In a September 28 report for Happy Eco News, environmental writer Mariz Guiniawan reports on the enormous impacts of six decades of Charles River restoration and climate resilience work. The article lauds the successful and persistent work of the Charles River Watershed Association, a member of the MMOC.
Here are some noteworthy passages:
“The Charles River earned its unflattering nickname ‘Dirty Water‘ honestly. Decades of industrial pollution, raw sewage, trash, and even discarded cars fouled the 80-mile river flowing from Hopkinton through 23 Massachusetts communities to Boston Harbor. When a group of concerned citizens founded the Charles River Watershed Association in 1965, they took on one of the country’s most degraded urban waterways, using science, advocacy, and legal action as their primary tools…
The 1990s brought CRWA’s most consequential sewage victory. Advocacy for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s Long-Term Combined Sewer Overflow Plan led to an innovative engineering solution reducing sewage releases into the river by more than 95%, while saving ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1994, CRWA also launched its Volunteer Monthly Monitoring Program, which has since grown to more than 80 volunteers collecting water samples monthly at 35 locations, building the most extensive water quality dataset the Charles River has ever had…
As climate change intensified flooding, stormwater pollution, and environmental injustice across the watershed, Charles River restoration and climate resilience work evolved to meet new threats. CRWA established the Charles River Climate Compact in 2019, a coalition of watershed cities and towns sharing information and designing joint projects to mitigate flooding and build resilience together, recognizing that climate impacts do not respect municipal boundaries…
Persistent advocacy against stormwater pollution produced results at the federal level. Following years of pressure from CRWA and the Conservation Law Foundation, including the threat of litigation, the EPA announced a new stormwater permit program in 2022 targeting previously unregulated commercial and industrial properties. By 2024, the EPA released an even more ambitious draft permit requiring rain gardens and infiltration systems on large private properties with significant impervious surfaces, directly reducing pollution entering the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset Rivers…
Nearly 60 years after concerned citizens first organized to save their polluted river, the Charles has become one of the cleanest, most celebrated urban rivers in the country. Yet CRWA’s own guiding philosophy insists clean is not an endpoint but an ongoing verb. As stormwater pollution, intensifying storms, and environmental inequities continue testing the watershed, Charles River restoration and climate resilience work carries forward the same combination of citizen science, legal advocacy, and nature-based solutions that transformed Dirty Water into a model for urban river recovery nationwide…”
Read the article in full.
Photo: CRWA