Narrator: Nina Bell
Interviewer: Donna Sinclair
Date: Apr. 21, 2000
Place: Portland, Oregon

[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 2]

Transcribed by Melissa Williams

DS: This is Donna Sinclair from the Center for Columbia River History, today is April 21st 2000 and I’m interviewing Nina Bell of Northwest Environmental Advocates in Portland, Oregon. So before we start talking I wanted to ask you to tell me a little bit about how your environmental consciousness formed. Based on the work that you’re involved in.

NB: Um [laughs]. Well, it formed at an early age. My parents were, what in those days were called conservationists, and I can remember from pretty early in childhood, well probably the earliest thing was my mother talking about zero population growth. I was in the third grade [and] I remember that keenly. And then after that we moved to Seattle and my parents were just involved in a lot of different things. As a family we worked on trying to stop the Amchitka nuclear blast on Amchitka Island, nuclear testing, we were Greenpeace Seattle [laughs] at the very beginning, the four of us. And in fourth grade, even though deathly shy and I keep thinking back on this, but I stood outside a grocery store and collected signatures for Washington’s bottle bill, which didn’t pass but [laughs], and heard my parents talk about environmental issues and the politics of organizations and the politics of the environment around the dinner table all the time, so it just sort of became something that I did as part of my family and then began to go off and do things by myself as I got older and so, um, so I worked in the whale issue and I worked on nuclear power issues and then I went to Reed College for two years and as I was, well, I dropped out, but I thought I was taking [a] leave of absence, and as I was doing that the nuclear power issue was still very much in the forefront and I got involved in that and worked with nuclear power issues through about ’85, including two years in D.C. And then began to feel that I wasn’t able to make much headway with that issue, and I’d sort of gotten to the top of whatever I could do, I mean I was helping [the] state attornies general, and I was writing legal briefs on things and at that point I finally decided to go to law school. About the same time I started to go to law school I began working on water quality issues, and that’s what I do now.

DS: What interested you in water quality issues?

NB: Um, it’s hard to say. When I came back from D.C I vaguely remember going around and talking to a few organizations trying to figure out what they were working on and what they weren’t. I think with the sense that I didn’t have an interest in duplicating what somebody else was doing, and I certainly up ’til then I hadn’t been duplicating anything, and certainly there were lots of environmental groups, not as many as there are now, but still plenty out there. We were starting to look as an organization at why people were concerned about Hanford, and Portland being the major metropolitan area effect[ed] by, related to Hanford, and Seattle is pretty distant from Eastern Washington and doesn’t have the river connection. So we started looking at that and realized somewhere early on that not only did, well the government has a certain amount of information about the impacts of multiple Hanford facilities on the river, that information wasn’t really known, it was a visceral response that the public had [that] wasn’t based on any information that the people had particularly, um, that somehow we were affected in this community, and began to realize that there were a lot of things wrong with water quality in the Columbia River and that neither state, because it was an interstate water, was paying attention to it and it literally fell between the cracks between the two states, and EPA wasn’t doing anything either. So as an organization we had prepared what we called a preliminary report. It never got to a final stage, and it was something like Preliminary Report on Water Quality of the Columbia River, and it’s kind of funny to look back at it now because I had no idea about anything about the Clean Water Act, and neither did the person who wrote it [laughs], and we were going into territory we hadn’t been before, and identified there was information and there were data about the problems, it became clear the states weren’t doing anything about it, it was not on the radar screen. If you go back to the original documents of that era the Columbia River wouldn’t show up on the reports that the state has to make to the EPA, pursuant to the Clean Water Act, the Columbia River didn’t even show up on those reports, and so we began talking to the EPA and the EPA said ‘Well, there’s this great program called the National Estuary Program, the NEP, and it provides a lot of money for studies and then figure out what to do based on those studies, and you know we really think this is a good idea but neither state’s interested.’ So we took up that cause and spent, I don’t know how many years, but a long time trying to get the designation of the Columbia River, and sort of short and long stories about that, but the gist of it…

DS: The designation…

NB: The designation, as part of this National Estuary Program, then would bring with it the money and the resources, and a framework for doing the work, and the program’s part of the Clean Water Act. And Puget Sound was the first– the Puget Sound Program was created prior to the NEP and then was the first one sort of. . . and so although it was much better funded than anything else around the country, except for Chesapeake Bay, you could see that it led to gathering information and reports that were made to the public about what was wrong and what the effects of the pollution were on fish and wildlife and human health, and discussions between multiple interest parties about what to do about the problems. And it had this effect of bringing to the public this issue that really otherwise was not really in the public view. So that was what we thought we would do and it turns out that that campaign, to get this NEP designation, was a lot harder than we thought. Basically the governor’s offices wouldn’t agree to it, Governor Roberts when she was running for election said she would agree and then she backed off when she got elected, and the biggest opponents were really the public ports along the Columbia and the pulp and paper industry. So at some point I think they feel politically, especially the governor’s office felt politically, they couldn’t just oppose this program, which was relatively innocuous, and we were able to find industry in other parts of the country that were able to say this was not something to be afraid of. At Galviston Bay, for example, the chemical industry representative was saying glowing terms about the National Estuary Program. So eventually what happened was they proposed a state-led alternative which was, I’m gonna get the name wrong, but The Lower Columbia River Bi-state Program on Water Quality, or some such thing, I co-chaired that for two and a half years and during that, it was a 2.1 million dollar program to gather information and eventually I resigned from that process, and eventually after more years of still trying to get the National Estuary Program the states, of course, ran out of money and industry stopped funding the bi-state program, and they went and they got the federal designation, which is now the Lower Columbia River Estuary Program, LCREP, which is I think a shadow of what it could have been, but at that point federal funding was much, much lower than it had been when we first tried to get the designation.

DS: When was that?

