Equity In Every Drop: Series Two

Episode 5: Bearing the Burden of Factory Farms

Series two includes six episodes focused on the issues and advocacy priorities of our Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

In this episode of Equity In Every Drop, host Thomas Hynes sits down with Buck Ryan, the Snake River Waterkeeper from Boise, Idaho, to discuss the extensive impact of concentrated animal feeding operations, or factory farms, on local waterways and ecosystems. Buck details his journey from a river guide to an environmental lawyer dedicated to protecting fisheries and water quality.

The conversation covers Snake River Waterkeeper’s critical efforts in litigation against major polluters like J.R. Simplot’s Grandview feedlot, the challenges in achieving regulatory oversight, and the severe ecological effects of unchecked agricultural pollutants. Buck emphasizes the broader implications of pollution on regional economies, recreation, and public health, while highlighting hopes for future improvements, including dam removal and sustainable agricultural practices.

This episode sheds light on the urgent need for accountability and transparency in agriculture to protect vital water resources.

Stay tuned! New monthly episodes will be posted here and anywhere you get your podcasts. Click “Subscribe” in the episode widget above to access links to popular podcast apps.

Thank you for listening, sharing, and supporting our mission to ensure everyone’s right to clean water. Together, we demand equity in every drop.


Waterkeeper S2, Ep5 – Bearing the Burden of Factory Farms

Thomas Hynes: My guest today is Buck Ryan of Snake River Waterkeeper in Boise, Idaho. Buck worked as a river guide in Wyoming and Alaska and researched wildlife ecology in Costa Rica and Ecuador before pursuing a career in public interest environmental law. His career goal since childhood has been to protect and restore fisheries for future generations.

He lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and his two sons. Buck, thanks so much for being here today.

Buck Ryan: My pleasure, Tom. Thanks for having me. 

Thomas Hynes: Great. So I think it would be great to start if you just tell me about yourself. I know we just gave you a little intro, but tell me about yourself. Tell me about your watershed and tell me about Snake River Waterkeeper as an organization. 

Buck Ryan: So, I grew up a pretty avid fly fisherman guided as you mentioned in Wyoming and Alaska and settled in Pocatello, Idaho after going to law school in Vermont. To pursue, specifically a law degree to engage on environmental issues.

I had the good fortune of doing some foreign study during undergrad when I was doing [00:01:00] wildlife biology research in Costa Rica and Ecuador, where I kept seeing these kind of large-scale you know, international format, environmental issues, presenting at a very local level, and I found that to be both disturbing and guiding in terms of my career.

Just three examples would be being in Ecuador and seeing the impacts the oil industry had on local communities. Being in Alaska, guiding for salmon, and seeing an entire run of sockeye salmon completely eradicated from a watershed. I think we saw three fish all summer in a run that should have had tens of thousands because there was international longlining going on offshore that were completely decimating the fish stocks.

And lastly, on a trip to some islands in the Seychelles in the middle of the Indian Ocean watching crocs and plastic water bottles wash up on the beach each morning, really brought home to me how existential the threat of our activities are becoming to these natural systems. I went to Vermont Law School after getting a wildlife biology undergraduate degree to practice environmental law. And that’s what I’ve done. So I [00:02:00] moved to Pocatello and worked for a firm after that and learned how to do a plaintiff side, environmental litigation, and then moved to Boise and started the first chapter of Snake River Waterkeeper based out of Boise, Idaho, but serving the entire Snake River Basin, which is 100,000 square miles, more than 1,000 straight river miles of the Maine Snake River from its headwaters in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, all the way across southern Idaho and up along the Idaho/Oregon border past the four lower Snake River dams to the confluence with the Columbia near Kennewick, Washington.

We have a lot of issues on the river with regard to pollution and our native fish stocks. The big battles that we as a Waterkeeper chapter are engaging in, are dams, factory farms – which include dairies and feedlots – and hatcheries. We also engage pretty heavily on wastewater treatment because we just have that many issues with our wastewater treatment for municipalities in Idaho.

The broad span of our work covers those items. And then we very specifically [00:03:00] engage on pollution issues that involve the Clean Water Act and other statutes where necessary to engage on these issues on a local level. My chapter also does a lot of local stewardship because our basin is so big we need a lot of help from our grassroots members and supporters to have eyes on the river throughout this 100 square mile reach, which includes the Salmon and Clear Water Rivers. So, we do river cleanups and we sample water quality at public access swim sites all summer long so that we can flag public access swim areas, red or green, safe or unsafe for swimming for children through the swim guide app, which is run through the national Waterkeeper Alliance by the Lake Ontario Waterkeepers. 

