Category: Opinion

The Delaware River, the Chesapeake Bay, and other flagship waterbodies make news headlines with stories of the long and costly struggles to restore their fish and other wildlife.

But while these high-profile efforts grind on, the real story of the Delaware River’s health hits closer to home.

Beneath the ice on small streams across Pennsylvania, thousands of species of fish, insects, snails, and mussels are waiting quiescently for spring, just as fishers, kayakers, and water lovers wait out the cold winter months, eager for spring.

Poor report card

Alarmingly, Pennsylvania’s recent river report card indicates that some of those streams are likely to wake up in the spring more degraded than last year. The tally of impaired streams and rivers in Pennsylvania grew by 852 miles since 2024 (longer than a round-trip drive from Philadelphia to Erie), while only 154 miles of streams (shorter than a round trip to Lancaster) were removed from that list.

Overall, our rivers are worse off than they were two years ago, and 37% of the state’s waterways remain impaired. If there were a hospital for polluted streams, five patients would have entered for every one patient discharged. And the larger the river and the broader the watershed, the bigger the challenge of bringing back fish and wildlife.

While the report isn’t uplifting, we are fortunate that the state Department of Environmental Protection produces a thorough and transparent analysis of the facts on where and why improvement and degradation have occurred. The report shows us that the key to faster success is focusing efforts around small headwater streams.

These streams, the ones our roads carry us over every day in our communities and that often go unnoticed, are where we find a trickle of hope: Watershed improvements lead to cleaner streams and healthier fish and wildlife populations. They are also the streams that can bring communities together to protect open space, strengthen zoning laws, and form partnerships to target local sources of pollution.

Restoring health

Usually, the science shows us that streams don’t need invasive repairs with backhoes and chain saws akin to a surgeon’s curette and bone saw; they need, like many people making New Year’s resolutions, to go on a diet — for streams, one that’s lower in pollution and higher in leaf litter.

Practically, this means aggressive reduction and treatment of stormwater runoff, eliminating sewer overflows, upgrading sewage treatment, preserving and planting forests, restoring the healthy agricultural soils that benefit farmers, and reducing the use of chemicals on our own properties.

We expect 2026 will bring news of the important progress being made to the Delaware River, as the Philadelphia Water Department will soon be required to meet new water quality standards. Cheer for the Delaware and other superstar rivers, but remember that progress starts at the source of pollution.

Therefore, in 2026, we hope to see a new focus on clustering pollution reductions and protections in smaller watersheds, where measurable improvements in fish and wildlife communities are faster, cheaper, and easier to achieve. That will require more DEP staff to make those measurements, more engaged citizens to champion local actions, and more science to guide the rehabilitation of our streams and watersheds.

Just as evidence-based medicine improves health outcomes and lowers costs, evidence-based restoration improves biological outcomes for our streams and rivers.

The list of potential pollutants is long, so research is needed, now more than ever, on how to restore fish and wildlife at the lowest cost.

Scott Ensign is the assistant director and a research scientist at Stroud Water Research Center. David Arscott is the executive director and a research scientist at the Stroud Center.

The first time the police arrested me, in 2011, I expected it. We were Occupy Philadelphia, we were doing a sit-in at the Comcast lobby. Of course, they led us out in cuffs.

The second time, I didn’t see it coming. Cops stormed the Occupy encampment, driving us into the street. They trapped us with barricades, making their subsequent dispersal orders a physical impossibility.

Then, they arrested us illegally for our supposed failure to comply, hauling us all to jail. The experience was shocking. Naively, I had thought that attempted compliance would spare us arrest that day.

My shock at the time seems quaint now. In the decade that followed, Philadelphia police at mass protests showed an increasing disregard for their supposed rules, the law, and our bodies.

During the 2018 Abolish ICE protests, they bruised us and destroyed our belongings. In 2020 — as we protested George Floyd’s murder — they tear-gassed nonviolent crowds, often also shooting at us with potentially lethal baton rounds.

Those 2020 marches were the last mass protest I felt able to take part in, not out of a sense of self-preservation, but because we had begun to try and start a family. There is no proving that the sudden, heavy bleeding I experienced immediately after the gassings was a miscarriage. No proving that my inability to conceive in the following seven months had any relation to the gas. I’ll never know. What I do know: There is ample evidence demonstrating these chemical weapons to be abortifacients and hormonal disruptors.

When we did finally manage conception, I feared too much for my pregnancy to attend mass protests and risk that gas again. I’d spent my entire adult life organizing and attending political demonstrations; it felt like a major part of my vocational identity had been stolen from me.