NB: Ooo. I think the Bi-state began in 1990, it was supposed to go for four years, but I think it strung out a little longer and then it’s hard for me to remember when they actually went for the designation, but it certainly was a number of years ago. And then when we went trying to get involved at a fairly high level in the LCREP Program, pretty much the state said we don’t want you , so that was the end of that [laughs]. And quite frankly the whole, the result of it has been a big disappointment not only to us but I think the people in the estuary communities generally speak of it as having been mostly not productive and just sort of a wash, nothing much to pay attention to, um, even laughable, and I actually think a big part of that was we were excluded from participation and there really never was a strong environmental voice in that program and I think the strength of environmental voice makes all the difference in how things proceed. So, that was kind of the backdrop to all the subsequent issues on water quality work that we did because we had this focus on the lower Columbia River then began talking about the basin as a whole because obviously the whole drainage of that basin effects the lower river, and the whole issue of should there be some sort of basin management, which I think has been agonized for decades, in my looking through the law library files, and then also looking at what was in Portland’s backyard, what was happening with the Willamette River, what was happening with the Columbia Slough, and then how are those different water bodies and geographic areas effected by state programs. So we began doing almost sort of three different things, two of them were kind of more geographic based. One was looking at the Columbia River and the Columbia River Basin, then the other was looking at specifically the water bodies that are affected by, and included, in the Portland metropolitan area, and then the third aspect of that was actually looking at state programs in Oregon and Washington and beginning litigation that affected the state water quality programs in both of those states. And then a few years ago, on top of that we added kind of a fourth component which was being involved at the federal regulatory level where a lot of national policies are being made that affect the state policies that affect the waters that we drink and use in this area. So we’re still involved at all those different levels, as best we can.

DS: How did you get involved with Northwest Environmental Advocates? Is that when you were looking around for something to…

NB: No, actually Northwest Environmental Advocates was originally called the Coalition for Safe Power and it was formed in 1969 by people who wanted to stop operation at the Trojan nuclear power plant. After people began working on the Trojan issue through public education and licensing proceeding before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission where you didn’t have to be a lawyer to practice law before the NRC, that was what I was doing eventually, but the Coalition then began working on proposed nuclear power plants in Oregon and Washington as well and promoting renewable energy, and so the name actually changed I think somewhere around, I’m gonna guess ’85, ’86, but I was working with it when I left Reed so that was ’77 and basically since that time, in one form or another.

DS: And how did you come to Portland?

NB: Well, I was raised in Seattle and I came to Portland to go to Reed. And like many people who go to Reed I dropped out of Reed [laughs], it’s a badge of honor I guess to drop out of there, but yeah I stayed and then I didn’t go back to school until actually ’87, and I finished up my undergraduate degree and went to night law school at Lewis and Clark.

DS: Can you tell me about your first introduction to the Columbia Slough? What do you remember about the first time you saw the slough?

NB: That’s funny because I don’t I remember, um, I live in Northeast Portland so you know, the slough is one of those things you drive over even less aware of doing so than when you drive over the Willamette, I mean, it’s just sort of this ditch you drive over to go to Seattle on I-5 or something. Um, I don’t remember the first time I really interacted with the slough but I remember one trip vividly, I’m trying to remember who we were out with, I think it was with Mikey Jones, who you definitely need to talk to [laughs], Mikey is Mr. Slough, I’m pretty sure it was with him, I have to think about it but, we put in at the– I can’t remember what they call it–the Northeast 13th where there’s the big blob of dirt that the Army Corps dumped in there, so we put in right at the top of the lower part of the slough, and it was a hot August day, and then went all the way down to Kelley Point Park, and it was, I mean I’m sure I had already been working on slough issues behind a desk by the time we did that, but it was just a complete revelation I think, to me, in that there was this incredible amount of bird life. We had a map of the CSO, the Combined Sewer Overflow discharge pipes, and we wanted to locate each one and sort of get a sense of them, and try to figure out what those other pipes were, which there were many, storm weather pipes and things, and so I just have these vivid recollections as we would go down herons would be there and we would sort of scare them off a little bit, and then we’d canoe down a little bit further and then they would fly back up again, sort of hopping along, and kingfishers kind of dive-bombing into the slough and catching fish, I really don’t think I’d ever seen a kingfisher before, so that was exciting, and then I’ll just never forget this view of these little goldfinches kind of hovering around one of these sewer outfalls [laughs’], it was covered with blackberry bushes and stuff, but just the bird life made an impression and the water itself which was really mucky, that made an impression and I really, that day, having already known about the problems that the slough faced, I guess saw its potential. And I guess I worry about it periodically from this feeling of it’s this little, I don’t wanna say channel, but this little sort of tube of water and a little bit of greenery and just encroached terribly on both sides by industry, and occasionally if I happen to be driving around the area or something I might notice that a new building’s been put in that seems too close and anything at this point just seems to me just another nail on the coffin, it’s that feeling. But I’ve certainly been there more since then, but that was my first impression, it has a lot of potential, and it is an important habitat, and it also wasn’t someplace that I really would want to encourage people to go to because it clearly wasn’t clean enough to sustain that use, although we took our boat up in there, our Riverwatch boat, to give people tours, but they didn’t touch the water so it was OK [laughs].

DS: Have you seen people fishing?

NB: Oh, yeah, yeah. When we used to go up there for other reasons, you know, call out to people and invariably if they were Caucasian and we asked them if they were going to eat the fish they’d say no they would throw it back, they were part of the Bass, I’m forgetting the name of that club, but the Bass Anglers Club, or whatever, and you know, they were there to see how big a fish they could catch. Other people, recent immigrants and Black people. [You] generally got the impression they were planning to eat the fish and it was funny because as I was getting the exposure on the ground I remembered back to a conversation I had had with somebody from EPA, who was just one of the most thoughtful agency people I’ve ever met, and as well as conversations with people at the Oregon Department of Environmental Equality– DEQ– and the DEQ people were never very concerned with the public’s use of the slough, in fact the more I spent time there the more I would go back to them and argue with them and say, ‘Look, people are catching the carp to eat them, they are using the slough, it’s not just some sort of wasteland that nobody interacts with,’ which was the feeling of the day at the DEQ. The person at EPA had worked in Oregon quite a lot and had spent a lot of time driving the I-5 Corridor . . . and [was] somebody who was tuned into water, and paid a lot of attention to what he was driving over and was well aware from an early time that people were using the slough and had expressed to me concern about people fishing there probably before I really was all that aware of what the slough was, and how different it was from other water bodies in the area, so it all started connecting with me that we had a really big problem on our hands and state agencies weren’t doing anything and EPA doesn’t act quite at that level. And so from there when we ended up doing, I can’t remember the chronology of these different things, but we ended up putting up the warning signs, putting out the warning brochure, doing the Riverwatch trips, and doing the Toxic Waters Map which talked about it, and there’s a certain irony to that last thing because the description of the Columbia Slough on that Toxic Waters Map has one sentence in it that I consider the only non-objective statement in the whole publication; the only statement that was based on our opinion and not supported by known government documented facts, and everything else was government documented, which didn’t stop people from threatening to sue us about it [laughs], and that sentence says something about the Columbia Slough has been ignored by regulatory agencies because it’s used by people of color and low-income people. We had arranged with The Oregonian to reprint part of the colored map, which they did, and they ran a big story with it, and the reporter I think must have read every sentence in this publication and he latched on to that one sentence [laughs], so a good part of the newspaper story has to do with that, and he went to the DEQ and said “What do you think of this?”

