Environmental lawyer a ‘voice of the wilderness’

Each time Rachael Paschal Osborn “meets” a new river, she wades in, shoeless. She jokes to her husband, John Osborn, that she never knows when she’ll need legal standing in a case.

Osborn, 49, director of the Columbia Institute for Water Policy, also teaches environmental and water law at Gonzaga University. Wherever people gather to discuss the Spokane River, you’ll often see Osborn there, armed with case law.

In a recent interview with editorial board member Rebecca Nappi, Osborn explained why the river needs activists more than ever.

Q: Rachael, you wear many different hats. Describe what you do as an attorney and an activist.

A: I’m an attorney and I represent clients — environmental groups, Indian tribes, labor unions, small communities that care about natural resources and are trying to save them. However, I am powering my practice down and getting more into policy research work where I first started a couple of decades ago and trying to get back into that.

Q: And you teach at Gonzaga University?

A: I do. I teach environmental law and water law.

Q: What are the names of the official groups you are associated with?

A: I’m the Spokane River project coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Upper Columbia group. And I am director for a small nonprofit called Columbia Institute for Water Policy, which is where my interests are going right now.

Q: How did you first get involved with river and water issues?

A: When I was an undergrad at the University of Washington eons ago, I attended a brownbag lecture at my small department, the smallest department on campus I think — the Institute for Environmental Studies. The lecture was given by a law professor, Ralph W. Johnson, concerning the public trust doctrine and particularly talking about a recent case, the Mono Lake case in California, in which the California Supreme Court held that there is a public interest in water resources that supersedes property rights and interests. It was a court decision that saved Mono Lake.

I was enthralled. I was just amazed by this decision and this story being told by the person telling it. I knew I wanted to go to law school. I got my undergraduate degree in environmental studies and then went to UW law school and tracked down Professor Johnson and camped outside his door until he gave me a job as a research assistant. And worked with him all through law school.

After law school, he hired me to start an organization called The Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Which at the time was a research program within UW law school. We got kicked out of the law school as we began to do things that were increasingly controversial. It is now its own successful nonprofit over in Seattle. I ran the center until 1999 when I moved to Spokane. The role and the mission of the center was to protect the water resources of Washington state. My job was to protect rivers and aquifers, using all the tools available, ranging from public education, legislative work, litigation and so forth. It was a big and wonderful job.

Q: Were you activist-inclined as a child?

A: I’ve certainly always had this sense of justice and fairness. I’ve thought about this, where does this come from? I have to give some credit to my mother. She was a person involved in social justice issues. She was a civil rights marcher in Oklahoma in the 1950s, and I think there was that aspect of awareness of social issues.

I was profoundly affected by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill which was probably the first big environmental disaster to be broadcast on television. The pictures of the oiled seabirds and animals really struck me. I was 13 at the time and I thought that was horrible. That might have had some influence on my interest in environmental issues.

Q: Describe the first time you encountered the Spokane River.

A: I had been to Spokane several times in my work with the center in Seattle. But the first time I really remember it was in February 1996, a month in which the river was flooding. It’s the month that sometimes gets cited as the floods that washed a million pounds of lead into Lake Coeur d’Alene in a single day. I didn’t know what was going on in Lake Coeur d’Alene, but I was standing on one of the pedestrian bridges watching the falls that day and it made a very big impression. I imagine it was flowing at well over 20,000 cfs (cubic feet per second) that day.

Q: What did you feel about the river that day?

A: A couple of things. First of all, and I’ve carried this with me to this day, I can’t believe there are waterfalls like these in the middle of a city. And secondly, the overwhelming power of water. It’s mesmerizing. It’s awesome.

Q: How do you interact with the river now?

A: I go out and walk along the river every single day. I love to walk down to the Sandifur Bridge, that’s my favorite destination. I’ve been walking up and down Doomsday Hill to get more exercise recently. I love to go to the waterfalls, especially this time of year, they are so beautiful. My favorite place to have a drink these days is Anthony’s. I have a very healthy respect for water. I don’t really like to get out on rivers this size in a boat. Not a paddler.

Q: How did you end up living in Spokane?

A: I had met John Osborn. We met professionally, then became friends and then we fell in love with each other. One of us had to give, and it’s a decision I don’t regret at all. I decided to move over here in 1998 and finally got here in 1999.

Q: Characterize John’s involvement with the river.

