Traveling the Anacostia  river by kayak through the mist of a summer dawn,  it becomes suddenly apparent what we are working for on this RAVE: Why I got up at 4:30am to meet Lee Cain of the Anacostia Watershed Society for a paddle through the quiet tree lined waters of a still sleeping Washington DC; Why 8 photographers of the International League of Conservation Photographers are working with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to bring the troubled waters of the Chesapeake watershed before the US Congress.

The reason is this: a sleeping beaver floating on the still water’s surface, a great blue heron running across the water en route to the sky, a great egret shrouded in the rainbow mist of the rising sun. This is a river much forgotten, but it is not lost. The Anacostia and its wild creatures and plants are just waiting, quietly for the kind of attention and care that decades ago saved a great lake from death and ignited a national consciousness of the essential need for clean water.

          Great blue heron flying over the Anacostia River

Over the course of this project I had a conversation with a woman who remembered fishing on Lake Erie as a child with her family. She also remembered the day they stopped visiting Erie, and her mom’s explanations as to why. “The lake is sick. We can’t eat the fish there anymore.” That was back in the 1970s when Lake Erie was widely considered  biologically dead. So famous was the demise of this lake that it earned a place in a Dr. Seuss story the Lorax. 

You're glumping the pond where the hummingfish hummed.

No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed!

So I'm sending them off: oh, their future is dreary!

They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary,

in search of some water that isn't so smeary -

I hear things are just as bad up at Lake Erie!

Lake Erie and its watershed became a wake up call for a generation. It inspired songs like REM’s Cuyahoga, about the Erie feeder river that caught fire several times in the late 1960s. A Time magazine article described the Cuyahoga as a river that "oozes rather than flows" where a person "does not drown but decays.”

All this attention for the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie led to a piece of legislation at the heart of the Chesapeake RAVE, The Clean Water Act of 1972. Thanks to this law, the Erie of the 70s is on the mend. It is not healed, but it is healing. And that is what we hope can happen for the Anacostia River and the entire Chesapeake watershed—if we can just get people to pay attention and spare some care for these waters.

If everyone could spend a quiet morning gliding through the forested stretches of this river, I’m sure we could find the resolve to work with corporations and municipalities to responsibly protect our waters. Not everyone can make this morning journey, but everyone can take steps to help the river and the bay. Find out how at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation website.