Thomas Hynes: And how long have you been Snake River Waterkeeper? When did you start? 

Buck Ryan: We started the chapter back in 2014. So we’re actually celebrating 10 years, a full decade, um, this year. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s awesome. That’s very cool. 

Buck Ryan: Yeah, thank you.

Thomas Hynes: Absolutely. That’s very cool. So, for this series of the podcast, a lot of what we’re focusing on is confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs or as the public might better know them, factory farms and, you know, just big ag, big agriculture.

And one of the things that we’re sort of highlighting is that this has kind of gone away from the pastoral, idyllic American family farm, and it’s become this real, you know, industrialized thing. 

With that in mind, tell me what role first, agriculture, you know, in big a little a, however you want to say it what role that plays in your local economy and in your, you know, and then we can get into some of how it plays in the ecosystem after that, but, I’m talking to you from Brooklyn, New York City, so we don’t have a lot of farms here, we have some, but, tell me what role it plays [00:05:00] locally.

Buck Ryan: Agriculture is Idaho’s lifeblood for better or worse. It’s what has put us on the map. Everyone knows Idaho for potatoes. And the truth is that it really does take up the most land mass in terms of the local agriculture here.

We have sugar beets and we have onions that are a primary driver in the agricultural industry locally as well. But the big one is potatoes. And, so a lot of our economy, Well, I should also mention grain. Up on the panhandle, it’s mostly not in the Snake River Basin, but up in far north Idaho, we do have that same alfalfa and grain industry that you see in eastern Washington.

But what really drives things around here is potatoes. And the substances we use to raise them. So, in many cases, that means a lot of your local jobs are working either directly or indirectly with the potato industry – could be developing chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, but two of the major stakeholders in Idaho and that this includes in government, not just in business, are Simplot and Monsanto.

So, think McDonald’s french [00:06:00] fries and think glyphosate Roundup. So, these are major players and the potato industry has a massive presence here in Idaho. And I think a lot of people get pulled into the mindset of thinking that Waterkeepers are anti-agriculture. And I don’t think many of them are. I can only speak for myself, but I think that. What we really want to see is agriculture done right and done in a way that’s sustainable and also doesn’t externalize the costs into environmentally catastrophic practices, like what we’ve seen with a lot of the monoculture around here with potatoes. It can become a thing where scale is put in priority in the place of quality and I don’t think it has to be that way. 

I do think we need to use agriculture to feed our country. I think it’s very important. But, I think that what you’re seeing now is a backlash from your traditional mom and pop farmers and your smaller operations because these mega corporate monocultural ag industries are coming in. They’re actually squeezing out all the third, fourth, fifth generation Idahoans who have been doing things in a way that is sustainable [00:07:00] for a number of years and who are open to doing things in a way that would make them sustainable into the future. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And I, it’s funny, I don’t think of, I mean, I haven’t been around since 2014, but I don’t think of Waterkeepers , as anti-ag, you know, I think it’s anti-pollution.

And obviously, I think everybody understands that we need food. And I think everyone in the country who loves French fries and other kinds of potatoes are grateful for Idaho’s contribution to our national menu. And I just think like we all want jobs, right? We all want thriving economies, but there’s gotta be a way to do that right. You touched on a concept that’s really interesting and relevant to me about externalizing the costs of pollution and cleanup. Because it kind of feeds into my next question about how agriculture impacts your local ecosystem and waterways.

And then I will just say this is a total non sequitur. But again, as a guy coming from New York City, I was probably like, in my late thirties before I realized that Ore Ida potatoes is a portmanteau of Oregon and Idaho. 

Anyway, [00:08:00] that’s for the listener. We’ll move right along. 

We’re talking about externalizing costs and impact on local ecosystems and water waste agriculture.

So I’ll let you, I’ll let you answer that before I add any more trivia.

Buck Ryan: Right. I think it’s important to think of, or at least understand how a lot of the mega agricultural industry views rivers. Rivers are a, they’re a free way to move pollution and byproducts away from your facility so that you don’t have to pay trucks to cart your  externalized products away. 