A: John has been an advocate for the river for a very long time. He became aware of the situation with the metals contamination in the 1980s. He was terribly concerned that the community didn’t understand the issue and wasn’t paying attention to it. We have a severe problem, and he has made that connection between the clear cutting in the Coeur d’Alene National Forest and the floods that are caused by that mismanagement of the forest. The floods then meet up with the metals that are coming in from the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River across those wetlands and flood plains in the Cataldo area and washing those metals into Lake Coeur d’Alene and then into the Spokane River. He was one of the people behind the video “Get the Lead Out” that was distributed to 10,000 homes in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene back in the mid-‘90s, trying to blow the issue open and get more public attention to it. So he’s had a long history of working on river issues.

Q: If there’s one thing you’ve learned from John about this river, what would it be?

A: He’s a doctor, an extremely compassionate person. The larger lesson I’ve learned from John is one of compassion. How to inject that in my thinking, not only about natural resources but about people who are working on issues who might take different approaches or have different viewpoints than I do.

Q: The word environmentalist sometimes gets thrown around as not a positive word. It reminds me of how feminist has gotten misconstrued as a very good word. Why do you think (environmentalist) has negative connotations for some people, especially in this area?

A: I’ve been saying lately that I think we need a new taxonomy for this term environmentalist which has come to represent a whole range of different types of people and viewpoints. I would suspect that every single person you have interviewed in this series, regardless of their job or what they do or how they relate to the river, would call themselves an environmentalist. I think it’s true now that most people care about the environment.

That negative connotation that is generally associated with it, I haven’t really thought about that. Maybe it’s because environmentalists are successful in stopping projects. People don’t like that. Or in slowing things down and making people think about them. I think it’s just a strategy or tactic to marginalize.

Q: Do you call yourself an environmentalist?

A: I certainly have in the past referred to myself as an environmental lawyer. I think conservationist is a better term. It harkens to history, going back to Teddy Roosevelt. The idea of conserving resources is one that better projects what John and I are trying to do.

Q: Teddy Roosevelt. Talk a minute about how that term connects you to his legacy.

A: When you look back in that era, we were in the midst of an era in the United States in which the exploitation of resources was occurring at an enormous level. It was accepted in society that that was what we were supposed to be doing. And one thing Teddy Roosevelt and others in his era did was that they began to put the breaks on. And say, wait a minute, sometimes resources need to be conserved. We need to throw some boundaries up to prevent wholesale exploitation because there is intrinsic value in the resource itself.

Q: How much did you participate in the Avista dam relicensing process?

A: I was approached when Avista was first going around talking about how it wanted to utilize the alternative licensing process. I was approached about participating on behalf of a couple of different groups in town. I personally did not want to get involved. I looked at it and thought this will be a huge amount of time. My view was the alternative process was unlikely to yield positive results, because I recognized there were conflicts between Washington and Idaho over the Spokane River. So I didn’t get involved.

I sort of kept tabs on it, reviewed what work groups were working on but never attended meetings until August 2004 when the aesthetics work group popped out with a proposed plan for operations at the Falls (in downtown Spokane.) I was appalled at that proposal which was to turn the Falls on so they were running at 200 cfs from noon to 7 on Fridays and weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

I think it’s time to rethink how we manage those Falls. They may be more valuable to this community just flowing in their natural form than they are as a power generation facility. Avista generates just a paltry amount of power there. I got involved and raised objections to that proposal and then eventually Sierra Club got involved in some of the work groups that were working through some issues.

Q: What was your main objection to the noon-to-7 plan?

A: I think the Falls should be flowing naturally, at a minimum, whenever there are people in the park. All day, every day, there are people in Riverfront Park. The falls don’t fall below that 200 cfs until July extending into September when Avista starts releasing more water out of Coeur d’Alene Lake to create storage capacity for winter runoff. So it’s really a two-to-three month period that’s critical there.

Q: Your preference would have been?

A: Sierra Club put a proposal out there that said from dawn to midnight or something along those lines. I can’t remember now. It was more than a year ago when we were discussing this. Avista agreed with us. Avista very quickly moved to come up with a new proposal and they did submit a different proposal when they ultimately filed their license application with the federal agency. I think they understood that the proposal was just a little too skinny. There were additional negotiations that went on.

I might add that prior to that time I had been commenting on the environmental documents that Avista had been preparing. The goal was to be most influential for the time spent in looking at the environmental assessments and the environmental impact statements for the project.

Q: What is the advantage to having the Falls flow like that during those summer months?

