing turn of events, her paddling partner posed a provocative challenge. âIf you were a real environmentalist,â he said, âyouâd form a group and stop this thing.â Wendy thought for a moment and then said, âIâll do it if youâll do it.â Watts responded, âIâll do it.â Wendy stared at him: âAre you serious?â Watts stared at her, âAre you serious?â
They explored that question further over a subsequent beer and by November they had an organization. As W. H. Murray predicted, a whole stream of events issued from that decision, and three and a half years later, following one of the most intense and well-organized lobbying campaigns in state history, the Idaho legislature passed a bill protecting the Payette from development.
Wendy Wilson is the first person to point out that the Payette River was saved through the efforts of thousands of people. âI didnât do it by myself,â she says. âI was smarter than that. It takes a group of people.â But what Wendy Wilson and Tom Watts did do themselves was make the commitment that gathered the people who started the organization which saved the river. And thatâs where river protection begins: Someone has to make the commitment.
North Fork of the Payette River above Banks, Idaho. (Photo courtesy of Tim Palmer.)
Falling in Love
Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss.
Mark Dubois, a pioneering river conservationist who dedicated a decade to the Stanislaus River in California, recalls a conversation he once had with a Russian activist. âI asked him the question, how do you get people involved,â Dubois, who has himself gotten thousands of people involved, remembers. âHe said, âFirst I think it is necessary to fall in love.ââ
If youâve fallen in love with a river, if you feel your life linked somehow to its flow, then at least half the commitment has already been made. But before you wed yourself to a river campaign, consider the experiences of Mark Dubois, Wendy Wilson, and others who took the plunge. As with marriageâan experience not entirely unrelated to river savingâit pays to have some idea of what youâre getting into.
When the fight to save the Payette began, Wendy Wilson was working for the Idaho Trial Lawyers Association and during the first year of the campaign she was an unpaid volunteer. But by the second year she was working full time on the Payette, scraping by on donations, and the river began to rule her life. It has now become her career.
When Marion Stoddart moved to Groton, Massachusetts more than 30 years ago, she asked herself the question, âWhat am I going to do with my life?â Looking out across the polluted Nashua River she found the answer. âI wanted to devote my life to some good purpose,â she recalls. âI was looking for a significant challenge.â The Nashua became that challenge and consumed her for 25 years.
Mark Dubois, who was then a guide for an organization taking disabled people down rivers, had no idea what he was committing to when he agreed to help coordinate a statewide initiative drive to save the Stanislaus. âSometimes ignorance is bliss,â he confesses. âHad we known what we were getting into, Iâm not sure any of us would have gotten involved.â What Dubois got into was a battle royale waged up and down the length of Californiaâin the state legislature, in Congress, and in the U. S. Supreme Court. It lasted a decade and it lost. But Duboisâ life was changed forever, transformed by his relationship with one river into a relationship with all rivers. And out of the defeat of the Stanislaus came an organization called Friends of the River and a movement that has helped save numerous rivers in the West.
Stanislaus River below Camp Nine, California. (Photo courtesy of Tim Palmer.)
So when you make the commitment to save a river it is by definition a big one, and a long one. Ignorance may sometimes be bliss but, when attached to a river-saving campaign, it can also wreak havoc with marriages and careers. Perhaps the most important things to understand about any commitment you make to a river are these: Your life will be challenged and enriched beyond your understanding, nothing else you do in lifeâshort of raising a childâwill seem as important, and your relationship to the planet will take on an intimacy and richness that will color your vision for the rest of your days.
Find Partners
As Wendy Wilson, and every other successful river saver makes clear, you canât save a river by yourselfâyou need partners. There may be a few organizational geniuses capable of launching a river campaign single-handedly, but most people donât get very far alone.
Take Jerry Meral. By any standard, Jerry Meral is a formidable organizer. He has placed so many successful initiative measures on the California ballot that the organization he heads has been dubbed âInitiatives R Usâ. But when Meral launched one of the nationâs earliest river campaigns in 1969, he didnât do it alone. He found a partner in David Kay, who ran a nonprofit river company, and together they found partners in Rob Caughlan and David Oke, owners of a young public relations firm committed only to causes they believed in and people they liked. This team gave birth to Friends of the River, the oldest and largest river conservation organization in the West, and it launched the biggest grassroots campaign in California history.
To anyone standing alone at the put-in of a river-saving campaign, Caughlan offers this adamant advice: âYou donât have an organization by yourself. You donât have an organization until you have someone else.â
Finding someone else isnât usually a problem; indignation over the abuse and development of rivers and streams runs deep. But if you discover yourself ahead of the crowd, on the leading edge of a river issue with no one around to join you, there are a lot of proven ways to recruit some partners. If your river supports whitewater recreation, you have an automatic constituency and a pool of easily recruited volunteers. Paddling clubs are great places to find campaign partners. Wendy Wilson virtually created Friends of the Payette in one night at a meeting of the Idaho Whitewater Association. Commercial river outfitters usually (but not always) have an urgent interest in protecting the resource that produces their revenue.