That could be chemicals, that could be manure. It could be gray water. It could be anything. What you have to know is if you don’t use a river to move your pollution away from your facility, then you’re paying one way or another to have it carted off. And that’s not how we think of rivers, but we have to understand that’s how folks who are looking at bottom lines think about rivers.

How can we use this in a way where we don’t get in trouble but where it saves us on our bottom line? And so we have to be on the lookout for that mindset. That’s not what rivers mean to us. Rivers for us are places where we have clean drinking water for people to recreate, people to have [00:09:00] drinking water and domestic water for domestic use and water for their crops.

If we allow this mindset and these externalized pollutants to be the main use for a river, then we run into the situation described in a 2014 High Country News article, which was called the Snake River’s Idaho sewer system, and it describes this working river approach to usage for waste removal using the river’s flow.

And it is important, I think, to understand the kind of two rivers approach to the Snake River that is taken. With some exceptions, this river is primarily used for recreation from the headwaters down to Idaho Falls. I’m not saying there’s no one fishes below Idaho Falls, but the way that the water quantity is managed and the way that water rights are divvied out, that river is kept in a certain way on the upper river, in a certain different way that is, has a mind toward business and agriculture from Idaho downstream across the middle Snake through southern Idaho and up the Oregon/Idaho border. 

Which, I won’t call the [00:10:00] Ore Ida border, because I don’t want to further embarrass your potato knowledge, so. But yeah, I think it’s, you can do a Google Earth flyover and come down the river and actually watch the color of that river change as you go past Idaho Falls and across southern Idaho. And you have to realize that, we’re not sounding an alarm that is not real. 

In that same article, there were folks who dove down to the bottom of those reservoirs behind the dams on the lower Snake River reservoirs and could see the bottom functioning like a septic system, it’s actually bubbling, trying to process all the things that are deposited at the base of those dams.

And that’s an issue I haven’t heard a lot of discussion about in terms of dam removal, but I think it’s when we have to start confronting is – what do we need to do prior to removing these lower Snake River dams to ensure we aren’t just releasing that all downstream into the ocean? 

It certainly is no reason to hold up dam removal, but at the same time it’s a concern we need to grapple with because there are some legacy pollutant chemicals that are piled up, [00:11:00] mercury and others behind these dams that probably need to be sorted before they’re just let go.

So I guess the point is that this river is incredibly variable in the water quality that it has and in the uses that it’s managed for under the Clean Water Act and other statutes by our state agencies. 

Thomas Hynes: I think it’s so interesting what you’re talking about with the dams, which is not really what we’re here to talk about, but that’s just, I mean, I think that goes to show and underscores the value of someone like a Riverkeeper out there being like, Hey, hang on a second, we need to really look at everything and taking that concern and that monitoring and that understanding and being like, hey, wait, we want to remove these dams, but they’ve actually act as like a reservoir or like a retaining wall for all these dangerous things in the water and just being thoughtful, even with the things that we really want to do, like dam removal, but you have to kind of just move slowly and thoughtfully and judiciously.

Buck Ryan: And again, we don’t [00:12:00] want to in any way hold up those dams [that] have to come out at the first possible date. And we need to know what we’re doing when we do it, so we’re not releasing a bunch of things downstream that are going to compromise water quality. And I think you bring up a great point, which is that without confusing the issues, it’s really important to note that the pollution issues we work on that seem unrelated to salmon and steelhead and dam removal are directly impacting those because every pound of manure we’re stopping from going into the river from a factory farm or a dairy is a pound that is ending up somewhere between the input site and stopping at those dams so that when the salmon and steelhead are back in the river and we’re trying to bring back these remnant populations of anadromous fish we have water quality that’s good enough for them to actually live, spawn, and survive in.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah it’s interesting because it’s like we’re talking about like one side of food production impacting another side of food production. 

I mean, it really is robbing Peter to pay Paul. [00:13:00] 

Buck Ryan: yYeah, we could have a commercial recreational and commercial salmon fishery in Idaho that would go a long way toward replacing jobs and protein production.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, and I harp on this all the time. And so I apologize if listeners have already heard me say this, but it’s like, yeah, you know, we talk about this work as though, for the sanctity of nature and for the harmony of all species and things, but it’s actually really good business too, right.

Like, there’s like, there’s good money and not polluting the rivers. There’s good money and not damming the rivers. There’s economic opportunity and restoring things the way they’re meant to be. It’s not one or the other. And I actually, I don’t apologize for saying that because I think that it needs to be hammered home.