A: It’s an aesthetic benefit to the community. There is an intrinsic value to the community. There’s not much habitat there — fish don’t live in the falls. Snoqualmie Falls over in the Seattle area gets hundreds of thousands of visitors every summer. We actually get a lot of visitors here, too. There is an economic benefit to having waterfalls in your city, especially falls like these; they are so unusual. We’ve never tried to quantify that. I’d love to see that done. What is the value of these Falls to this community from an economic viewpoint? But I’ll stand on the aesthetics. When you have an amenity like this, a beautiful river and beautiful waterfall, there is nothing wrong with standing up and saying this is valuable and we deserve to be able to use these Falls and enjoy them just the way they are.

Q: Do you know what the final compromise was?

A: I do not recall what Avista filed, but it was significantly more, every day, falls running every day. Definitely extended hours and days. Also the question that’s been raised is that they would like to put a fairly minimal amount of water over but claim they could create a better effect by doing some construction in the river bed, to be preceded by a pilot experiment with sandbags. I don’t know when or whether that will happen, but they’ve got a theory that less water could look like more if just do some modification of the channel.

Q: What’s your opinion of the relicensing application process?

A: The alternative process did not come to the conclusion that everyone wanted. I think there was a benefit to it. It certainly brought a lot of people in discussions about the river. Avista has done a lot of damage to the river. There was a lot of talk about how that damage could be mitigated in the future. There was consensus and agreement on a lot of good things. There was benefit to the process even though it didn’t conclude the way a lot of people hoped.

But the process is now flipped over to the federal agencies who will run the show. The application that’s been filed has things that we agree with, some that we disagree with. We’ve been pushing Avista to do some more studies looking at water quality issues as well as the economic question: What would the river look like if it were operating under what’s called a natural hydrograph where you have normal flows in the river? And FERC, the federal agency is cogitating on our request.

Q: What’s your predication. Will the license be granted?

A: I suspect that it will be. One thing that’s interesting is if you look at dam relicensing around the Northwest is that this relicensing process sometimes forces companies that own dams to realize that they are not worth it. Several dams have been decommissioned once the full scope of mitigation requirements was understood and what it was going to cost. There are some similarities that can be drawn. Creaky old dams don’t generate a lot of power. Do cause a lot of damage. At some point the companies have to start paying for this. You don’t have FERC saying as much we’re not going to give you a license as FECR saying you are going to have to do X,Y and Z and then that becomes part of the balance sheet. So you do have dams that are now being decommissioned or coming out of operation as a result of this process. Whether that will happen here remains to be seen. I haven’t been a direct advocate for decommissioning, but we think it should be studied.

Q: Is there one dam, if you were the decommissioner, that you’d take out?

A: The Falls is the first place to go. Long Lake is the money maker dam for Avista. That one will probably be staying put. Nine Mile Dam has huge problems, the amount of sediment that has built up behind that dam. The reservoir is only a few feet deep in there. In a response to one of the emotions we filed, Avista discussed selling Post Falls Dam. They brought that up, not us. So we are interested to understand what the thinking might be on that.

Q: If the two Falls dams downtown were decommissioned, what would the river look like?

A: A lot of water gets sent to the south channel in the summertime so presumably there would be more water in the north channel and less in the south. Do you ever go and look at the Monroe Street dam and it’s got that lip and you wonder what’s under there. What does it look like in there?

Q: OK, we’re going to shift gears to the other thing going on, the Spokane River TMDL Collaboration. You’ve been involved with that. I’ve seen you at the meetings. Tell me your opinion of that process. Let’s start with how you got involved in the process.

A: I was working on the power plant cases in Rathdrum, Idaho, and that case taught me the connection between the aquifer and the river. One of the issues, set of impacts, I tried to raise was if you’re pumping a lot of water out of the aquifer in that part of Idaho it will take water out of the river. But it doesn’t take water out of the river in Idaho. It takes water out of the river in Washington. And so what are the impacts associated with that and is there a way to connect that back in? Why should Idaho care?

And it turns out there are a lot of different reasons. And dissolved oxygen is one of them. Not only are Washington dischargers affected by the dissolved oxygen problem, but Idaho dischargers are as well. I became aware of this and in that process of trying to marshal it as evidence in the power plant cases, I realized oh there is this whole process going on with the river and the cleanup plan and no one is really paying attention to it from the environmental community and so, when the technical assessment portion of it had been going on awhile but when they finally flipped over in the creating of the plan, Ecology established an advisory group and I joined that advisory group.

