Here's a kayaker who puts her paddle where her passion is. Heather Wylie, a biologist who was threatened with suspension from her job at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for kayaking on the Los Angeles River, has now left the agency to pursue a career in environmental law, while being cleared of any wrong doing.
Read more about it here.
The move comes after the Army Corps backed down from threatening to suspend Wylie, who took her trip last summer to prove that the L.A. River is "navigable-in-fact." That's important, because rivers that are determined navigable are protected under the Clean Water Act.
While the L.A. River is widely known for the concreted trench that runs through downtown Los Angeles -- which Hollywood has made famous with everything from car chase scenes to death-defying feats of skateboarding bravado -- it winds through more than 52 miles of Southern California. Its tributaries extend even farther, high up into the San Gabriel and Santa Susana Mountains.
But the Army Corps, like any good government agency under the Bush Administration, was trying to roll back Clean Water Act protections in the entire L.A. River basin so that development could run wild along its banks. When an earlier court ruling gave the Army Corps -- along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- the ability to severely restrict which rivers were covered by the Act, the agencies jumped at the opportunity.
As Wylie pointed out in an editorial in the L.A. Times, the Army Corps' and EPA's actions were a thinly veiled attempt to allow developers to write environmental law.
"With a big assist from the Bush administration, developers and industry successfully lobbied the agencies to use the new guidebook as an opportunity to push the majority of our nation's streams and wetlands out of reach of the Clean Water Act," Wylie wrote. "In the view of many, the restrictive standards cripple the Clean Water Act."
Yet, after Wylie took her trip -- which only got national media attention when the Army Corps threatened to suspend her -- the EPA took an about face, and stripped the Army Corps of any further responsibility for determining the status of the L.A. River, as well as Arizona's Santa Cruz River.
Now, with the help of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a watch-dog group that holds the government's feet to the fire in abiding by its own environmental laws, the Army Corps has also released Wylie from any claims of wrong doing for her publicly minded paddle this summer.
"I am delighted with this resolution and am looking forward to the next adventure in my life," Wylie says in a press release on PEER's Web site. "I had a great time kayaking the L.A. River and we were successful at stopping the Corps from rolling back Clean Water Act safeguards on the L.A. and Santa Cruz Rivers systems. I urge every public servant that knows of betrayal to the public trust to contact PEER and actively bring attention to these issues – we must hold our public agencies accountable in order to bring about change."
I couldn't agree more, and especially like what Wylie had to say in the L.A. Times about public employees' duties to act responsibly on the public's behalf.
"As a federal employee, I did not forfeit my 1st Amendment rights to speak out or to petition my government to redress wrongs -- on my own time," she wrote. "To my surprise, my demonstration about the Clean Water Act has turned into a fight about the extent to which public servants will be allowed to serve the public, our true employers, while off-duty. I stand by my actions, and I have not put my paddle away."
If I ever need an environmental lawyer, I think I know whom to call.