And they said, “Oh, that’s crazy, that’s ridiculous, there’s no such thing as environmental injustice, everybody’s treated the same and this water body would be treated the same if it were in Lake Oswego,” which of course we hotly contested, and of course subsequently the whole environmental [justice] issue became one that, you know, the state formed a committee and the federal government provided lots of money, and state DEQ has a committee, and you know everyone’s acknowledged it as a real issue, but when we first wrote that sentence it was heresy to say such a thing, so, you know, anyway, just one of the things I suppose that drove us to pay more attention to the Columbia Sough was what its impacts were on people as well as fish and wildlife, and that concern really stems from having our roots as an anti-nuclear organization, where when you talked about radioactive materials and its effects, you almost exclusively talked about the effects on human beings rather than on fish or trees or whatever. So rather then having this sort of dichotomy, which I think some environmental organizations have, well there’s the environment and human health is something separate, we’ve always seen it as related and don’t put human health off as something other people should deal with, it’s just part of the environmental issues.

DS: When you started the campaign to put the warning signs on the slough, what sort of reception did you get? Can you talk a little bit about that? How did real people respond?

NB: Well, our first foray with signs was two large– two or three hand-painted ones that we put up on the Willamette River in what’s called Willamette Cove, which is right downstream of McCormick and Baxter, now a federal Superfund site, where we actually had data on the contamination of crayfish in that area, so we put those signs up, and of course the state agencies were very upset because we invited the media and all that, well, you know there wasn’t any problem, they were gonna get to it and what have you, so that made a big splash and we had specific reasons for wanting to focus on that area, and we’re concerned with people fishing there, we had run into a commercial crayfish person who was fishing with a commercial license but he was feeding his foster children with the crayfish, that’s what he told us, so that was really very disturbing because that was at a point where in 1987 EPA had taken samples and analyzed them for dioxin, part of the 1987 National Bioaccumulation Study, and so we knew right there was not a good place for anybody to be catching anything, but you would never know, it just looks like a bunch of trees there and it looks sort of peaceful. But we still had a desire to address specifically the community people who were using the slough, and so I think it was actually at that time I had taken this little summer position working for Fred Hansen who was the director of DEQ and then became Deputy Administrator of EPA, and now runs Tri-Met, and he had asked me to do some work, it was kind of a secret project [laughs], let’s just leave it at that, I can explain it but, and it’s interesting but not relevant to the slough. In any case some of my research involved going back to Washington, D.C. and looking at what are called 305(b) reports for each state in the Union and that [was] where every two years the state tells the EPA what they’re monitoring data show about water quality in their state. So looking through some of these states I found there were plenty of states, in the Great Lakes area certainly stands out, where the states were not nervous about saying we have toxic contamination and you shouldn’t eat the fish, and not only that we’re gonna put up these warning signs that tell you either not to eat the fish or how much you can eat safely, and if you’re pregnant you sh– they weren’t afraid of it, it was just “We have information and we’re gonna make it public and we’re gonna do the best we can to prevent people from being hurt,” whereas hanging around DEQ, as I was doing this job, I know lots of well-meaning people had data on their desk that showed there were toxic levels that they sat down with me and could do the calculations and say ‘This is dangerous, people shouldn’t be eating this and the data never got off the corner of their desk, they didn’t ever think to send it to the Department of Health or Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife…

DS: Why do you think that is?

NB: Bureaucratic inertia? I don’t know. As I said, they’re well-meaning people, they cared, they made these calculations, they helped me make calculations, they didn’t see it as their job to advocate for the public with the information they had, it was just sort of a cerebral, intellectual kind of thing and I think ultimately a fear of ever really concluding anything, sort of like ‘Well we gathered data, but gosh we wouldn’t really wanna say anything was wrong.’ This is played out with this issue of skeletal abnormalities in fish in [the] Newburg Pool on the Willamette River, they’ve gone back and forth and they seem to conclude that there’s a problem, but more often than not DEQ would be heard to say ‘Well, seems to be a pretty high percentage of skeletal abnormalities, but gosh you know, we don’t really know – maybe that’s natural, maybe all this level of tumors is natural,’ well, maybe it is, who am I to say, but first of all if you do the studies you ought to do it in order to consider it against some measuring stick, and very often, and again I would see people talking about these studies, in fact sometimes I would interject myself into these little meetings and conversations and say ‘Well, why aren’t you collecting this species,’ or ‘Maybe you should test it this way,’ or ‘Maybe you should gather some of the fish….’ I mean, people would get together and decide on where they were gonna go catch fish, with this electroshocking equipment, and not really think through what part of the fish they were gonna analyze or what chemicals they were gonna look for, or what they would measure it up against when they got the information, completely haphazard, again, people considered my friends, the best-meaning people, yet not ever really thinking about– always at the top of their head ‘How am I gonna decide what the relevance of this information is, and what are we gonna do with it when we get it.’ It was just ‘No, our job is to collect information and we’ll sort of figure out the rest later,’ and so when they collected the information I think they never had in their minds ‘Will we have any kind of obligation,’ and we have to, I don’t know, keep pretending this is ecotopia, that we don’t have toxic problems in great Oregon, I mean in the midwest people don’t hide it, and so we pretend that the Willamette’s clean and the Columbia’s clean, and beat’s me, at some point I really don’t have an explanation except that I think it’s almost this academic interest and an interest in taking information and filing out the reports and sending them to EPA and not ever really thinking about what’s the purpose of all this, which I think is a real problem, people in state agencies aren’t thinking about why they’re doing the work and what they’re supposed to be protecting, even if I were to disagree with their conclusions in the end they should be thinking about those things. Knowing that that’s how that system worked, and obviously having access to information on what were the contamination levels in the slough, and knowing that some people I knew in EPA thought it was a matter of concern and seeing that they weren’t going to take any action and that other states…

[Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2]