We had meetings for a year, all the same people sitting around the table. And at the same time, the dischargers came up with the idea of doing the UAA (Use Attainability Analysis) and so I became a member of that advisory group as well. And we’d all go sit around different tables in different rooms but it was all the same people and it still is. We’ve all be sitting around tables together for several years.

So a year ago, crisis was looming. Litigation is crisis for many people. To me, it’s just a part of the dance. And when that occurred the idea arose to create this collaboration process and I became a part of that along with my colleagues from the Center for Justice who have been representing the Sierra Club.

So we’ve sat around some more tables together with the same people to talk about trying to do some fact finding, trying to find ways to come to agreement on some of these issues, exploring some of the objections that have been raised about the TMDL proposal. I would say, in some ways I feel like we spent a lot of time to wind up in the same place that we’ve been. The (phosphorous) loading numbers haven’t changed. We need to go out. We need to try things. We need to do things. We need to see how it works for the river. I understand why the dischargers want certainty. But you can’t have it. You just have to do things to find out how well they work. My view of it is that there has been a lot of time spent. I’m very glad to see Ecology moving forward on this. They need to be the regulatory agency that they are, make the decisions. And issue the permits and let’s go forth and see what the future holds.

Q: What will happen next?

A: Ecology has told us they will come up with a new cleanup plan, but the loading calculation will remain the same — the amount of phosphorous that they’re predicting that can be put in the river, and that will have to be allocated among all the dischargers. They have to issue individual permits and those permits is where the rubber hits the road. That’s where the binding conditions will be placed. That’s where the agreements and the promises that have been talked about, if they are going to happen, will become part of those permits. This is new stuff for Ecology, trying to do it this way so it’s very interesting. I’m hoping that we will move to implementation.

Q: When will we see the cleanup plan?

A: I know what Dave Peeler (water quality program manager for Washington state’s Department of Ecology) tells us. He has said he wants to get it out this spring. We had another delay. It was a reasonable delay. People wanted more time to review and comment so I don’t think that puts us too far behind.

Q: What have you learned from this process about the dischargers, especially the wastewater dischargers?

A: They will be surprised to hear this, but I’ve long been a proponent of wastewater treatment. When I taught environmental law in Seattle, I used to take my students down to the treatment plant at West Point. We have the same thing here. You have a beautiful park and then this huge, smelly plant sitting there, using the water resources flowing by as its dilution source. But we got to do it. These are absolutely necessary to civilization.

I have a great appreciation for it. I really like and even admire some of the people charged with operating these plants. They are very dedicated civil servants. So it’s fun to get to know people. I favor the treatment of wastewater. Whether it has to be discharged into the river is a critical question right now. Virtually all the new plants that are built and the thinking in wastewater treatment is water that comes out of the plant, with our new technology, is pretty clean. Could we use it? It’s a resource. It’s valuable.

We have laws that were created 10 years ago and have been amended and updated to facilitate the use of this water. There are communities in southwestern United States that completely depend upon it. They don’t shunt it away. This is something we can use and it’s valuable to us in a water short area. But we haven’t viewed ourselves as a water short area in this community so we haven’t gotten to that point accepting that it is worth the expense to go through this process and install the technology, install the purple pipes and find ways to substitute reuse for existing water supply.

Q: How do you respond to the idea that if we didn’t put treated wastewater in the river it would affect the flows in a detrimental way which in turn would affect the fisheries in a detrimental way?

A: Well, most of the plants that are upstream of the critical reaches are not putting a lot of water into the river. The big gun here is the treatment plant (at Riverside State Park.) They call it the reclamation plant but they’re not reclaiming water. And so they don’t have a huge effect on flow. Taking the water out down here would not have as dramatic effect. That is my response to that. The 3 million gallons a day coming out of the Coeur d’Alene really translates into very little flow.

Q: Will it look barbaric someday that we ever put treated wastewater into rivers?

A: Well, one way of answering that is to look back at what we used to do. How did we used to deal with our sewage in this community? We used to put it raw into the river. The state health department declared it a nuisance. There was legislation in the ‘30s and the ‘40s. It was having a horrible effect not only on the Spokane River, but the Columbia. There were all kinds of efforts to get it stopped. We look back now and we’re horrified, aren’t we? We can’t believe we did that.