Buck Ryan: I think that’s right.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, we don’t have to choose between a good economy and a good environment. And in fact, bad environment is bad business. But I digress. 

Buck Ryan: No, I think, I think we get a lot of Hobson’s choices, and I think politics mixes a lot of these things up. But I have no problem with a [00:14:00] person who could care less about animal cruelty.They should still be supporting what we’re doing. If they don’t care about the wellbeing or treatment of cows, but they do care about what their children are eating. That’s still a great reason to get behind our work to bring factory farms into compliance and have some level of accountability where we’re doing this on a scale and producing meat that a person with any political view or any lack of care of animal husbandry and wellbeing would still want to support what we do.

And I think the same thing happens with dam removal. People think it’s an environmentalist-only issue. It’s a green agenda. Well, if you believe in jobs in Idaho, the commercial salmon industry would be right down the middle for you. So, it’s important to take a second look and look at what’s really happening.

It’s hard to keep the politics out of it, but if you look at the brass tacks of what the jobs are and what the production is and where we could be versus where we are, we could be having a wild commercial fishery versus having a really, environmentally dangerous beef industry that is [00:15:00] polluting our rivers. You just replace one with the other, I think it could reach across the aisle. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And externalizing costs, by the way, means that we pay for it. So, it’s actually not really that cheap when you talk about, even if you don’t get the replacement industries, externalizing costs is a cost to the taxpayer. So, let’s talk a little bit more about, like what’s happening. So, you’re talking about, you just alluded to, there’s a lot of cattle. What’s causing the problems? I guess I want to ask how do legal avenues help address the problem? aAnd where do they fall short? And describe the problem more if you can?

Buck Ryan: The problem is we have nearly 400 large cattle feedlots, which include dairies in the state of Idaho with, and I’m calling those, that’s a capital L large CAFOs in Idaho because they’re regulated a certain way if they have more than a thousand head. We have nearly 400 in Idaho who not only don’t have Clean Water Act permits to pollute, but didn’t even apply since the general permit expired in 2012.

So, we have zero regulatory oversight and [00:16:00] accountability. The word of that has spread throughout the industry such that we’re now attracting international. The internationally owned syndicates of corporate CAFOs that are moving to Idaho because they know they won’t have any administrative oversight or compliance costs.

And, so we’re serving in the role that should be served by the EPA or the state enforcement agency by going in and doing our research and investigating, figuring out which of these CAFOs are, and when I say CAFO, I mean a concentrated animal feeding operation. In this case, we’re talking about cattle, the beef feedlots or dairies with over a thousand animals, and going in and finding out – are they polluting, and if so, taking them to court for not having a permit to pollute.

So, what we have is basically a behind-the-scenes agreement. It’s sort of like a, in nature, it’s like a bait ball. It’s a pack defense mechanism where they all are putting up this front and saying, by not having a permit, they’re saying we are zero discharge, we don’t discharge a single ounce [00:17:00] of waste from our facilities, and it’s not possible.

Thomas Hynes: A thousand cows don’t, right? Okay. Sorry. 

Buck Ryan: A thousand cows is the minimum. The outfit that we are in court against right now has a capacity of up to 150,000 cattle at a time on a 700 acre plot of land. 

So if you do the math on that and assume 50 to a hundred pounds of liquid manure a day per animal.

Thomas Hynes: Oh my God.

Buck Ryan: That it’s going in this tiny lagoon that you’ve dug on your property. You know, so, we’re doing two things at once. One, we’re trying to strengthen the permit in a way that when we do force all of these large cattle operations to apply for a permit, that there are meaningful enough requirements within that permit that we can actually track what they’re discharging each day.

The old requirement just forced them to have someone basically out visually inspecting a field while they were spreading the manure on it, and to basically turn themselves in if they saw anything go in the river and you can imagine how few reports we have of that. 

Thomas Hynes: You can do that with 150,000 cattle.That’s a fool’s errand. 

Buck Ryan: Right. Well, and it’s the [00:18:00] law that doesn’t require anything more than to have someone out there. It could have been a guy who forgot his glasses at home that day. It wasn’t, there weren’t numeric requirements, to know what was going in the river.