NB: … put up signs, and not these little tiny signs– I mentioned that we put these big hand painted signs up on the Willamette. Well, eventually a number of months later the state, being sort of embarrassed into doing something, went and put their own signs up, and they were at most, I don’t know, eleven by fourteen, and they were absolutely infinitesimal, half the time they fell off and were underwater, I doubt that they’re there today though the risk is still just as great as it was then, and you really couldn’t read them, we would go out in a boat to see – could you see them or not – and you couldn’t , and so I certainly didn’t want to do something like that and we weren’t gonna wait around for the city or the state to figure out that the slough should be posted, so we did these big beautiful signs ourselves and we went and put them in with concrete and posts and all of that, and at the same time out together the multi-lingual warning brochure, which while not beautiful, I think was effective. EPA for some number of years talked about it as being a model for other states to use and Richard Brown with the Black United Front distributed a lot of those single-handedly, you know going into stores all through North and Northeast Portland and dropping off copies, and schools in the area asked for them, and how do you know what the effect is, I mean [sigh], the only way we could judge was periodically talking to people or at some points you’d see piles of fish left at the base of the signs. Do we know that signs are ineffective? Yes, we knew that when we started because lots of people will fish in the Great Lakes and consume dangerous levels of toxic material because, I don’t know, they like to fish, because they don’t have another source of protein and it’s free, I’m sure that it’s a whole range of reasons, and there’s no doubt that in the Columbia Slough fishing continues and people continue to eat the fish, and I think some of it is, and it’s not like I’ve talked to these people but I’ve talked to other people who have and I think that some of it’s cultural, I remember reading in a cooking magazine about how Romanians have a real thing about carp, it’s very special in their communities and when they prepare it and how they prepare it and all of that and I suppose that maybe the risk doesn’t seem that great to them, but I think that whole extended families get fed on those carp, and my impression when we were in the canoe was you could practically reach out with your hand and catch those carp, they just sort of boil at the surface of the slough and so it’s easy to feed lots of people with that fish. Of course, then I’m sure you’ve seen the articles about the reaction that the city had which was to go out and cut a bunch of them down with those saws [laughs], so then Willamette Week picked up on that and made fools of the city for doing that and then the city printed signs that were similar, but not identical, and went and put them back up on their property, so that was a big media kind of circus.

DS: What was your reaction when they went out and cut the signs down?

NB: Oh, pretty much outrage [laughs]. We sue a variety of people and still maintain good relationships with them, EPA we sue on some fairly regular basis and it’s not held against us, in fact sometimes we get phone calls from high level people saying, “We appreciate your getting us to do this on time,” or “We understand why you’re doing this and we think it’s a good idea even,” but we’ve never had a good relationship with the city, with certain individuals in the city, yes, but the city as a whole has been one of the most antagonistic relationships we’ve ever had. And so the lawsuit on the combined sewer overflows made them incredibly defensive and we were waging not only litigation, but a media war, which was easy to do because there was a CSO discharge, that’s now cleaned up, that one doesn’t work anymore, but there was an outfall right basically on the edge of downtown right as you reach the end of the Tom McCall Waterfront Park there’s a big plaque that says that the Willamette River was cleaned up and made safe for fishing and swimming and literally immediately below that if you look down was this outfall out of which every day during the hot summer days right, not during the days of quote ‘heavy rain’ when the city said that’s when they overflowed [laughs], but every day during the summertime you could see the sewage coming out [laughs], which put the lie to their heavy rain thing, the heavy rain’s not true anyway, it’s just a light rain that makes it go, and there was a person who had initially brought us the issue and said “Something seems wrong with this.” Well, his initial offerings to us were this large plastic bag full of syringes, and condoms, and toilet paper, and I had a bottle of syringes that he had picked up at the edge of the Willamette, and there was such a visual aspect to what was wrong with this that even though that wasn’t the main issue for us it was a good issue in terms of presenting the issue to the public and the media, the city, rather than saying, yes we really need to do something about this, was incredibly defensive and they were defensive publicly, they were defensive in our settlement negotiations with them and they just became more entrenched in that sort of ‘We’ve got it under control, there’s nothing wrong’ kind of mentality, sort of circle the wagons. So when we put signs on their park land they responded in the same way, you know, ‘You people are crazy, you don’t have a leg to stand on and we’re cutting these signs down.’ How we might have presented it on the signs was maybe more direct than they would have wanted. I don’t remember the words, but they just didn’t want to take ownership over any of these problems, and as far as I’m concerned that’s the way they still behave, we just don’t get along.

DS: So the Bureau of Environmental Services is working on combined sewer overflows now? Are there strained relations?

NB: There are strained relations. We also filed a notice of intent to sue under RECRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] . . . Superfund deals with abandoned waste and RECRA pretty much deals with on-going, and there’s a citizen suit provision there that’s quite dramatic, dramatically useful for citizens and so we filed an intent to sue to address the toxic contamination of the sediments in the slough against the city, knowing that the city under the law would then turn around, as they can in Superfund, and bring in all the other parties. It’s not the city alone certainly, by a long shot, that’s responsible for contamination of the slough, but they’re a big part of it and it was just easier for us to just name one major party and they could go after the rest. They then subsequently have a ninety day window in which to meet the terms of the act that would prevent us from actually filing the lawsuit, and on the ninety first day they signed an agreement with the DEQ basically to treat that area as a Superfund site more or less, and then they proceeded with their Columbia Slough sediment project, but again they weren’t going to do anything without being forced to and so when we forced them that just created more antagonism, and of course subsequently they have, with the Combine Sewer Overflow process, what we found in our initial settlement discussions, which went on for a whole summer, was they didn’t know anything about their sewer system, not for the Willamette or the Columbia Slough. They didn’t know where the pipes were, what the volumes were, they knew where the overflow points were because for years they had printed this full-color booklet, every year – “CSO outfalls” – and it had a picture of each outfall and comments on like whether the concrete was falling apart [laughs] or the bricks… it always struck me as a very odd picture book, that’s about the most they seemed to really know, and they had written about the CSO overflows in this big Columbia Slough background document, has a lot of information in it, they’d written about the toxic contamination, but again just the way the state people behaved, although in this case the city was on the hook for paying for lots, so they had another reason for not doing anything about it, while they wrote about it they never did anything about it and DEQ never made them do anything about it I think just because DEQ was intimidated by the power of the City of Portland, and so again there was no other choice but to think in terms of law suits, so that’s what we did, but those were never seen as a good thing from their perspective, it was ‘Oh, now we’re gonna be forced to do something that we don’t want to do.’

