Waterkeeper: Hawk and Dove

There's no one else in the world who has done more to advance the vision and accomplishments of the Waterkeeper movement than Rick Dove. Like the founders of the Waterkeeper movement Rick is a former marine. He saw two tours in Vietnam and served as a military judge, Congressional Liaison and Provost-Marshal.

This organization was started by Marines. It was a group of 300 veterans, mostly Marines and their wives, who first met in an American Legion Hall in 1966. They came together because they saw the Hudson River being stolen from them by industrial polluters. They concluded that government agencies were in cahoots with polluters and decided that the only way they could reclaim the river for themselves was to confront the polluters directly. One of these Marines, a Sports Illustrated writer named Robert Boyle, discovered an ancient statute, the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act, which allowed individuals to participate in the prosecution of polluters with the U.S. Attorney's Office, and collect bounties. The new group started going after polluters on the Hudson and the Waterkeeper movement was born.

The Marines who met that first night in Crotonville, New York were mainly recreational and commercial fishermen and crabbers on the Hudson River. Similarly, Rick Dove, after 26 years in the Marine Corps, retired to become a commercial fisherman and crabber on the Neuse River. He also saw his fishery being destroyed. By 1994 most of the Neuse River’s fish stocks were collapsing. The fish were covered with lesions. Fishermen contracted debilitating respiratory infections and skin eruptions that wouldn’t heal, and even brain damage. Rick contracted the lesions himself. The sickness, caused by exposure to Pfiesteria, was killing fish by the millions and leaving people with brain damage. Rick helped trace the disease to the untreated waste from hundreds of thousands of hogs pouring into the river. In Rick’s view, the billionaire hog barons were literally stealing the river from the people of North Carolina. Rick was the first person to confront the hog industry in that state and anywhere else in the nation. In his soul he was still a Marine. He was still fighting for democracy.

The best measure of how a democracy functions is how it distributes the goods of the land, the public trust assets, the commons, the air and the water. These are things that by their nature cannot be reduced to private property. They are owned by all the people and held in trust for future generations. They are community assets: part of our commonwealth. How are these resources distributed? Are they maintained in the hands of the public or do we have a government that allows them to be captured, privatized and consolidated by large corporate entities?

That’s the whole battle of Waterkeeper Alliance and that’s why the whole environmental movement is really a battle to save democracy. Rick Dove saw this fight in these terms from day one and he’s kept the movement on track by teaching people what it means to be a Waterkeeper.

The hog industry is a paradigm for what happens to government when corporations take control. The Raleigh News & Observer won the Pulitzer Prize for a five-part series on the hog industry called “Boss Hog.” The story showed how public officials in North Carolina were corrupted by this industry. Meat factories cannot produce a pork chop or a pound of bacon cheaper than a traditional family farmer unless they break the law. Their entire business plan is predicated on their ability to corrupt public officials and make the public pay for disposing their waste with poisoned water.

Twenty years ago when Rick started doing this work, there were 27,500 independent hog farms in the state of North Carolina. Today, except for the Niman Ranch sustainable farmers, there are none left. They have been replaced by 2,200 factories, 1,600 of them controlled by one corporation, Smithfield, which now dominates the landscapes of North Carolina. Corporate agriculture is driving the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson’s American democracy, rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds, owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our system of government, each with a stake in our country. Now the landscapes of North Carolina are controlled by huge corporate interests, who have no loyalty to our country, who are the first ones to move their headquarters to the Bahamas and their operations to Poland, Canada, Brazil or Mexico. They don’t care about America.

Rick started the battle against these companies and executed it like a military operation. He helped start 11 Riverkeeper programs on all the major rivers and estuaries on the east coast of North Carolina. He organized an air force of 22 airplanes that fly over the hog fields to document their practices.

These companies get laws passed at the state level that take away the power of local towns and counties to regulate factory farms. They take away the ability of citizens to control the destiny of their own communities, or even to publicly criticize their practices. This is a war on free speech and on our democracy. These companies have to crush local democracy and local control – they have to crush public officials – or they can’t compete and can’t survive.

This is, without any doubt, a battle to save American democracy. And Rick pitched it as that to the public from the very outset. We are not here to protect the fishes and the birds simply for their own sake; Waterkeepers recognize that nature is the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to meet our obligations to our children, we must provide them with the same opportunities for dignity, enrichment, safety and democracy as our parents gave us. We must start by protecting our environmental infrastructure by going to war against the big corporations who want to plunder our country.

I’ll say one more thing about this democracy. Corporations, under our law, can’t practice true philanthropy, or altruism. They do not take control of government officials to protect our democracy. They don’t want democracy and they don’t want free markets. They want profits. And the best way for them to get profits is to use our corrupt campaign finance system – which is essentially a system of legalized bribery – to get their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the market by giving them competitive advantage and privatizing the commons. All they want is plunder, and under ourlaws, that’s the only thing they are legally entitled to want, because if they want something else, their shareholders can sue them.

Rick Dove saw this flaw and said this is an enemy that I am very familiar with, because it is an enemy of democracy. This is a man who gave 26 years of his life to protect our country. He risked his life in Vietnam. He went because of his idealism, because he loved our country, because he loved democracy. And when he retired, he came to work with us. If you know Rick, you know he uses military imagery all the time and I deeply appreciate that. Waterkeeper is a band of brothers and sisters, fellow warriors, and Rick Dove is number one among us who is willing to fight and has dedicated his life and enormous energies to protect our shared environment.

J. David Tidwell, Mable B. Anderson, and Rick Dove - Birmingham, AL