So, what we fought for in the ninth circuit and one where, or a reimagined a permit that had meaningful monitoring requirements that allow us to track through a numeric reporting system what is going into the river. Meanwhile we’re in court suing one of, if not the largest CAFO in the region, which is J.R. Simplot’s Grandview feedlot in Grandview, Idaho. It’s, again, capacity of up to 150,000 cattle at a time. And, we are in court pleading to the judge to accept, what we feel is very obvious, which is that they are discharging massive amounts of manure to the river. 

And we’ve been monitoring water quality down there for eight years, and we have a massive administrative record that we’ve submitted to the court of data that we’ve taken down there, which have shown [00:19:00] exponential increases of E coli and total coliform bacteria below the facility. Where it has its nexus with the Snake River versus above. And there’s actually an admission on the record as well in this case that shows where Simplot released a public statement. They commented on our Ninth Circuit permit litigation saying they couldn’t control the amount of runoff that entered their facility because of the number of cattle and amount of manure they’re producing there.

So, we are trying to set a new standard for the industry and make sure that everyone is in fact, if they are discharging a pollutant to the Waters of the United States, then they have to have a permit, which is what the Clean Water Act requires. And, that’s all we’re asking for is numeric reporting of discharges. So, there is some level of backstopping on the law in Idaho on the cattle industry. 

Thomas Hynes: So you’re describing like a, almost like a no lifeguard on duty situation where everyone’s like, Hey, cool. Like, I’m going to keep going back to like a high school party. It’s like there’s no parents [00:20:00] home. We can do whatever we want. Let’s go. Like everybody come over except that it’s not. It’s like way more reckless and dangerous than that. So, what impact are you seeing on the Snake River and in your watershed from this malfeasance, fecklessness, or whatever, lack of protections. What downstream, I apologize for that pun, but like what downstream effects and impacts are you seeing?

Buck Ryan: No, the impacts literally are downstream. I mean, we are seeing algal blooms in Hell’s Canyon and on down through the Snake River Reservoir the Snake River Dams system. Because of this, it’s not just because of warming waters every year that we’re seeing these algal blooms, it’s increased nutrients, it’s nitrates and ammonia and all the different byproducts of the fertilizer industry, but more specifically, of or more, the most of that is from nitrate and ammonia coming from cattle manure all along the river system.

So, there are certain areas have to be closed. The state wildlife area, the Ted Trueblood Wildlife Management [00:21:00] Area. It’s a state public space that was once great for birding and accessing the Snake River is now completely posted with E. coli warnings. Straight between this facility and the Snake River.

Posted with yellow E. coli warning signs. The same goes for the beneficial uses on the river from there. You get downstream and what we’re seeing is nitrate levels and E. coli levels that do not allow people to swim in the water. And that’s, you know, for the full course of the recreation season, we sample at all these swim guide sites.

It’s 28 sites within a couple hours of Boise, Idaho, spanning from Twin Falls down through the Lake Lower Snake River dams near the Columbia confluence. And, fully one third of those sites at some point during the summer are flagging with levels too dangerous for kids under eight years old to swim in.

So we’re seeing direct impacts and have been for the entire eight years that we’ve been sampling that reach. 

Thomas Hynes: I just, it feels like robbery. It feels like things are being stolen from your community. You know, you talk about these like state parks and access to rivers and places to bird. I love to [00:22:00] bird. It just. This makes me angry. I want to talk to you about –  sort of two ways to ask this question. The way I had framed it originally is like, what would you like to see changed and we can ask that but what does victory look like? What does success look like? Like if you can get your way, I guess it is the same question. What would that look like? 

Buck Ryan: Sure. I’ll be blunt. Four dams removed. Salmon and steelhead back in the Snake River in historically significant numbers, not in numbers that seem nice compared to the numbers we see now, which are artificially inflated to include fish that were trucked down the river as juveniles and trucked back up the river as adults.

They were taken out of fish traps and squeezed for eggs and milt at the hatcheries. We want a self sustaining population. To maintain the genetic diversity that was in our historical runs. We want four dams out. We want fish back in our rivers so that we have a recreational, possibly even a commercial salmon fishery here on [00:23:00] the Upper Snake River.

I want…this is a wishlist, right? 

All CAFOs, mega CAFOs, you know, a thousand plus cattle. I want them to all be reporting on a daily basis, what pollutants they discharge into the river so that we can feel good about them operating in our system and know what’s going into our river so that the public can know what they’re swimming in.

