I work for a statewide group dedicated to protecting and restoring Maine’s rivers. It has been a difficult few months to represent the environment in the Maine Legislature. In many cases, it’s as if decades of environmental awareness have simply been erased in our statehouse.

Our relatively new governor has set a tone that environmental concerns are a quaint, but inconvenient, luxury when jobs are at stake. Influenced by industry lobbyists, a number of the governor’s environmental appointees have made common cause with the polluters they regulate and turned it into open season on our rivers. Nowhere has this played out more dramatically than on the Androscoggin River.

Among many other battles and skirmishes, we’ve fought – and lost – a huge struggle with the state’s paper companies and their lawmaker and administration friends. We tried, but failed, to stop legislation that would allow major portions of two of the state’s dirtiest waterways, the Androscoggin River and the St. Croix, to meet a lower dissolved oxygen water quality standard than any other rivers in the state.

Those two rivers have significant paper mill operations on them, which – while they run considerably more cleanly than they did decades ago – still contribute to serious degradation of these rivers.

Early in the deliberations on the legislation, one lawmaker mused publicly that he didn’t want to see anything passed that would cripple the ability of industry to use a “working class river.” Later, the argument over the bill devolved into a chronic refrain used to stymie environmental progress – the classic “pickerel versus payroll.”

Addressing those who wanted to push the state’s paper mills to clean up their act, one legislator asked, “Why don’t you be honest and tell people you want to put people out of work today?” Never mind that a highly regarded industry consultant had said that by investing in cleaner technology, the mills would become more competitive and cost efficient. This bill represented a profound retreat in the decades of progress we’ve been able to make in cleaning up our rivers. And it was passed.

Although the Androscoggin is still Maine’s most polluted major river, with annual summertime algae blooms of epic proportions, persistent dioxin contamination, and the absence of its once enormous fish runs, this degradation has historically not gone unnoticed. There have been significant public actions to force clean up of this river in the past.

Now, though, we are facing an ironic situation: this river remains dirty, but it may have been cleaned up just enough for people to think it’s fine. It doesn’t smell too bad, there isn’t foam coming down it – so what’s the problem?

But the battle for the Androscoggin was not entirely lost this past legislative session. Led by Rep. Elaine Makas, many members of the local delegation marched into the legislative committee that was hearing the bill and told them “Do not treat us and our river as second class anymore!”

It was an unprecedented sundering of the historic ties that once existed between Big Paper and the local community. The legislators told the committee that the region’s economic future was inextricably tied to a clean Androscoggin. Other members of the community testified similarly that, in the words of one local farmer, “The paper mills are going to have to learn to share the river.”

This is a historic time for the Androscoggin. The paper mills’ discharge licenses are about to be rewritten and it is highly likely that state regulators will be very lenient in setting discharge limits, which would be bad for the river and its surrounding communities. But now we have the beginning of a community-wide consciousness in the Androscoggin River Valley, in part fostered by declining employment at the mills, that good water quality means a better future for these economically challenged communities.

The legislators who trooped in front of the committee this past session were wrong: the Androscoggin and its communities aren’t being treated as second class – Gulf Island Pond doesn’t even meet the state’s lowest water quality designation, out of four possible levels. That means that you and your river are less than fourth class.

Is that what you’re willing to settle for? And frankly, the Androscoggin doesn’t just belong to the people who live around it. Maine’s rivers are our shared heritage, and they historically harbored resources that were an integral part of the much larger Gulf of Maine ecosystem; none of us who live in this state or region should be satisfied with a dirty Androscoggin. It is an insult to all of us.

Clearly, this river needs to be cleaned up. The only thing standing in the way of doing that is politics. The mills have the money to do it; they’ve done it in other states. All of us – millwright and businessman, doctor and waitress, and professor and fisherman – need to let the world know: We will not settle for a fourth-class Androscoggin.

There are other issues besides pollution that need to be dealt with. Land conservation along the rivers’ banks is essential. Local real estate values are rising rapidly, and land is being turned into house lots, with resulting loss of farms and woodlots. Education will be crucial: town planning boards and conservation commissions need to understand what they can do about sprawl, about innovative ways to conserve land, about raising funds for conservation.

Taking a polite approach to cleaning up the Androscoggin and conserving its adjacent lands will not work now. This community’s central natural resources – this once glorious river and its surrounding valley – are at a tipping point.

We can let houses sprout on some of the richest farmland in the state and we can let this river die a death of a thousand cuts. Or we can say that there’s another vision for the Androscoggin – of clean water and healthy riverbanks that are home to working farms, working forestland, publicly accessible parks – and work relentlessly to achieve it. Because that’s what it’s going to take.

Naomi Schalit is executive director of Maine Rivers. This article was adapted from a letter to the Androscoggin Land Trust.

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