blueprints

98 | robert hass
George, an environmental journalist—had from late October until the
contest deadline established for the middle of February to publicize the
contest, devise it, call airlines to see if one of them might contribute airline
tickets for the children and their families (and consider printing the children’s
poetry and art in their magazines), find hotels, plan an itinerary for
the winners, and arrange transportation, all the while keeping her eye on
the main goals—to treat poetry and the visual arts as natural and powerful
means of expression that should be celebrated and that children should be
learning in school, to encourage interdisciplinary environmental education
and the teachers in our schools who are trying to do it, and to let all children
know they live inside watersheds. By the time the contest deadline
came, Pam had generated more than two thousand entries from children in
more than thirty states.
In Washington, at a meeting someone had arranged with local environmentalists,
I met Robert Boone. Robert, who is a descendant of Daniel
Boone, worked inside the federal bureaucracy and kept sane by taking up
canoeing on the Anacostia River. The presidential yacht is berthed on the
Potomac. The Anacostia is the other river in Washington, and it flows
through the poorest neighborhoods in the city. A victim, like most American
rivers in the 1950s, of Army Corps of Engineers policies directed
toward making rivers disappear or behave like rational canals, it had been
recently the scene of an extremely encouraging project in river restoration.
Bruce Babbitt was Bill Clinton’s secretary of the Interior at the time and,
though Clinton and his environmentalist vice president, Al Gore, were
remarkably quiet on the subject of the environment throughout their
administration, Babbitt was vocal and had gone so far as to say that dam
decommissioning and river restoration were going to be the civil rights
movement of the twenty-first century. Like most American rivers, the Anacostia
had a conjoint sewer–storm drain system built for a much smaller
population than the city’s infrastructure had now to support. This meant
that, whenever there was a substantial spring or summer rainstorm, raw
sewage from the city’s sewer system poured into the Anacostia and—in a
Dickensian touch—flowed through the poorest, mostly African American,
neighborhoods in the city. And, rain or shine, the banks of the river were,
like the banks of most American rivers, littered with detritus, mostly plastics,
and the riverbanks in the middle of the city, even in its parks, had
become unofficial dumps: there were tires half-submerged in the shallows,
the remnants of abandoned sofas, all the forlorn disjecta of our consumer