I also want us to adopt a practice that does not further pollute the Eastern Snake Plain River aquifer where 95 percent of Idahoans drinking water comes from, which a Boise State study shows will be too polluted for us to drink by the year 2050. It’s 25 years from now. We have to stop those practices and recharge that aquifer in a way that  keeps it drinkable and keeps it bubbling up at Thousand Springs in South Central Idaho near Twin Falls with water that can be drinkable. Used and drank, and serves the public in a way where they can recreationally use that portion of the river. Since we’re on a wish list, I’ll wish the zebra mussels and quagga [00:24:00] mussels will not persist on our rivers because they can really choke it out, take the oxygen demand out of the water and just be catastrophic for all aquatic organisms.

I’m going to wish for us to change our mosquito abatement programs and our insecticide spraying on the upper river that’s catastrophically impacting hatches. A lot of insects that are critical to native cold water salmonid populations, and I’m going to hope that we get our sewage on the very upper river near, near Jackson, Wyoming, and really throughout the river’s course, I want us to get into a wastewater treatment system, that prevents algal blooms and cyanobacteria. And crashing insect populations that sustain our fish as well.

And then lastly, I want us to get rid of hatcheries. If we have these self-sustaining wild populations. We can follow Montana’s experiment that they’ve been doing ever since Dick Vincent convinced the state to stop stocking rivers in Montana in 1974. We can mirror that program here, and we can have wild, sustaining populations of trout throughout our [00:25:00] watershed, and save the taxpayer dollars on these hatcheries that just create these artificial cookie cutter fish whose fins and lips are rubbed off, and dump them in the rivers, and tell the public it’s the same thing. So I’ll keep, I’ll stop there. I’ll save maybe a couple for later, but that’s. 

Thomas Hynes: I mean, yeah, I think that was pretty reasonable, but when we were talking about your wishlist with CAFO’S, I mean, what you’re asking for is like pretty reasonable.

You’re like, just tell us how much. Cow. I don’t know what my cursing policy is. So, you know, whatever. Feces is going into the river. Like, shouldn’t it be like treat the waste before it goes in the river? 

Buck Ryan: It’s where we are. I mean, of course, the moonshot, you know, the moonshot wish would be, would be to actually have you know, beef feedlots and dairies that were only producing enough waste that the river could, you know, ably dilute them in a way that wouldn’t compromise any beneficial uses. And you wouldn’t think that would be a big ask, but it’s so far from where we’re at now that it’s just seems a [00:26:00] little, I don’t want to be overly idealistic, but all I really want to know is what’s going into our river so that we can do what we need to do to deal with it. 

And I think our state, the state as the implementer of the Clean Water Act in Idaho should be on the lookout to protect beneficial uses on the river based on those numbers. So, I guess my wish would have more implications than it sounds like in the sense that once we knew what was going in the river the Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality has an obligation to ensure it’s not more than would allow the beneficial uses designated for these portions of the river.

So, without being tongue in cheek, I’m saying, what I’m asking for is those numbers, knowing that the state has a mandate through the federal Clean Water Act to ensure those numbers aren’t over the amount allowing for, say, a fishery on the Lower Snake River or swimming on the Middle Snake River. So, implicit in that wish is the wish that we not put so much cow manure in the river that it compromises being able to swim or fish in it.

Thomas Hynes: And I think, yeah, you’re [00:27:00] right. Like, you can’t do one without the other. I mean, you got to know what the full, you got to get your arms around the problem entirely. And that seems to be the lack of transparency is one of the more galling parts of this problem. It’s not, you know, it’s like, yeah that’s fair.

So, I really appreciate you being here today, but I want to just ask you one more question. And maybe you could just touch on what are some of the things that Snake River Waterkeeper is doing? Specifically, not just in the court of public opinion, but like in court, what are you and your organization doing about all of this terrible problem? 

Buck Ryan: Yeah, thanks for asking, Tom.

I appreciate it. So, we have a number of lawsuits underway right now, including some that we’re participating in as in an amicus capacity or as co-plaintiffs. Right now we’re in lawsuits with a number of different wastewater treatment plants in Idaho who are not fully processing their human waste before putting it back in our rivers.

