Rivers Coalition May 2025
Do you know what we did for the first Earth Day back in 1970?
Martin County High School student Larry Crary drops his outboard motor into a coffin during a mock funeral for the St. Lucie River at Phipps Park on April 22, 1970. Credit - Stuart News
The May Rivers Coalition meeting was cancelled due to a conflict with another event. Which gives me an opportunity to reminisce a bit…
A few years ago a friend of mine, a member of the Martin County High School senior class of 1970, asked me “Do you know what we did for the first Earth Day back in 1970?”
“No.”
“We staged a mock funeral for the river.”
My jaw dropped. Fifty long years had passed; we were STILL staging mock funerals for the river. In spite of the strenuous efforts of a lot of extremely dedicated hard-working people during those five decades, nothing had really changed.
Until it did.
The transformation was driven home at a Rivers Coalition meeting a few years ago by then-director of the South Florida Water Management District Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch. She told us “There has been a cultural shift at the SFWMD.”
Then she added something I never, ever, expected to hear.
“There has also been a cultural shift at the Corps of Engineers.”
This was stunning. Both agencies were now specifically including both aquatic and human health factors as a major part of their decision-making process. It wasn’t just gallons of water any more.
An ongoing dialog between parties who hadn’t been on the best of speaking terms began. The Executive Director of the SFWMD and high-ranking members of the Corps of Engineers now regularly attend our monthly Rivers Coalition meetings, listen carefully to our concerns, and address them directly and honestly. Their decisions don’t always go the way we’d like (they have other stakeholders to answer to) – but they’re definitely taking human and aquatic health issues into their decision-making process now.
So after fifty long years the pendulum has finally started to swing in the estuary’s favor. There’s a long, long way to go yet, and a lot of hard work still lies ahead of us. But as Col. Booth of the Corps of Engineers told us recently: “Every year, things are getting better.”
Somewhere, I think Maggy is starting to smile.
-- Walter Deemer, League of Women Voters Martin County Chapter Representative