DS: It went all the way to the Supreme Court, didn’t it?

NB: That case did, and to me again that demonstrates their willingness to spend tax payers money for no particular purpose, but also they’re never letting go of their proposition that this was a law suit that shouldn’t have been filed, that once we won at the Ninth Circuit that they still petitioned the U. S. Supreme Court to review it, and for us it was really important because until the ninth circuit decision we’d made some bad law that would effect the whole country, and that was more important than Portland’s wage frankly, and perhaps the city was under similar pressure from dischargers of all types throughout the country to try and reverse the good law we had made, although I have to say I go to a lot of meetings and I’ve had people come up to me in Arizona, and Utah, and various places people who work for cities and say ‘That was a great case, it really helped us…’

DS: Can you explain why?

NB: Well, what happens, you have a case and this sort of narrow legal issue wends its way through the courts for years and you’ve won an important thing but you have hardly won the whole issue and that’s the reason we ended up settling the case once we won that decision. But the decision itself doesn’t have anything to do with Portland sewage it just stands for the proposition that a citizen, and that also really means EPA, can enforce the language of a permit that is narrative language that says the discharges that are allowed under that permit cannot cause or contribute to water quality standards violations, so we never got to the issue of did Portland cause water quality standards violations or contribute to them. What we were just getting at was [asking was] that language in that permit enforceable, and the answer was yes. That sent a message, well, I don’t know, it didn’t seem to send much of a message to the City of Portland, but it sends a message to other point-source industries and municipalities in Oregon that they had a level of vulnerability to citizen suits that they hadn’t really conceived of, and again, where a citizen can sue that’s also where EPA can come in. [The] state can do anything it wants but generally it doesn’t, the state has a pretty bad history on enforcement, and permits are put in every five years to act as a shield, they require certain things of the permittee, but then they act as a shield against these citizens’ lawsuits, so as long as the state says you can discharge X amount of temperature, dioxin, sewage, what have you, and nobody challenges that permit, then if you come along and as a citizen say ‘Well, they’re discharging all this dioxin, or temperature, or sewage, or whatever and that’s wrong,’ they are able to turn around say ‘Well, this permit allows us to do this’ and it’s a shield against those law suits. The reason that this language causes some problems is that the permits are not being written properly, and permits themselves universally do not conform with the Clean Water Act because these permits do allow discharges to cause and contribute to water quality standards violations and that’s just flat out illegal; doesn’t stop the state from issuing them and doesn’t make EPA veto them, this is a sort of nationwide problem. So where there was this additional language that said, not withstanding these limitations we’ve put on your discharge about how much of this, that, and the other thing you can discharge you also are bound by this narrative language that says you can’t cause or contribute to standards violations, meant that what they thought was a shield was no longer the shield that they thought it was and the end result of that is I think that Oregon industry that discharges with permits, as opposed to farming and logging and those things that don’t have those kinds of permits, Oregon industry understands the importance of this whole area that I work in, which is called TMDLs, or Total Maximum Daily Loads, these clean-up plans for waters that violate water quality standards, like the Slough, or the Willamette or any number of rivers, and these TMDLs are a way of figuring out how much of a pollutant can a water body handle, and then taking that pie and sort of cutting it up between the different parties and then once that’s done then the amount that a particular industry or city is allowed then should go into their permit, and that process is the subject of lots of law suits we’ve filed in Oregon and Washington, but even with the lawsuits the states have not prepared very many of these TMDLs and what point source industry in Oregon realized was in order to have really valid permits that protected them against citizens law suits, they needed these TMDLs to be done so they knew what portion of cleaning up the pollution in the river they were responsible for, and that message was heard in other places, although mostly heard as people in cities saying this demonstrates that we have to do better and that was sort of the message that was heard out of the state was if we want true protection then we’re gonna have to come up to the plate. [In] Washington State the point sources don’t seem to be the least bit rattled by that case, even though it applies to them too, and have taken a hard line that they don’t want TMDLs to be done, and they don’t want the state to do it, and they’d just as soon not fund the program and have EPA do it, and figure that they won’t get hurt; so it’s funny how a border can make a difference even if it really shouldn’t [laughs]. But I think that case was important for changing the discussion in the state about what we’re doing to clean up all of our waters.

DS: And didn’t it also relate to citizen action and enforcement of the Clean Water Act?

NB: Yeah, in that it upheld the notion that we had the right to go to court to enforce that narrative language, that sort of not withstanding effluent numbers, you’re still not allowed to cause or contribute to violations of water quality standards. And I’ll tell you that the reason the city was concerned was that every time raw sewage goes into water body it immediately causes or contributes [laughs] to a violation, there’s no discussion about whether any amount of raw sewage is gonna cause that because it does, and one of the other big loopholes of this whole process is this concept of mixing zones where you suspend the water quality standards [in] some area downstream of this discharge pipe and so you could say ‘Well, the raw sewage as it comes out of the pipe may cause a violation, but we’re not gonna consider that, we’re only gonna consider sort of what’s at the edge of that mixing zone,’ which in Oregon is then an arbitrary amount of geographic area that you can give it. However, you can’t justify a mixing zone for something that affects human health because people cannot detect sewage, and as you’d see if you were going along the Willamette, especially in the summertime, but other times too, people don’t veer out of the way of this plume of raw sewage coming out, they’re not even cognizant of it, whereas the idea of a mixing zone is that fish have avoidance mechanisms and they will avoid these areas of pollution that are uninhabitable for them and they’ll go on the other side of the river. It’s all very theoretical and not very well supported anyway, but we were able to convince the state that there could not be mixing zones for these CSOs. So all in all when you take the fairly small amount of flow in the Columbia Slough, no mixing zones for CSOs, the fact that that water body gets overwhelmed with sewage and storm water, even though the city then subsequently sought to back off their commitment on the level of control of CSO discharges in the Willamette, they did not seek to back off the Columbia Slough and said that they would stay with the very, very high level of controls they had agreed to for the Columbia Slough, and those are higher than, as far as I know, anywhere else in the country, which is this three discharges in ten years of raw sewage, this is all theoretical, but once every five years in winter and once every ten years in summer, for a total of three every ten years. Where, as I said, in the Willamette they were able to get the DEQ to back off through a so-called collaborative process, which did not include us, so it wasn’t very collaborative, and now they’re beating the drum to do it again.

DS: Where you involved in the decision-making or in that collaborative process in the slough?

