As San Diego Coastkeeper’s Waterkeeper, Legal & Policy Director, and attorney, it is my job to ensure that those businesses, governments, and individuals who pollute San Diego’s waters are held accountable and that our waters are both protected and restored.
The honest truth is that while many of our pollution laws in San Diego and the U.S. are quite strong, they are seldom enforced. That’s where we come in. Waterkeeper organizations patrol local waters and prosecute polluters. We are the voice for the water and a defender of the right of every person in San Diego County to live with fishable, swimmable, drinkable water.
San Diego County’s rivers, bays and ocean are under a threat of a thousand cuts. Many different sources of pollution pour into our water every day, which combined become a powerful and often toxic mix poisoning our water and our livelihood. Because this threat is so distributed and gradual, it doesn’t create cause for alarm in the same way something like an oil spill does, making it much more dangerous. It’s easy to just accept the fact that, for the safety of swimmers and surfers, our beaches need to close for 72 hours after it rains. But as Waterkeepers, we do not and will not ever stop protecting our waters.
Our model is simple and powerful: find and fix. One by one, we identify sources of pollution and then use every tool at our disposal, most often legal actions and advocacy, to bring polluters into compliance with the law and heal the cuts that are harming our waters.
San Diego used to average a sewage spill-a-day. With strategic legal action, we were able to push the City of San Diego to invest $1 billion in infrastructure upgrades, reducing sewage spills by 90 percent. That’s just a single lawsuit of the many in our twenty-year history of turning pollution into clean water and polluters into responsible protectors of our water. Imagining San Diego County without San Diego Coastkeeper is, frankly, a bit too scary to consider.
This isn’t a new practice. It’s a tradition that’s proven incredibly effective—across the world. We’re part of an international movement of more than 300 independent Waterkeeper organizations all over the world dedicated to protecting and restoring a specific body of fishable, swimmable, drinkable water. We’re proud to be a part of this tradition, and proud to be one of the largest Waterkeeper organizations in the world.
But I can’t do anything without you by my side. We have to do this together. We all share our water. We all benefit from our water and a thriving, abundant ecosystem. So it’s all of our responsibility to protect it.
If you see something polluting our waters, let me know. I’m your Waterkeeper. If you want to join the Waterkeeper movement and support San Diego Coastkeeper, consider making a donation or joining our team of dedicated volunteers.
Finally, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so I can keep you up to date on the latest information you need to know about San Diego County’s water.
