Saving the Anacostia

The cover of The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, wp, for today, October 2, 2011 ...

... bears a lovely photo by Linda Davidson that highlights a series of articles inside. The lead article is Neely Tucker's "Anacostia River: From then till now". The Anacostia River ...

(The top of this map points northwest.)

... runs through my home town, Washington, D.C.:

It's fed by branches and creeks in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, in Maryland, and the Anacostia in turn feeds the Potomac River, on its way to the Chesapeake Bay.

Ms. Tucker reminds us that when white Europeans first saw the Anacostia in the early 1600s, it was still fully 40 feet deep, and in 1608 the famous Capt. John Smith could marvel at its clarity. The Nacotchtank Indians had long considered the Anacostia their river of life:

“The river was seen as a vein of Mother Earth; it was salty, like blood, and it tasted like blood,” says Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Indian (the closest descendants the Nacotchtanks have left) and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “It was part of the living system.”

Back then, the native peoples "moved on the river and its dozen or so tributaries — clear and abundant with shad, pike, bass and oysters — on small canoes."

Since the coming of white men and women, what's happened to the river ...

Blue, gooey substance collecting on silt
at low tide.

Trash and debris along the river
near where the Washington Nationals play.

More trash and debris.

... has been a study in how to despoil our living Earth, step by step by deplorable step. That's one upshot of Ms. Tucker's article.

The early white settlers included wealthy planters who wanted to grow tobacco near the Anacostia, using black slave labor. They cleared the aboriginal forests and drained the wetlands. Since they didn't replenish the soil with manure, it kept declining in fertility ... so they just cleared more land and started over. The result was that much of the cleared soil wound up in the river.

After the American Revolution, the European market for tobacco declined, and the planters switched to wheat. That made things worse, since they now had to plow up land that was formerly cultivated with hoes. At the outset of the nineteenth century, after Maryland ceded territory to build the new Nation's Capital:

Within a generation, the Anacostia was so clogged with silt and debris that deep-water boats could no longer make it to Bladensburg. In 1873, Washington began using underground sewers to dump raw waste into the river.

Then came the depredations of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, in the early twentieth century ...

... began a campaign to create usable land around the Anacostia. Tributaries were strangled with heavy culverts. Great swaths of bog and marsh were converted into dry land with landfill.

The Anacostia riverbed is now so overlain with centuries of agricultural runoff, sewage buildup, and other debris that Ms. Tucker is forced to write, "Today, you can walk across almost any part of the 8.5-mile Anacostia, as most of it is five feet deep or less, choked by silt and pollution."

Now, though, we paradoxically find that the only way we can restore the Anacostia to its former health and glory is to apply governmental and institutional tools that only a European-derived democracy can muster.

We also need environmental advocacy groups — especially local ones like the Anacostia Watershed Society — to continue to put pressure on various components of federal, state, and local governments, including the U.S. military, to do the right thing. Again, that's something Ms. Tucker's article is telling us.

It's as though a culture that has long revolved around contention and conquest, rather than cooperation, came to these shores and contended with the native tribes, wiping many of them out. Meanwhile, they conquered the supposed chaos of nature. Result: a continuing cascade of environmental catastrophes. Now that same culture resorts to a litany of adversarial episodes — court cases, congressional hearings, political campaigns, etc. — as the only way to bring itself to heel.

How ironic. Yet there's a positive lesson here. The worst features of a culture can turn into its best characteristics.

There's no way America can ever go back to a lost, uncivilized past where humans live in complete harmony with nature, Indian-style.

So, to get back in harmony and balance, we have to find our own way. It has to be a process that does not undo the marvels of civilization. It has to respect the spirit of this photo from the wp article:

It's the Anacostia in one of its remaining clean, green settings ... crossed by a bridge for golf carts!