And that’s a problem for a number of reasons, most of which are probably obvious, but we are trying to bring them back into compliance so that wastewater is being [00:28:00] treated in a way where it’s not wastewater going back into our rivers. We filed a number of different cases over the last few years. And we are about to engage in a case in eastern Idaho in which cyanide is actually being put into the Snake River at a very high level. We’re still in the early phases of that investigative process to understand the source of that. But that one probably will have national headlines, and maybe depending on what we learn, could be a really big story, I think, nationally.

But, most of the wastewater treatment plant lawsuits we’ve done so far are for nitrate or ammonia exceedances, where these wastewater treatment plants, which are run by the municipalities, are not fully treating the waste before it goes back into the river. When we win these cases or settle them we take the lump sum, we recover it, and we put 100 percent of it back into river projects which are court approved by the judge on some cases, it’s putting in rip rap or say, dredging out a silted channel of of a river where fish used to spawn to provide new spawning habitat. And in many cases, we’re providing jobs to local communities by contracting [00:29:00] this work out to local bioengineers who can go in and renew a section of river into great fish habitat.

So, it’s sort of a win, win for the local communities. They get their water quality back, they get local jobs, and they get improvements made on their local streams and rivers, and the fish win as well. We are also commenting in eastern Idaho on a proposal this is a suit of national and regional significance in which Simplot is actually trying to do a land swap with the Bureau of Land Management to be able to dispose of and store a bunch of a huge amount of byproduct from fertilizer production. Phosphate, and actually radioactive materials. They’re trying to do a land swap so that they can dispose of all this on land bordering the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in eastern Idaho where the Shoshone Bannock tribes live.

So, that one’s very politically- charged. We’re commenting as amici in the briefing and supporting the tribe’s objection to having radioactive waste stored directly next to where their tribal members [00:30:00] live. And we’re also involved in an ongoing basis on implementation and enforcement of the TMDL on the lower Snake River where we’re trying to keep water temperatures low enough as they go through the lower four Snake River dams complex, so that if the fish do make it that far, they don’t immediately get what we call mold or rot or whatever, they die from complications of their immune systems from the hot water they’re exposed to when they come through the Lower Snake River dams.

So we’re involved in an ongoing basis on that. Meanwhile, we’re also trying to keep waterways around here clean visibly and physically by doing river cleanups. And by engaging our local populace and taking stewardship of local rivers. So there’s a public outreach component to it as well. And we have a die-hard membership. We have almost like a 98 percent member retention rate. So once people find our work, they really like what we’re doing. They come out to the cleanups. They support us every year And we’re just really that’s one of the things we’re the most proud of not just the legal victories, but of the actual local engagement, um, and the retention of people who find us and then stick with [00:31:00] us. 

I think most Waterkeeper chapters would tell you it’s a choose your own adventure, but we find that that’s a great model for us to, you know, engage on the most dire issues that impact our basin. While also keeping people plugged in with their local waterway so that you’ve got people in the future who want to protect those areas and who value them for the benefits they still have because once you have, say you have quagga mussels choke out all the life in that section of river, you’ve just lost all the future fishermen and duck hunters and birders, whoever was engaging on that portion of the river.

Once that beneficial use is lost, you lose the river protectors for the future there. And so that’s one thing , we want to remain very cognizant of and really try to maintain. While we fight the big battles downstream and in our local watershed, the big polluters, while we take those on. We try to keep our head up and also engage on the smaller waterways and in the smaller communities to make sure that people are aware of the issues, keep an eye on their drinking water, keep an eye on where their kids are swimming, and then let us handle the [00:32:00] big lawsuits and the millions of pounds of manure that are going into the river every day because of these CAFOs.

Thomas Hynes: You got a lot on your plate. That’s incredible, but it’s been really great talking to you here today, Buck. I really appreciate, well, first of all, just you being here, but after speaking to you, I appreciate all that you’re doing. It sounds like a lot. It sounds like you really have your hands full, but you’ve got a great approach to it and you’ve got the great mindset and I hope at least half of those wishes on your wishlist come true because I think we’d all be better for it.

Buck Ryan: Half would be great. I appreciate your granting of half my wish list. 

Thomas Hynes: If it was up to me I give you everything you want, but 

Buck Ryan: It’s two more than I thought I’d get. So we can live with that. Thank you. 

I really appreciate you guys having me here today. It’s great. We get amazing support from the Alliance and it’s great to have the opportunity to share some of these issues that we face in Idaho and in the greater Pacific Northwest region aired on a national scale. So thank you for your interest and for being here today. 

Thomas Hynes: Thank you, Buck.