NB: Well, as far as I know the slough didn’t even come up in that, I think it was all focused on the Willamette, because the city just knew better than to try and ask to have the levels changed, so in terms of how those levels were started in the first place, as we were doing our settlement discussions with the city during the summer after we filed the suit, the city was busy over with the state DEQ and the Environmental Quality Commission, which sort of serves as the board of directors for the DEQ, [a] citizens’ board, and they were over there coming up with this agreement, and what the city had figured was if we came up with an agreement the suit will go away, the suit won’t be valid anymore, which wasn’t true, but they did come up with an agreement and that’s where they agreed to this three and ten year overflow for the Willamette and Columbia Slough, and that they would get to that level in twenty years, and so we were negotiating the settlement and they were negotiating this other deal and we injected ourselves as much as possible in the other deal but it was largely not a public process and I think the other interesting thing about that process was that although the deal had to be eventually agreed to and signed by the commission, and they had some public meetings on it, they certainly didn’t have any public hearings, and they did have at least one illegal meeting if I recall correctly and they were really scrambling because the city was saying ‘We need this protection.’ The Oregonian, which to my mind should have been covering on a sort of blow-by-blow basis the development of, at that point the most expensive project in the city’s history, didn’t pay any attention to it and wouldn’t, it was sort of some non-issue and so the public was never brought in to this unfolding process and the state never was really under any scrutiny as they did it because the media was disinterested in covering it. Now, the media was interested in bags of debris and filth that came out and that kind of thing, but they weren’t interested in this process that was to determine what the solution was, I just always thought that was a travesty. So now the city’s tact is, and I’ve got this big colorful book here on my desk yet and I haven’t read it yet, about what they’re planning, but the city’s tactic is now to say ‘Well, we can’t do everything, we can’t do our Clean Water Act commitments and our new Endangered Species Act commitments all together so we need to stretch the whole process out for a longer period of time, or we need to do less of one thing so we can do more of another.’ And what have you, so the interesting thing that’s developing now is obviously they’ve spent an enormous amount of money printing this full color sales job, where DEQ has sent them two letters saying pretty much ‘Earth to city, back off,’ [laughs] we’re not interested in re-negotiating for a third time, and the state I think there’s an interesting political dynamic because the state is putting a lot of pressure, well, I don’t think they’re putting enough pressure, but they feel they’re putting a lot of pressure on rural agriculture, which is of course one of the sources of upstream pollution to the Willamette River, and they’re getting a huge backlash right now, again mostly not covered by the media, but the Capitol Press in Salem I think covers it. There’s this huge backlash against what the state’s trying to do to control farming runoff, and if the state then says to the city ‘OK, you don’t have to do as much, or OK you can stretch it out another umpteen years’ then the farmers are gonna come even more unglued; so in the name of equity they are saying ‘No, you gotta stick with the program right now.’ And there’s this whole finger-pointing thing going on, you have it less with the slough because there’s sort of not much of an upstream there to talk about, but on these other water bodies, especially the Willamette and the Columbia, the city says, and they claim they don’t, but I hear it over and over again ‘Well, why should we clean up our sewage because the water when it comes to Portland is so filthy with bacteria as an indicator of human pathogens, that we shouldn’t spend all of this money cleaning it up because it comes to us dirty and we hardly make a dent in how much dirtier it gets, and the people upstream say ‘Why should we bother to clean up because once it hits Portland they dump all their human sewage into it, so what difference does it make if we clean it up,’ and it’s this whole finger-pointing exercise which the TMDL, total maximum daily load, is supposed to solve by saying ‘OK, all of you, upstream, downstream and in the middle, here’s what everybody gets now. You all go out in lock step and you implement the controls needed to reduce runoff from farms, runoff from cities, logging impacts, urban sewer discharges, whatever, and you do all these things and if everyone does them in the time frame they’re supposed to do them in the river’s supposed to get cleaned up.’ But of course, you know, the state continues to drag its feet in actually getting those TMDLs done. Now, the slough is different in that regard because after about ten years of working on it DEQ did prepare, finalize, a TMDL for the Columbia Slough for a number of different pollutants, sent it up to EPA which approved it, after ten years I would say I don’t think that TMDL was very good and I certainly considered suing on it, but I just didn’t have the time or energy I guess. This is still a process that’s in its infancy, it’s a part of the 1972 Clean Water Act but because it universally hasn’t been implemented across the country, despite law suits, and Oregon was the first to be sued in ’86, they’re still, each time they do it, especially with difficult water bodies, or difficult pollutants, they’re inventing, and reinventing, and sort of improving on things, so the Columbia Slough one’s far from perfect but it represents a step in the evolution of its process and it’s a fairly early step. But the idea is it should be a driver for the types of controls that are necessary to clean up the water. The slough is such a difficult thing because of all the physical changes that have been made to it that it just presents, of course physical changes have been made to water all over, the Willamette River had been channelized, waters in the east side particularly have been dewatered, and things like grazing and logging can completely destroy systems, and those physical changes really take decades to over come under the best of circumstances, and the slough you’d have to dig out a bunch of things to make it even remotely resemble an natural water body. So the whole system, the TMDL program, becomes much more difficult to apply when you’ve got those kind of inherent things that you have to cope with, those kinds of changes that have been made. So I don’t think that that TMDL lived up to the potential of the program to drive change, and again I think that’s partly because of the political dynamic of the City of Portland, and the county, Multnomah County has been terrible, you know, ‘Well, we just don’t wanna to do anything differently.’

DS: I know the Drainage District is working on implementing the TMDL standards right now.

NB: Yeah. Well I think of the different parties, although I wouldn’t say the Drainage District has ever– I mean there are different ones out there– have ever been ra-ra environmentalists, they’ve certainly been more open to the idea of doing some things differently I think. Multnomah County, which again, I believe the entities are represented by individuals and that that individual makes a world of difference, and Multnomah County as a county I don’t think you would say was anti-environmental, I don’t know that I have an opinion about the county as a whole, what it is or isn’t, but the individual who represents the interest of the county with regard to the Columbia Slough is horrible with regard to environmental protection, and then you have other municipalities along the slough and the upper area that are also very resistant. And City of Portland I think we get some people in the bureaus who really want to do the right thing, but overall I think they’re limping along, I don’t see really meaningful progress. And then some of that stuff is also then created by the DEQ… [For example, there is a big source of lead near the Slough in the form of air pollution – edited addition by Nina Bell, May 2001] [Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2]

NB: … What the state did instead of actually what I would say taking the most practical and direct approach, which would have been to change the Clean Air Act permit for those lead emissions said “Well, nah, we’ll let the lead continue to rain down on the environment, the city around that area , then we’ll just make it the city’s problem to deal with the lead as part of their storm water program.”