So in the future will we look back to what we’re doing now? I suspect there will be a better appreciation for the expense that’s been put into it. It was a big deal of the Clean Water Act to get secondary sewage treatment. It was a huge success in the implementation of the law in the United States. But it’s time to move forward.

Q: I was struck with how few women are involved in the Spokane River TMDL Collaboration. What’s up?

A: This is not uncommon. In almost all the work I do, I find I am one of the few women involved. You know it’s a darn good question why. Particularly in the wastewater treatment area, you just don’t see women doing that at all. In the legal field, half the students entering law school are women. So it’s more common to see women involved in legal issues. Look at the civil servants in our local government agencies and they are dominated by men. Is the civil service system itself keeping women from rising to these positions? I don’t know. It’s a good question and something I’ve observed myself.

Q: Do we need more women involved in Spokane River issues?

A: We need more diverse perspectives, be it male or female. I would like to see more people involved that look at and use the river in different ways than just a dilution source for pollution. Of course, the river is an incredibly important resource for the tribes in this region. And I despair that they are overwhelmed with meetings that they have to attend and monitor. They are stretched beyond the breaking point. It’s very difficult for them to participate. That’s a problem for the process.

Q: Biggest threat to the river right now, in your opinion?

A: Toxics. It’s not even on the horizon yet. I include in that PCBs and the heavy metals. There is huge pollution from PBDEs, the flame retardants, that are used in upholstery and computer manufacturing. Turns out we have high readings of PBDEs in the Spokane River. I’m not sure where they’ve come from.

The PCBs are a combination of historic practices from some kind of armory or World War II ordinance station or weapons development program out in the Valley. There are PCBs from that. Avista’s hydraulic equipment. PCBs have been used in lubricants traditionally. Lots of PCBs floating beneath Kaiser. And Inland Empire Paper is a current discharger of PCBs to the river that we heard is coming from a paper that is being recycled at the plant that has yellow dye in it that is apparently manufactured elsewhere in the world.

PBDEs, not sure. Computer manufacturers in the Valley? We don’t even know. At this point, we have the data showing that they are in the sediments. How we’re going to deal with these and clean these up will be a huge challenge for this community.

The PCB TMDL is on the horizon. Ecology has been doing the technical assessment. It is now at least 15 months behind schedule. We’re kind of wondering what is going on with it. We’ve raised the issue about what kind of technology is going to be required to control PCBs coming out of discharge pipes. Shouldn’t there be a linkage here between the needs for that issue and dissolved oxygen? We haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer to that. Phosphorous is going to look pretty easy.

Q: How do the toxics harm the river?

A: Toxics bio-accumulate. You have the critters that are in the mud that consume them and then you have the fish that consume those critters and then it gets into the human food chain because you have a lot of people who are eating fish out of the river. Of course, there are fish consumption advisories but not necessarily people that understand that they ought to be limiting their consumption. This has an impact on immigrant communities, homeless communities, people that don’t know or can’t afford to care. PCBs and toxics are implicated in all kinds of human health problems and particularly pose issues to fetuses and nursing mothers.

Q: Awareness has been raised about the phosphorous. What will it take for the toxics to reach that level of awareness?

A: This gets back to John Osborn’s “Get the Lead Out” video. That’s what it took back then; we’re going to hang the educational materials on people’s front doorknobs. They will plug it into their TVs. It was a direct educational action. And I think now we have a better awareness and mechanism to distribute information. When the study comes out that shows we’ve got PCBs and sediments up and down the river, I hope it’s something that people pay attention to. The media, the agencies and I suspect the various conservation groups will be doing their best to educate people as well.

Q: On March 17, 2005, in an op-ed piece on the Spokane River, you wrote, “Let’s bring back the salmon.” Is that really possible?

A: If we can build the biggest dam in the world, we can find a way to get the fish around it. It is possible to put passage on all of the dams in the Spokane River? The Grand Coulee does pose a problem. Chief Joseph does too, although they are working on Chief Joseph. There are ideas out there about how to get up and over that dam.

You can haul in trap salmon from the main stem of the Columbia around the river. The bigger issue is getting the little juvenile downriver. It’s not so much bringing the migrating adult salmon up. That is a problem to be tackled, but it can be done.

Q: Why should it be done?

