Getting Organized

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth ... that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way.

W. H. MURRAY

Get Committed

On a summer afternoon in 1988, Wendy Wilson and Tom Watts were sitting in their kayaks in an eddy on the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho. Wendy was upset. A wealthy Idaho potato farmer had announced plans to finance a hydropower project that would drain the river. The water would go through pipes to an underground generating plant, the power would go to California, and the river would, in a manner of speaking, go to hell.

As Wendy complained about this disturbing turn of events, her paddling partner posed a provocative challenge. "If you were a real environmentalist," he said, "you'd form a group and stop this thing." Wendy thought for a moment and then said, "I'll do it if you'll do it." Watts responded, "I'll do it." Wendy stared at him: "Are you serious?" Watts stared at her, "Are you serious?"

They explored that question further over a subsequent beer and by November they had an organization. As W. H. Murray predicted, a whole stream of events issued from that decision, and three and a half years later, following one of the most intense and well-organized lobbying campaigns in state history, the Idaho legislature passed a bill protecting the Payette from development.

Wendy Wilson is the first person to point out that the Payette River was saved through the efforts of thousands of people. "I didn't do it by myself," she says. "I was smarter than that. It takes a group of people." But what Wendy Wilson and Tom Watts did do themselves was make the commitment that gathered the people who started the organization which saved the river. And that's where river protection begins: Someone has to make the commitment.

Falling in Love

Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss.

Mark Dubois, a pioneering river conservationist who dedicated a decade to the Stanislaus River in California, recalls a conversation he once had with a Russian activist. "I asked him the question, how do you get people involved," Dubois, who has himself gotten thousands of people involved, remembers. "He said, 'First I think it is necessary to fall in love.'"

If you've fallen in love with a river, if you feel your life linked somehow to its flow, then at least half the commitment has already been made. But before you wed yourself to a river campaign, consider the experiences of Mark Dubois, Wendy Wilson, and others who took the plunge. As with marriage—an experience not entirely unrelated to river saving—it pays to have some idea of what you're getting into.

When the fight to save the Payette began, Wendy Wilson was working for the Idaho Trial Lawyers Association and during the first year of the campaign she was an unpaid volunteer. But by the second year she was working full time on the Payette, scraping by on donations, and the river began to rule her life. It has now become her career.

When Marion Stoddart moved to Groton, Massachusetts more than 30 years ago, she asked herself the question, "What am I going to do with my life?" Looking out across the polluted Nashua River she found the answer. "I wanted to devote my life to some good purpose," she recalls. "I was looking for a significant challenge." The Nashua became that challenge and consumed her for 25 years.

Mark Dubois, who was then a guide for an organization taking disabled people down rivers, had no idea what he was committing to when he agreed to help coordinate a statewide initiative drive to save the Stanislaus. "Sometimes ignorance is bliss," he confesses. "Had we known what we were getting into, I'm not sure any of us would have gotten involved." What Dubois got into was a battle royale waged up and down the length of California—in the state legislature, in Congress, and in the U. S. Supreme Court. It lasted a decade and it lost. But Dubois' life was changed forever, transformed by his relationship with one river into a relationship with all rivers. And out of the defeat of the Stanislaus came an organization called Friends of the River and a movement that has helped save numerous rivers in the West.

So when you make the commitment to save a river it is by definition a big one, and a long one. Ignorance may sometimes be bliss but, when attached to a river-saving campaign, it can also wreak havoc with marriages and careers. Perhaps the most important things to understand about any commitment you make to a river are these: Your life will be challenged and enriched beyond your understanding, nothing else you do in life—short of raising a child—will seem as important, and your relationship to the planet will take on an intimacy and richness that will color your vision for the rest of your days.

Find Partners

As Wendy Wilson, and every other successful river saver makes clear, you can't save a river by yourself—you need partners. There may be a few organizational geniuses capable of launching a river campaign single-handedly, but most people don't get very far alone.

Take Jerry Meral. By any standard, Jerry Meral is a formidable organizer. He has placed so many successful initiative measures on the California ballot that the organization he heads has been dubbed "Initiatives R Us". But when Meral launched one of the nation's earliest river campaigns in 1969, he didn't do it alone. He found a partner in David Kay, who ran a nonprofit river company, and together they found partners in Rob Caughlan and David Oke, owners of a young public relations firm committed only to causes they believed in and people they liked. This team gave birth to Friends of the River, the oldest and largest river conservation organization in the West, and it launched the biggest grassroots campaign in California history.

To anyone standing alone at the put-in of a river-saving campaign, Caughlan offers this adamant advice: "You don't have an organization by yourself. You don't have an organization until you have someone else."

Finding someone else isn't usually a problem; indignation over the abuse...