Well, storm water controls are at the very beginning stages of development and implementation, I’ve been to meetings at the city where they’re saying, “Well, we’re trying these swales,” or “We’re trying this wetland treatment area,” or “We’re trying this thing over near this piece of freeway,” or whatever.

And then you say, “Well that sounds good. How are you gonna tell if it has any effect on decreasing pollution?”

“Well we don’t know, we don’t have any idea how we would monitor it, we haven’t even worked that into the program.” [laughs] This is all experimental and we have now, because the Clean Water Act was modified, storm water permits that are required for large municipal areas and those storm water permits require cities to do various things. But a) we don’t know how effective those things are, b) we’re not even sure how to monitor for effectiveness and ultimately there’s no question, but keeping the pollution out of the storm water is a much more practical approach than any kind of treatment of this very diffuse pollution, you know, you have a large amount of water with a relatively small amount of pollution in it.

So it makes much more sense to say, “We’re not letting the lead into the atmosphere,” rather than saying “Well, we’re gonna let it continue to go into the storm water.” And then it’s the city’s problem to figure out how to get it out of there. Now, I don’t know that the city ever took up that cause the way I did, they should have, though that might have been perceived as anti-industry, so they’re always caught in that bind of not wanting to ever speak out [against] industries, and we’ve seen that on the slough, but if somebody doesn’t do something about those things then they just sort of continue on and it’s not like what the city is doing is gonna clean the lead out of our storm water. The other fascinating thing that I saw was, again [it’s] a non-public meeting [that] some of these things happen in, where the Port of Portland which has got probably more political power than the city by at least a small [margin]. The Port of Portland [is] discharging all of its deicing fluids into the slough [laughs] and the city discharging its storm water and its CSOs, both of which have at least one similar impact of depressing dissolved oxygen levels [laughs], watching the two of them sort of point fingers at each other, who’s gonna take the lion’s share of fixing this and the Port, which I think is even more arrogant than the city, and I guess we have worse relationships with the Port when I come to think of it [laughs], but they, I meant maybe this is a fiction I’ve created, but my take on this meeting was that the Port’s representative just sat back and really didn’t engage in the discussion and told everybody that as far as they were concerned they weren’t gonna have that discussion with anybody else in the room, they would simply work out their position with DEQ and they were so above everybody else that they didn’t even have to engage in conversation. I was a member of the public, there were no other members of the public, all the other people in the room were government agency people, local government or federal or whatever, state, but their arrogance was just overwhelming. So when you’ve got that kind of thing the timeline for restoration of water quality in the slough is gonna be very, very long.

DS: So what do you see as the most critical issue on the slough?

NB: Well, I guess I’d have to say that, well critical issue, they’re all related, the thing that jumps out at me is the toxic contamination, not only [its] effect on human health but its effect on the food chain, and its contribution to the lower Columbia estuary, but I think restoring the natural flows of the slough and protecting habitat, those are critical too, and of course there have been some people who have said that’s more important and have talked about the idea of flushing the contamination out of the Columbia slough, and only see that slough as a separate entity and couldn’t care less that the toxic contamination would make its way down the river, which is shocking, and some of the old-timers who really care about the slough have a very, very narrow view of the environment, they just want that one place cleaned up, which I oppose, but in the long term it really is like all environmental issues, I can’t even just say what’s the worst pollutant, well it depends on what you’re trying to protect, it depends on how much of it there is, it depends on how sensitive your uses are, I’m not going to say dioxin’s more important than temperature, temperature’s a big reason why we have endangered salmon in this state, and it doesn’t sound that bad, but our rivers are really, really hot. Dioxin lasts for what you might consider close to forever, in terms of its effects on genetic material of wildlife, it’s not really reversible, the kinds of effects that it has, and it doesn’t take very much of it, but it’s really apple and oranges, and I think what you say for a healthy ecosystem you can’t really say well, only toxic things are important to address, or only conventional things like temperature and sewage, I mean, it’s really everything, and so I guess that’s my view of the Columbia Slough. The thing I’m probably the least concerned about is the nuisance algael growth that they’ve been wrestling with, I mean obviously it has impacts on dissolved oxygen, I really wouldn’t care that much if all the carp died tomorrow, but it is used by salmon, at least it has been in the past, it should be again one day used by salmon, it’s certainly heavily used by birds and mammals, and by certain people so those things should all be factored in when figuring how to solve for the myriad of problems.

DS: How large a factor do you think that the groups of people who live in Northeast Portland play in affecting policy?

NB: I don’t think they have at all. I think that to the extent that the public has been invited in and engaged in determining policies for the slough, it’s primarily been through the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, [from] which the outspoken environmental people have all resigned, there are still some people who are extremely angry and frustrated and feel very betrayed who hang in there, I don’t know why they hang in there.

DS: So you’re not involved in the Watershed Council?

