In a way, Spokane Riverkeeper Jerry White, Jr. has been drawn to the rivers of the Northwest his entire life. You might even say the rivers called him, offering inspiration at just the right moments.
After White graduated with an archaeology degree from Western Washington University in the 1980s, he went on to work for the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in the early '90s, expanding campgrounds, doing survey work, and offering tours to school children. The 60-year-old recalls that one specific tour near the Pend Oreille River at a former Kalispel tribal village site sparked his passion for teaching.
"I was like, 'Oh my God. This is what I want to do,' is just talk about this interesting subject of these gaps in cultural perspectives," White says. "There's all these different ways to look at the world."
So he became a teacher. He taught middle school history, social studies and English for 15 years, weaving the connections between rivers and culture into his classes.
"It's the relationship between people and rivers that's fascinated me forever," White says.
Somewhere in there his family moved to Spokane's West Central neighborhood, and he got a daily view of the confluence of the Spokane River and Latah Creek, also known as Hangman Creek. White says he watched the river turn brown with polluting sediment year after year.
"It just, it almost physically hurt me," White says. "And really, honestly, nobody was talking about it."
So he went to work with conservation agencies, including Save Our Wild Salmon and Trout Unlimited. Then, in 2014, White got the chance to take his dream job: the Spokane Riverkeeper.
At the time, he was a one-man show, fighting for the river under the umbrella of the Center for Justice, which worked on civil legal issues. Over the years, more staff joined the Spokane Riverkeeper (part of an international network called the Waterkeeper Alliance) and when the Center for Justice closed its doors in 2020, Riverkeeper split off as its own nonprofit.
Last month, White announced he'll be stepping down, but he's staying on for a while to help with the transition as the board hires a new executive director.
We sat down on a recent sunny Friday, overlooking the river, to talk about his battles to save the river, his work with local tribes, and how he thinks your water bill should probably be higher. White's responses have been edited for clarity and length.
INLANDER: What are some of the biggest victories you've had as the Riverkeeper over the last nine-ish years?
WHITE: One of them I'm most proud of is the work that's now going on on Hangman or Latah Creek. After moving to West Central in 1999, I saw it and realized how egregious and horrible this was.
We litigated against the [Environmental Protection Agency]. We basically said, "Look, your cleanup plan is just not very solid." So that really lit a fire. And then we had the good fortune of having a really strong team over at [the state Department of] Ecology that was willing to say, "Awesome, let's negotiate a settlement plan." The combination of this powerful settlement, good teamwork, and a good team at Ecology has funneled millions now into the basin. It's a high-priority watershed. I think we're going to see the day when Hangman Creek really does turn the corner on recovery and begins to be functional habitat for salmon and trout.
Do you feel like you're already seeing the changes in that watershed with less soil eroding and more planting going on?
If the work that's going on up there and the cultural and financial momentum continues, we definitely are going to see a positive outcome. I'm not here to say it's fixed. It will be generational. It took 150 years to get to where it's at. But given the momentum, and the good folks on the team at Ecology, and the tribes working to recover salmon — who are huge players, sovereign nations — that's big.
What's another win you wanted to mention?
The second win is very much a process win, and that's our dialogue with tribal governments, tribal membership, and even tribal associations or groups. Tribes are not monolithic. They're just like our city: Folks operating in multiple capacities with multiple perspectives. We've worked really hard to open dialogues and create trust and partnerships. I've been speaking with leadership in some cases, and they're all very enthused to keep a partnership moving with Riverkeeper. Last year we did this long journey down the Spokane River, and we had the good fortune of linking up with some tribal canoe families. That was the most beautiful time spent just getting to know people, and slowly but surely finding common ground and having great conversations and building trust. Those folks are the riverkeepers and have been for millenia.
It's nice that you get to do that work in such a beautiful setting.
It's so true, and there's actually something really huge to that. We've found when we get on the river with people, there's just something magic that happens. I honestly believe it's the river working through people.
You know, the other big legal victory we had was the Washington water quality standards for toxics. We prevailed in that in spite of a rollback, from industry petitions to EPA.
When you guys started that litigation wasn't that still when the state of Washington was fighting against the more stringent standards, and then they got on board and fought against the EPA with you?
