Litigi-tastic Enviros Seek to Sue the Sound Clean

There's an interesting piece in the P-I today on the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, a citizens' group that's come up with an apparently effective way of decreasing pollution going into Puget Sound: suing the hell out of polluters.

Utilizing a clause in the Clean Water Act which permits citizens to sue to enforce the provisions of the act, the Soundkeepers have reportedly become the most litigious group of their kind in the country, filing suit against 60 companies in the last two and a half years.

In a burst of litigation over the past 2 1/2 years, the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance has done battle with about 60 food processors, factories, recyclers, timber yards, local governments, and others. Most are violating requirements to control runoff from Western Washington's relentless rains that carry heavy metals and other gunk into Puget Sound and its tributaries.

And the best part? The Department of Ecology, the state agency officially responsible for enforcing the Clean Water Act, is all for it.

"We think (the suits) are a good thing," Kelly Susewind of the department's water resources team tells the P-I. "We have limited resources, and there's more we could do, but unfortunately, there is plenty of work to go around."

So while suing the planet green may seem...inefficient, kudos to the novel approach. One of our biggest concerns about the incoming Obama administration's conciliatory approach to the business community on environmental issues is that without any real power, how are environmentalists actually supposed to get the business community to work with them collaboratively, rather than just running roughshod over well-intentioned activists?