NB: Well, I was, right, I was. And one of our board members and one of our volunteers was, representing different interests, and we played a big role in trying to determine everything, the bylaws and the mission statement, and the constituents that were represented and what not, and frankly we all came to the same conclusion that this was an enormous waste of time, it was going nowhere, and I can tell you why I think that, and they continue to have meetings and they continue to put the stamp of approval on things that they don’t know enough about, and that not everybody there agrees to, and the stamp of approval comes in different ways, but the mere existence of the Watershed Council to me is a way of approving business as usual, and sometimes even things that are worse. So from an environmental perspective it has not served a useful purpose, you know they do some sort of public education stuff once a year, they have the Slough Regatta and a bunch of people go out on the slough and I say, So what? I mean I’m a big advocate of environmental education, but not for education’s sake, unless it’s with children in which case children can benefit from environmental education even if they never lift a finger to do something beyond that. They might learn democracy requires citizens to act, they might learn something about science, they might learn something about math, or they might learn something about how the real world works, a civic lesson, I don’t really care what they come away with, I assume they come away with something. But I think when you do education to adults if people don’t come away with two messages, one is democracy requires their participation, and secondly, this particular set of problems requires their action, then I frankly have no use for it, I mean maybe it makes them more aware of environmental things and they vote better later or something, and that’s fine, I just think it’s not a productive use of time particularly, so when the Watershed Council supports some sort of regatta thing, well what they have done is brought a group of people out there to endorse the notion that the Columbia Slough has something to offer, that it’s not just a wasteland, that we should all care about, those are important messages, but what happens next, at best a few trees get planted , but mostly you don’t see any change in policy, you do not see a group of people who are rising up and saying, You know, we want that storm water permit modified, or, We wanna get involved in this, that, and the other thing, you just don’t see it and I work in those kinds of processes, those kinds of advisory committees and what not, with industry all the time and I have to say, although it can make me pretty angry and frustrated sometimes, I really embrace my participation in those kinds of things. But what stands out about the slough watershed council, and I can’t say it applies to all watershed councils across the state, or the United States, but what stands out, and the difference between that process and every other advisory committee I’ve been on for state or federal government, or the bistate on the Columbia River, is that it has no foundation. There is no depth to which it will not go, and the other committees that I’ve served on the foundation is the law and that’s the starting point. . . The Clean Water Act, now we may have different interpretations of what that is, undoubtedly different interpretations, but as we wrangle about it we will decide that meeting water quality standards and meeting the terms of the statute are the bottom line for us, and then we can argue about what that means and how that should be carried out, because it’s never a straight line, and what kind of compromises we can make when you try to put law and reality together and the environment, you create things that lawmakers never anticipated and never could anticipate. So the wrangling serves a purpose to figure out well what’s a practical way, or if we do this so that it creates that policy how do we allay the effect it’s gonna have on something else. But if you have no foundation of the law and basically the goal you’re trying to achieve.

DS: I guess the foundation that I’ve seen from talking to other people, and I’ve only attended one meeting, would be that metro goals, and water quality is something people talk about, but metro goals are something that’s come up over, and over, and over again. I don’t know if that’s something that’s been established as.

NB: Well I haven’t been to one of their meetings for a long time, so we didn’t talk about Metro Goals at all when I was there and all we talked about was sort of water quality things, well I shouldn’t say all, water quality and habitat, there’s no bright line that divides them. But the notion that the Clean Water Act would be a starting point was never something that was embraced and I basically see it as an industry forum, and for the people who remain in that committee, and seem willing to continue to remain on it, they continue to bring stories out about how that’s happening, and sometimes very devious ways, I mean, they’re monumentally unhappy with feeling that they’re being used, which I have absolutely no doubt they’re being used. I go through advisory processes and I can look back and say Whew, I blew that or I should have been stronger on that issue, or Too bad the government interpreted our recommendation in that way, you know, you always have different views when you look back, but this is an ongoing problem, and I think part of it is the Watershed Council, in many ways its staff, sort of serve as an appendage to the city, and the city is a vested interest in many ways, both its own financial interest and its own interest in creating this perception that it’s really trying to protect the environment when frankly it does hardly anything to do that, and its interest in protecting other industries, which clearly is a part of its political shtick. So all in all it’s turned out to be a very negative thing, not even neutral at this point, I think it’s negative. So I’m sorry to have to say that, but I think that’s it true. So I go back and think, well, enforcement, carrying out implementation of the TMDL, and going after certain point sources that have permits is really the only way to address its problems using the law, and again it’s not because I don’t think talking and having meetings can’t get you a long way down the path, but that’s only if the state, with the backing of the federal government, is willing to take the next step and what we see repeatedly is they don’t, and so that just means actually our litigation load’s going up, we’re not always casting about to sue people, we’re casting about to get results and it’s very frustrating to have to file law suits every time you wanna try and get a result, so I don’t know.

DS: How many people are working in your office?

NB: Oh, three and a half. We’re small, but we get a lot done.

DS: What kind of vision do you have for the Columbia Slough? What’s your ideal vision of the Columbia Slough?

NB: Well, I guess my ideal vision is that the sediment, the toxic issues would get resolved, that we would take every opportunity to back industry and other human uses off the slough, I mean, you see a large concrete building in all likelihood it’s not gonna be taken out, but I think there are places where we could allow the green part around the slough to get wider, certainly never to get narrower, I don’t think there’s any justification for making it narrower, this whole notion ‘Well, all you need is X number of yards as a buffer’ I think is ridiculous when you’ve destroyed so much of it, it’s logical to say you simply stop destroying what’s left, so if it’s too narrow in one place you make it too wide some place else, you kind of make up for what you’ve done in the past and developers never take that perception, they’re always trying to nickel and dime more out of it and I think that should just come to an end and it’s not, particularly in the upper slough areas, you continue to see wetlands that were sort of farmed being paved over. I mean look at the whole Fairview Lake area is shocking. So I think long-term the whole groundwater issues need to be resolved, you know here we’ve sewered East Multnomah County to deal with groundwater contamination, which eventually makes it’s way to the slough, and meanwhile as a sort of cheaper fix to the CSO problem, the city’s now got all these sumps installed in North, Northeast Portland which are undoubtedly going to cause groundwater contamination that will catch up with the slough eventually. DEQ has been concerned about it for years, but sort of just at this mumbling level, ‘We’re concerned, we’re concerned,’ never anything to act on that. Now EPA has come in saying all these sumps need permits as injection wells, I’m not sure what a permit’s gonna do, what the benefit will be unless they force the city to use those sumps, to clean them out and maintain them to decrease the amount of pollution, but the groundwater issue I think is a big one, and doing something to restore more natural flows to that system. But I get pretty depressed about the prospects of that area because the area of the slough isn’t just that little piece of water, or even the arms and legs that are off it, but all the whole system of wetlands, which the Port of Portland has almost single-handedly wiped out in that area, without any mitigation whatsoever, and those wetlands are paved over now, and whatever so-called mitigation is supposed to be taking place is a joke and not for what the Port has destroyed, and so its vitality, particularly to migrating waterfowl, is permanently gone. And so maybe one of the visions I have, in addition is what we’ve done too, that will tell us whether or not we should go and do that to the Vancouver Lowlands, which is what the Port of Vancouver wants to do, and the Port of Portland, as part of this channel deepening [proposal wants to] destroy what little wetlands are left over there. Maybe the best we can hope for is that we learn a lesson from what we’ve done, but I’m no optimistic on that score either. So it’s all in all kind of a depressing water body and yet with not only remarkable potential, but just what it offers today to mammals, and fish, and wildlife and people, it’s still rather remarkable, you know, habitat.

DS: Well, thank you.

NB: You’re welcome.