Rupert Cutler: Perennial Friend of the Roanoke River
Star City Council appointed Dr. Rupert Cutler to replace outgoing City Council member Alvin Nash, who returned to the private sector earlier this year. “I have a lot of resignation letters going out in the next few days,” joked Cutler, who serves on several boards with interests possibly in conflict with his work on Council, including the Western Virginia Water Authority which supplies water to the Star City. He and I sat in Mill Mountain Coffee on Campbell Avenue near the Market Building in downtown Roanoke talking about the current threats to the Roanoke River.
Dr. Rupert Cutler has been a voice for the environment for almost five decades. In fact, Dr. Cutler was instrumental in the first Earth Day celebration on the campus of the University of Michigan in April of 1970. “Those were days of the body-on-the-line environmental movement,” remembers Cutler. “Those were the days of Senator Nelson and environmental ‘teach-ins’ based on the model of the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960’s.”
Cutler is not sheepish about his passion for the environment–a passion and zeal that have cost him politically from time to time. For example, following his distinguished stint as President Carter’s Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, Cutler was poised to be selected as the head of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources. This was in 1980.
Ten years earlier, Cutler worked with an environmental activist group that vehemently and very publicly opposed the construction of a nuclear power plant in Michigan. One of the commissioners, in the final stages of Cutler’s appointment, recalled Cutler’s effort to stymie the plant and blackballed him, labeling him an “environmental extremist.” Now, at 73, Cutler wears the badge with honor, and even then, the commissioner’s ill opinion of his youthful zeal didn’t stop Cutler for long. Cutler quickly moved to New York to become a senior vice president of the National Audubon Society.
While Cutler is serious about the problems currently facing the Roanoke River Watershed, he recalls that before the first water treatment facility in the Valley came online in the 1950’s little effort was made to treat sewage, which ran straight into the River. “We’ve made a lot of progress,” claims the soon-to-retire chair of the Board of Directors for the Western Virginia Water Authority–an entity created in reaction to the lack of a comprehensive water quality plan.
The first break in Cutler’s career as an environmental journalist came in Richmond when he served as the associate director of the former Virginia Game Commission’s publication Virginia Wildlife Magazine in 1958. “At that time, I got a $500 a year raise from my previous job, I was making a whopping $4500 a year back then.”
One of Cutler’s personally fulfilling accomplishments was his work as the lead lobbyist for The Wilderness Society on the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The definitions of “wild” and “scenic” were particularly thorny issues recounts Cutler. The definitions eventually came out something like this:
To be included in the System, a wild, scenic or recreational river area must be a free-flowing stream and the related adjacent land area must possess scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, cultural or other similar values. Every wild, scenic or recreational river in its free-flowing condition must be considered eligible for inclusion in the System and, if included, must be classified, designated and administered as a wild, scenic or a recreational river area. Wild river areas are rivers or sections of rivers that are free of impoundments and generally inaccessible except by trail, with watersheds or shorelines essentially primitive and waters unpolluted. These represent vestiges of primitive America. Scenic river areas are rivers or sections of rivers that are free of impoundments, with shorelines or watersheds still largely primitive and shorelines largely undeveloped, but accessible in places by roads.
Cutler still has one of the ceremonial pens used by President Lyndon Johnson to sign the WSRA in 1968.
While serving as the assistant executive director of The Wilderness Society in 1969, Cutler helped draft and testified in support for the National Environmental Policy Act–the legislation which provided for environmental impact statements crucial to determining how human efforts cause environmental challenges.
hb: Which threats have the greatest consequences for the health of the Roanoke River?
CUTLER: The Roanoke River is not just a single conduit that runs through the Valley and into Smith Mountain Lake. We need to view the threats to the River in terms of threats to an entire watershed. Montgomery County, Floyd County, Roanoke County, Roanoke City, Salem City and other governmental bodies must coordinate if we are truly looking at the problems from a watershed perspective.
hb: What efforts have been made to that end?
CUTLER: There have been many attempts to plan . . . to put together comprehensive plans but they haven’t been very successful on the whole.
hb: Why is that?
CUTLER: Well . . . to tell you the truth, there is a failure to communicate between Montgomery County, the New River Valley and the Roanoke Valley. Montgomery County is closer to the New River planning region than ours. The Board of Supervisors of Montgomery County is made up of farmers who are skeptical of the efforts of Salem in Roanoke County and the city of Roanoke. They are not inclined to participate in regional watershed protection efforts.
hb: Any exceptions?
CUTLER: The folks in the Catawba area of Roanoke County have been particularly cooperative and enthusiastic about protecting the river . . . you know the area . . . the Catawba Valley and Catawba Mountain area between Roanoke and Craig County . . . Dragon’s Tooth and McAfee Knob . . . that area . . . it’s beautiful in there and they know it and want to preserve it.
hb: So that is the administrative, bureaucratic challenge . . .
CUTLER: Right . . . the non-point source pollution threats are the greatest . . . for direct pollutants, the DEQ has to follow section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act to establish what the EPA calls TMDL or total maximum daily loads of pollution that a threatened river like the Roanoke River can take.
hb: And for non-point source?
CUTLER: An impaired or threatened river like the Roanoke River that makes the 303(d) list has a TMDL established that includes the total of both point source and non-point source pollution but there are hazards to the river difficult to measure like livestock trampling the banks of the River, eating the vegetation . . . their feces winds up in River. We’ve been able to encourage farmers to put up fences along the river to keep their livestock out and we’ve had some positive responses and cooperation over the years.
Part Two . . . coming soon . . .