A: Because salmon are the icon of the Pacific Northwest. If we cannot save salmon, we cannot save ourselves. We need to do it in the Columbia and the Snake rivers but we also need to begin to get ready. It won’t happen in a short time frame, but it won’t happen at all until we acknowledge that this is a goal and something we want to see. One of the reasons we’re talking about it right now is that license for the Avista dams is going to last for the next 30 to 50 years, and we want the license conditions to specify that Avista, working with the community, has got to start getting ready. They have to start thinking about how they are going to do this. The way the current proposal is written, that Avista has put out, is that the salmon will be butting their heads against Little Falls Dam before they even begin to think about whether it’s feasible to do a study on passage in the Spokane River. Well, that’s too late. If we can figure out how to get them up and around the big dams in the Columbia, then we need to be working now on how we can get the Spokane River ready to receive them.

Q: What would their route be? And where would they end up?

A: Well, their route runs from the Pacific Ocean, past the (dams) — Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day, McNary, Wanapum, Priest Rapids, Rocky Reach, Wells, Chief Joseph, Grand Coulee, Little Falls, Long Lake, Nine Mile.

They wind up in the river right below my house (near T.J. Meenach Bridge). It’s where they used to shoal huge numbers of Chinook right here. The aquifer springs come out of the hillside below my house and around going down to T.J. Meenach Bridge. And that cold water supported the insects and the type of food that supported a huge juvenile fishery. It was the aquifer that gave life to the salmon fishery in the Spokane River. They would go up Latah Creek. The falls were a barrier, although people say there were some salmon that got up and over those falls. Salmon are pretty amazing creatures. They will go where they can go.

Q: Will it happen in your lifetime? Will you walk underneath T.J. Meenach Bridge to the springs and see salmon jumping?

A: I hope so.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add?

A: From your series you get a sense of this, but the numbers and types of issues facing the Spokane River are numerous. It’s a complex system out there. And there’s all this stuff going on all at once. People complain about it. They say, “It’s too much.” But it’s also opportunity to do the linkages between what we’re doing with the dams and what we’re trying to do with water quality, for instance.

It’s important to keep in mind that now is the time. Decisions are being made now — the TMDLs, the dam relicensings, the Super Fund sites — that are going to affect this river for another couple of generations. These decisions will not come back around again for quite a long time. And so we need to take care right now that we make the right decisions so that when we look down the line 30, 40, 50 years, we will actually see the real changes and benefits we needed to keep the river alive.

Questions from Colin Mulvany, videographer.

Q: What will your legacy be concerning the Spokane River?

A: Helping to call attention to the problems. There is no single person who will save this river. The community has to do it. And before the community can do it, they have to understand the river and value it. That is the most important thing, bringing attention to bear. It’s happening. This series is a perfect example that it’s happening.

Q: Tell me the three most important things that you are working on for the benefit of the Spokane River.

A: I feel like I’m a voice of wilderness, but we have a huge problem with flow in the river. We do not have enough water. And it’s because we are over-pumping the aquifer. And we need to address this issue of flow. In the proposal we gave to the Department of Ecology for the TMDL, it includes a Spokane River stream flow restoration component, where we begin to face and tackle this problem.

The state of Idaho continues to issue groundwater rights. Those rights affect the river. We have to stop the hemorrhage before we can get in there to figure out how to deal with the systemic problem. The state of Washington has committed lots of crimes, too, on over issuing water rights in this basin, too. So that’s my No. 1.

Second issue would be the dissolved oxygen TMDL and the dam relicensing. I’ve personally given them a lot of time and hope to see something positive and productive come from that.

Q: How do other people perceive you? Do you feel like a salmon swimming upstream sometimes?

A: Depends on who you are talking to. Some people really think that what I am saying is important. They listen. I’m offering opinions that are valued in the community. And then there are other people who would prefer I go away and work on other issues. I have a reputation because when I get involved with an issue, I clamp down, so Rachael looking at an issue can cause people to become nervous.

Q: Why do you do what you do?

A: I love rivers, I really do. Actually, I love aquifers, too. I’ve always worked on this issue of groundwater-surface water connection. I was lucky to find this niche of water law. There are not very many people out there who do public interest water law. It’s a passion. I love it. They are difficult issues grounded in arcane 19th-century laws that do not serve us well now and yet we somehow have to deal with these to get past the issues and into solutions. I love all that. I’m driven by the fact I love rivers.

I have made a habit my whole career that when I meet a new river or stream, I take off my shoes and socks and stick my feet into the river. I joke to John that you’ll never know when you might need standing in a legal case. But it’s more than that. It’s connecting to it, feeling how the river is.