Many endangered rivers arenât runnable but most are fishable, and angling organizations are excellent sources of support since fishery degradation is one of the most common and inevitable consequences of river and stream development. Fly fishing clubs often have stream enhancement projects and are usually eager to support river conservation campaigns.
Many communities have environmental organizations; if yours does, they should be among the first places you look for interested partners. Then there are the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society whose local chapters attract the kind of people who become activists. Progressive church groups like the Quakers and Unitarians have politically active memberships and often welcome presentations on important public issues.
More often than not you wonât be starting a river campaign by yourself; youâll be part of a small group of people working as an informal team. But if youâre living in an environmental vacuum, stuck in some political backwater without any obvious sources of organizing support, there are still a lot of simple ways to find sympathetic souls. One way is to organize a meeting in your living room or at the local library, advertised through notices in the local newspaper and in posters placed around town.
Another way is to contact interested teachers in local colleges or high schools and ask them if you can present a lecture in their classrooms or lead a field trip to the river. Still another is to badger the local newspaper into doing a story about your river issue, listing a telephone number for readers to contact you. This combination of efforts will almost certainly arouse enough attention to bring some interested partners your way.
Clarify Your Role
A few other pointers about finding partners: Be as clear as you can about the role you intend to play in this river-saving effort, which will in turn allow you to be clear about the roles you will be comfortable having other people play. This is going to be an intimate and profound experience for the people leading the campaign. Egos and agendas will clash, disagreements over strategy and tactics will flourish, and dissimilar personalities will grate. All of that is, to some degree, inevitable and grassroots organizations have an organic life that you will be unable to control.
But you will improve the odds of success by choosing your partners carefully, both to establish the highest possible degree of compatibility, and to bring to the effort an appropriate blend of skills and abilities. You need to launch your campaign with a balanced team, the members of which share as much as possible a similar vision and values.
Establish an Organization
Here weâre getting down to the nitty gritty. Youâve made the fateful decision to commit yourself to a river or stream, and youâve found some kindred souls to share the grief and the glory. Now you need to build an organization capable of translating your commitment into successful action. How well you do that will determine the fate of your campaign.
Entire libraries of books have been written on building a successful organization, and some of them are worth reading. But before we discuss how to build one, letâs review the mostly obvious reasons why you need an organization to begin withâwhy a loose-knit amalgam of activists canât just leap into the fray ad hoc.
First, of course, an organization, with a name, address, and telephone number lends instant credibility to your cause. It means you are, in fact, organized. Politicians and powers-that-be relate better to organizations than to people. Organizations tend to be taken seriously, people sometimes are not. Organizations also give the public something to join, a name to identify with. When you create an organization, you also create the accoutrements of doing businessâletterhead, business cards, and a listing in the phone book. An organization with an office also provides a place for drop-in traffic to drop in, a place where volunteers can volunteer, and where the media can meet you.
Perhaps most importantly, an organization provides continuity to your campaign. People come and go, the players change, but if you have an organization, the cause can always continue. Donât even consider starting a river-saving campaign without creating an organization to support it.
Missions and Goals
Organizations are born many different waysâsome casually over beer and pizza, some formally following prescribed steps and rules of order. But how you form your organization is a lot less important than what you decide to do with it. Which is why itâs wise to be very clear at the beginning what your mission and goals are.
The creation of mission and goal statements is both a fundamental step in organizational development and a frequent bĂȘte noire for those who have to do it. Mission statements have become a cottage industry for management consultants partly because too many organizations arenât clear what their real mission is. Long tedious discussions about an organizationâs mission usually reflect serious disagreement or confusion about what the organization should fundamentally be about.
If you havenât done this before, youâre likely to think, âHow difficult can this be? Our mission is to save a river.â But itâs seldom that simple. Does saving the river mean stopping pollution being discharged into it or campaigning for stricter water quality standards? Does it mean killing a dam project or changing your stateâs water policies? Does it mean a Wild and Scenic campaign or a river corridor plan? Does it mean protecting a flood plain from development or attacking the growth policies which allow that development to occur? And does saving a river or stream also mean maintaining a permanent presence to watchdog the waterway so that future threats can be thwarted?
Some mission statements are, in fact, very simple. The Committee to Save the Kings River in California, which waged a successful campaign to stop a destructive dam, states succinctly that its goal is â . . . to protect the Kings River by having Congress designate a national Wild and Scenic River above Pine Flat Reservoir.â The somewhat more complex mission of the Westport River Watershed Alliance in Massachusetts is âto protect and restore the environment and improve the economic, aesthetic and recreational value of the Westport River Watershed and its coastal environs on Buzzards Bay.â
Friends of the River has a far less specific, more sweeping mission statement: âFriends of the River preserves, protects and restores rivers, streams and their watersheds. We accomplish these goals through public education, citizen activist training and organizing, and expert advocacy to influence public policy...