After giving birth in 2021, I knew from my Occupy years that even perfect compliance could not protect me from arrest and detention. I was breastfeeding, and my underweight infant routinely rejected offers of formula. I couldn’t risk the possibility of separation or a tainted milk supply.

Then another pregnancy, another birth, another child dependent on breast milk. Mass protest faded even farther into the rearview mirror.

As the second Trump administration implemented textbook fascist practices and dissenting protests became increasingly vital, I agonized about my political responsibilities, but once again stayed home. My children are so young, the youngest still nutritionally breastfeeding. I still don’t feel comfortable risking even a few days’ disappearance in jail, or tear gas-tainted milk supply.

As the previous week’s events made clear, birthing parents and primary caretakers — a population consisting mostly of women — are increasingly in a position in which we must make impossible decisions about exercising our right to protest.

Last Wednesday, in Minnesota, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot Renee Good in the face. Eyewitnesses report that Good — a mother who had just dropped her 6-year-old off at school — received conflicting orders from ICE agents. “Get out of here,” one agent reportedly told Good. When she attempted to comply, another agent fired three shots into her car, ending her life.

Let’s be clear: Even if Good had violated officer orders, there would be no excuse for this summary execution. Video clearly shows she posed no physical threat to any of the agents; there can be no justification for this apparent murder by agents of the state.

I highlight her compliance not to suggest that her life should have depended on it, but to emphasize the reality that neither whiteness nor obedience protects against violent state repression. This has always been true, but we have entered an era where agents of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE act with a brazen disregard for human life, most especially the lives of not only targeted immigrant minorities but also protesters decrying this Trumpian ethnic cleansing campaign.

These rogue agencies now treat constitutionally protected, nonviolent political speech as immediately punishable by violence, by chemical weapon, and even by death.

The risks of protest for birthing parents and primary caretakers of young children are disproportionately high. We must fear not just for our bodies, but for our pregnancies, and the continued physical and emotional safety of our kids.

Many of us who are politically active are increasingly forced to make impossible choices between the civic action this moment demands and our sense of responsibility to the vulnerable children who depend on us.

The image of Good’s blood on an airbag next to a glove compartment bursting with children’s stuffed animals is a stark reminder of the reverberating familial impact of a caretaking mother’s death, and the horrors this rogue presidential regime is only too happy to inflict on dissenters — especially dissenting women.

“Fucking bitch,” mutters one of the agents — very possibly the shooter — as he surveys the deadly wreckage. In their eyes, it seems, unruly women earn themselves an instant death sentence.

Whatever the Trump regime’s excuses, however, Renee Good acted legally and on principle. She chose to stand up to the fascists, to stand up for her neighbors. Her civic virtue cost her her life, and cost her child a mother.

Illegal, violent repression of political opposition chills all political opposition speech, of course. When we are responsible for the care of the very young or other extremely vulnerable people, however, the effect compounds. Caretakers fear not just for our lives and freedom, but for how deeply and immediately our children might suffer in our absence. We stay home from the protests we might otherwise attend (and are blamed for our “irresponsibility” when we don’t).

As a result, more and more childbearing-age women find ourselves having to weigh especially horrific possibilities when considering participation in the critically important speech that is a public political demonstration. And as the tragic killing of Good shows, these fears are not unfounded.

The Trump regime, meanwhile, has repeatedly affirmed this killing as justified. Their message to politically active mothers like me is clear: Stay home, or your children will suffer the consequences. It is a gendered threat, and they know it.

At the same time, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem overplayed their hand. Their draconian approach has backfired, emboldening a wide swath of vulnerable people to take to the streets and militantly resist ICE occupation.

Fox News now complains of “wine moms” using “antifa tactics.” A Native American mother at home with her baby shelters an immigrant DoorDasher from kidnappers. Somali aunties take to the streets of Minneapolis to hand out sambusas to protesters. DHS weakly complains about parents taking their children along to marches. Moms in Minnesota are guarding their kids’ schools from ICE and organizing mutual aid efforts, like grocery delivery to immigrant families.

Where the Trump regime sought to frighten a populace into cowering submission, they have succeeded in radicalizing whole communities — even and especially the vulnerable — into militant action. They sought to instill fear; they have instead inspired righteous fury.

The women they tried to banish to the kitchen have taken to the streets and to other acts of resistance, joining a host of vulnerable people with every reasonable excuse to avoid the fray.

“Hope has two daughters,” wrote St. Augustine of Hippo. “Their names are Anger and Courage.”

Hope is a mother, it seems. And she is introducing DHS to her kids.

Gwen Snyder is a professional organizer and longtime Philadelphia activist.