How Maryland’s riverkeepers protect the state’s waterways

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Finally tonight, a story from PBS Student Reporting Labs, our high school journalism training program.

  They traveled to Maryland to learn about one man's very unique job as a so-called riverkeeper.

• Fred Tutman, Patuxent Riverkeeper:

  My name is Fred Tutman. And I'm the riverkeeper on the Patuxent River for the last 21 years.

  As the riverkeeper, I'm an advocate for clean water on the state's longest and deepest inside-the-state river. This river doesn't go anywhere except Maryland.

  My main mission as a riverkeeper is to not only protect the resource to the best we can, so we do file lawsuits and lobby for policy change and new laws and better laws, but also to preserve, particularly on the Patuxent, the tradition of community activism.

  I kind of stumbled into this work. I was a late life law student after a career in television and radio, and I just thought this was made for me. I grew up next to the Patuxent river, and so this was my home river. I grew up as a boy playing on the river, having little adventures, kind of like Huck Finn or Mark Twain's novels.

  I was a kid who played around building my homemade rafts and trying to catch fish in various ways. So the summer camps are a passion project of myself and the people who work here at Patuxent Riverkeeper. All of us have had mentoring. All of us have had people who have been kind to us and shown us stuff along the way.

  Everybody needs mentors. I have seen kids really transformed. I have seen kids come here scared of the water and leave this camp thinking, ah, I got this.

  (Laughter)

• Fred Tutman:

  I love that. I think that's really exciting. And who knows? Maybe we will find another riverkeeper. I'm not a young man anymore. I have had two careers behind me. And I look ahead to some formal succession someday and think, if there's going to be a riverkeeper, maybe it'll come from this community that we have started to build.

  And I think the isms, classism, racism, sexism, those infect every institution, not just the environmental ones. The truth is, the environment is — whether it's intentional or not, is segregated. What people experience in the environment is unique to their social orientation.

  And I think that's where we have to really integrate these movements. These movements are dying for more participation from people of color, people from all walks. Clean water, we cannot live without it. And then the reality is, I don't think the planet's going to get cleaned up by just white people doing all the work and the rest of us standing around saying, ah, I'm going to be diverse.

  I mean, how crazy is that? How incomplete a story. The story of America is the story of everybody.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Terrific student journalism there.

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