It was. It's the convoluted piece that's really tough to understand, but that was a really big victory.
There's so many. I also think of the water conservation ordinance last year, I'm very proud of that even if it's just a step in a journey of 1,000 steps. We've got to start conserving water.
It blows me away how we're such high water users. [A 2021 study found that Spokane County residents use 235 gallons of water per day, which is higher than 97 percent of the rest of the country.]
It is wild and it kind of shows a value system that's out of touch with the natural world. Even the way we price water here in Spokane kind of devalues the river at some level. I don't think that's malicious. I just think that's honestly ignorance of the true connection between the aquifer and the river and our own consumption.
So the headline should be "Jerry White thinks your water bill should be higher"?
That would be great. [Laughs.] I mean that's exactly the famous story of [former Spokane mayor] Mary Verner falling on that sword. We need to price that water in a way that actually recognizes the values. That would not translate over very well to this culture, but maybe it's important.
What's your take on the recent Supreme Court decision affecting the Clean Water Act, which could change how we've protected wetlands from development for the past few decades?
In Washington state we have a "waters of the state" rule. We're somewhat insulated from that horrible decision. Many, many other states are not. It's really a move to drag us back to the Dark Ages. To not recognize hydrologic connection is just misguided. To then give a greenlight to pollute one part of that connection, and not understand that it's going to affect downstream or the other parts of that connection is really setting this country up for continued environmental degradation, which we can ill afford right now. It's going to pit people against people.
What do you see as the big obstacles or projects ahead for the next Riverkeeper?
We had variances [to allow industrial users] to discharge PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls] into our river. They shelved those applications. Those applications to me seem like they could become zombies and come back alive. That's a very real risk, because they represent something much bigger than the end of each pipe. It's a signal to everybody with a pipe in the river, or a pipe in the state's waters or national waters that these EPA variances can be used to run around the end of regulation and just create another water quality standard. That's the challenge for the next Riverkeeper potentially.
The other one is we've got a warming river. Lake Spokane [also known as Long Lake] is violating water quality standards behind Avista's projects. How is the public gonna hold Avista responsible to maintain cold water behind those projects in a changing climate? That can be done one way that's friendly to shareholders. Or it can be done another way that's friendly to rivers and communities that love their rivers, and to fish and salmon.
Finally, the real looming one here is the flow. There's no easy answer to that. We had Marshall Creek go dry this year. It's a trout-bearing stream. Totally dry in May. This year, we had 110 percent of normal snowpack in the high country, and we're sitting here with a river that two days ago was at 6,200 cubic feet per second, when it normally flows at 16,000 cubic feet per second. That's the next great challenge for anyone who's trying to put their arms around being a voice for and caring for the river.
What's next for you?
The organization is in great shape. The role of being an executive director is very challenging, in that you have to deal with a plethora of problems. Everything from, "Are there staples in this stapler?" to taking a call from the director of Ecology on vacation. There's kind of a shelf life here and there's somebody out there who's going to bring a new energy I think the community deserves. I was blessed with getting to be a steward for a short time in the life of a river that's ancient and do the best I could, and then hand that baton off. It feels really good for me now at this moment. I'm not done with river work, there's no way.
Yeah if you tell me you're just going to retire and sit around and do nothing, I don't believe that.
There's no way. The next step is beginning to vision and — take this as you will, but it's true — really interact with the river in a way so that it can help me understand how I can fit in. That, I think, is going to be focused. "Hey, here's a project, take that on and do that really well." I'm really excited about things that are maybe kind of far afield. Like "Rights of Nature." What happens if we say the river, salmon, the aquifer deserve their own rights to exist? What does that look like? Who pushes that? What's the legal science behind it?
Indigenous peoples from Europe to South America to North America to Asia to Africa have really thought in this way for millennia. The English legal system we work under sees it as new, but it's not new. But we're having to figure out how we can put this ancient way of thinking into legal terms.
I think if you spend enough time on the river, and I've had this experience personally, it works through you. I'm not afraid to say out loud now that I believe the river to be a sentient, living entity and the components of a living system. And that's clearly in my future with whatever time I have left. So more to follow on that. ♦