The Charles River is once again safe for recreational activity party due to the work of the Charles River Watershed Association. Photo credit: Peter H. Dreyer “Boston University crew team on the Charles River”

When I asked to meet with Elisabeth Cianciola, a staff scientist at the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA), I was surprised when she invited me to a golf course. Golf courses require large inputs of fertilizer and fertilizer, as a source of unnatural levels of phosphorus, causes algae blooms, which can cause fish deaths and any number of other ill effects. So, it was even more surprising to me that the reason Cianciola invited me to the golf course was that the CRWA’s office sits on the edge of that course. Their building is next-door neighbor to the golf course’s concession building, and the two look so similar that for a while I assumed they were both just parts of the course.

The CRWA was founded in 1965 in response to concern about the state of the Charles River. By this time, centuries of commercial use had left the water pink and orange with toxic waste. Pollutants like fertilizer, raw sewage, and even abandoned cars turned the river into a ghastly, stinking mess. Algae blooms had depleted oxygen levels in much of the river, killing fish. As early as 1955 historian Bernard DeVoto wrote an article for Harper’s Weekly that said the river was “unlikely to be mistaken for water.” Since its inception, The CRWA has advocated for better practices, using lawsuits designed to reign in polluters, all with a strong backbone of scientific inquiry. The organization has prevented dam construction, helped fish reach spawning grounds using “fish ladders”, restored wetlands that filter out pollution and protect against floods, encouraged better sewage treatment and much more. Thanks in part to the organization’s tireless efforts, 74% of the Charles River is once again safe for swimming. According to the CRWA, the Charles is now the “cleanest urban river in the United States” and between the years of 1995 and 2014, the river has gone from getting a water quality D grade, to a solid A-. Still, the CRWA’s fight has not ended. It has only evolved.

In general, the work of cleaning the Charles River has become more and more of a group effort. Most of the obvious, big-ticket fixes have already been implemented. “A lot of the more significant changes in water quality have been more than five years ago,” says Cianciola. Now, instead of finding single, large sources of pollution, the CRWA has been forced to combat the small contributions that everyone makes to pollution in the everyday course of their lives and “no one wants to be the first person to take on that extra burden.” The CRWA’s next hurdle is to involve the city at large. Fortunately, the CRWA has already begun to do that.

The first thing I noticed in Cianciola’s office was a traffic cone. When I asked her about it, she told me that it was a safety precaution for volunteers who might need to sample water flowing under bridges. While the end points of the Charles River are only twenty-six miles apart, but the river’s actual length is eighty miles and in total, the Charles winds through twenty-three different communities. In contrast, the CRWA is small and only has eleven employees. So the organization really depends on volunteers to sample water at the thirty-five stations along the river, and to pull out the invasive plants that phosphorus pollution encourages. There are some drawbacks to using volunteers for data collection, of course. The volunteers are not trained scientists, and in order to make sure the data are correct, the methods for data collection have to be simplified to reduce human error. The fact that the CRWA depends on citizens means that the organization sometimes hears about problems later than it would like to. Recently a fish kill that impacted eighty to one hundred fish was discovered by accident, because staff happened to be on the river, taking data for an unrelated study. Cianciola says, “It makes me a little uncomfortable that we only find out about these things sort of by coincidence.” Unless people are aware of what a water quality emergency looks like, it can be hard for the CRWA to find out that one has happened.

Despite all these down sides, the volunteer presence has some real benefits for the organization. Since volunteers are doing the sampling, the staff is free to do the more specialized work of data analysis and advocacy. In return, the volunteers get to feel more connected both to the river cleanup and to the process of citizen science. This broader involvement is important if individuals are going to make the contributions needed for continued improvements.

The office’s strange placement is another example of how the CRWA has learned to work with the community at large. In the past, the CRWA has had offices that more obviously faced the river, Cianciola explained, and the organization only has this most recent building because it is renting it from the State Department of Conservation and Recreation. And, as weird as the location might seem, the office’s placement has helped the CRWA reach more people. A company called Charles River Recreation owns this golf course as well as a number of boathouses. Since the CRWA and Charles River Recreation work so closely together, the two organizations have been able to cooperate on a number of projects. For example, when the CRWA finds that the water quality is unsafe, they tell the boathouses, who then raise a yellow or red flag. Not only that, but Charles River Recreation has helped the CRWA find the equipment it needed to remove invasive plants in the Lake District. Without this close relationship, that work would have been much more difficult.

The CRWA has been working with communities, companies, and housing developments in order to create better, more lasting solutions. For example, Cianciola is particularly excited about the CRWA’s various Blue Cities projects. These design ideas include planting rain gardens near parking lots, building green roofs, and installing porous pavement. These structures let stormwater filter through and clean itself similarly to the way it would happen in a natural environment instead of just running directly into the river, bringing with it a soup of pollutants such as phosphorus. Another initiative is the “green corridor.” These “corridors” are strips of green space that connect other green spaces. They soak up rainwater and clean it as the water slowly makes its way to the river. The “green corridors” would also improve the neighborhoods in which they’re built by providing green space.

Despite the daunting new challenges, Cianciola remains optimistic. “The water quality is very good for an urban river, but that’s not to say that we don’t have the power and the opportunity to make it better.”