Uncharted Waters
Recovered from decades of industrial waste dumping, one river in the nation’s capital is again threatened—this time by federal budget cuts.
“It’s such a different sight than what people expect of the Anacostia River,” says Trey Sherard.
The riverkeeper slowly pulls his boat up to the underpass of the Anacostia Railroad Bridge, collapses the boat canopy, and wryly asks if anyone has read The Chronicles of Narnia. Sherard is met with a few yeses and some nos, then says we are about to enter the Anacostia River version of the wardrobe that transports to a magical land.
Before us are sunbathing turtles, an osprey nest, and two miles of undeveloped waterfront. The Anacostia River—known to many in Washington, D.C., as a littered and polluted urban waterway —seemingly has a natural beauty to rival rivers anywhere in the United States. Lush green woodlands slope into muddy riverbanks. Wetland grasses sway in the breeze, and the sun glistens off the current.
“This section of river here,” says Sherard, “is what we call the epicenter of environmental racism on this river, which is saying a lot because the whole river has often been defined in terms of environmental injustice.”
Along the river’s east bank are five historically Black Washington communities: Mayfair, River Terrace, Kenilworth, Parkside, and Eastland Gardens, all boxed in between the river, Kenilworth Park, and the Anacostia Freeway. For decades, these communities have dealt with disinvestment, industrial pollution, and the waste and litter carried by the neglected river. Swimming in the Anacostia was deemed unsafe and made illegal in 1971. The communities surrounding the river have been vocal about these problems since the area was first developed.
“It’s not for lack of advocacy by the community, [that the river was neglected],” says Sherard, “but for lack of their message being received by someone held accountable.”
At this point in the tour, the boat is located squarely inside D.C., but from the bow, it looks like you’re out in the country. The juxtaposition of the rich greenery from the U.S. National Arboretum and Kenilworth Park with the history of environmental racism of the area is staggering. Sherard, who leads this boat tour as part of his work with the organization Anacostia Riverkeeper, says that the contrast is useful for helping people understand what’s happened here and getting them engaged.
“[The river is] this incredible asset and opportunity, even despite all of the abuse that we’ve given to it,” he says.
The eight-and-a-half mile Anacostia River is short, but has a long history of supporting human life. The largest of three D.C.-area Native American villages, Nacotchtank, was located along the river, which was called anaquash, meaning “village trading center.” Historians believe Native Americans lived on the river for 10,000 years before being pushed out by European colonialization. Settlers arriving in the early seventeenth century found a river teeming with shad, herring, and perch, and in places it was forty feet deep, leaving plenty of room for large vessels to navigate the waterway.
The District’s population boomed during and after the Civil War as newly freed enslaved people moved north and Union soldiers garrisoned there. Over time, silt filled the river bottom from increased runoff, and large ships could no longer navigate through the waters. Its usefulness as a waterway for shipping ended, and many industries treated the river as a waste disposal site.
Sewage has proven to be a perennial problem for the Anacostia River. A significant portion of the capital’s sewer system was built before 1900 and is a combined sewer system, which means stormwater and sewage are mixed. This doesn’t cause problems when conditions are stable, but during heavy rainfalls, the system can overflow into nearby waterways, including the Anacostia. These events can cause bacteria levels to spike to unhealthy amounts, giving rise to waterborne illness. As humans continue to drive climate change by rapidly burning fossil fuels, D.C. is seeing more intense rainstorms. The Anacostia River watershed, the area that drains into the main branch of the river, covers 176 square miles of highly urbanized geography. Stormwater, sewage, sediment, and trash all flow into the river, creating a concentrated mix of harmful debris.
“You can associate the conditions and health of the river to conditions and health of the areas that border it, and that includes the people who inhabit those areas,” says Dennis Chestnut, a lifelong Washingtonian and resident of Ward 7. “When discussing environmental justice on the Anacostia River, you have to include and focus as much on the communities that border the river.”
Chestnut is a master carpenter and vocational educator by profession, and is also a national river hero and environmental activist with a palpable enthusiasm. “The river really got me very interested in science and made me appreciate the outdoors,” he says. His relationship to the river is lifelong, and he has made it a personal goal to help others build one as well.
“As a child, it was like an ocean to me,” Chestnut says. In the 1950s and 1960s—before it was outlawed—he learned to swim in the Anacostia and in a tributary near his childhood home. Today that tributary, a stream called Watts Branch, is mostly captured in concrete channels and culverts. For Chestnut and his family, it was like a personal beach, and since it was an inlet, it was safer to swim.
“The times that we were in, the reason we were swimming in the stream and in the river was because Washington, D.C., was legally segregated,” says Chestnut. “The closest swimming pool was in a white community and it was segregated. We couldn’t go to that pool. But we had the river.”
Chestnut emphasizes that the environmental burdens on the Anacostia River and the communities to its east have not been accidental. He points out that railroad tracks crisscross Ward 7, highway 295 cuts through the middle of the community, and the riverside Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco) plant burned coal and dumped waste in the river for decades, alongside many other polluting industries.
Watts Branch flows through Kenilworth Park, which was Kenilworth Dump and Landfill for nearly three decades. The site received municipal waste from the capital, burned trash openly, and received ashes from nearby incinerators, which leached into the river. The dump exposed the nearby community and river to smoke and toxic chemicals. It was one of the few open areas in the communities east of the river, and Chestnut remembers playing at the dump with his friends. In 1968, seven-year-old Kelvin Tyrone Mock burned to death while playing on the trash when winds shifted and engulfed the child in flames. The following day, the mayor ordered open-burning at the dump to stop, but municipal trash continued to fill the site until 1970.
“All of those things that we would consider negative impact kinds of things—like the railroad tracks, the freeway, the power plant, the landfill—were located on this side of the city primarily because this was the side where the people of color and poor people lived,” says Chestnut. “This community has been resilient for a long time, having to put up with all of those things.”
Earth Conservation Corps (ECC) a youth-driven environmental action organization that works to restore the Anacostia River, has also made enormous strides in helping communities reclaim the river through cleanups and youth programs, but there is much more to be done.
“The perception of the Anacostia [to most in Generation Z] right now is still, ‘Nah, it’s dirty, don’t touch it,’ ” says Sonora Phillips, director of programs and partnerships at ECC.
Yet, she adds, “Young people are powerful. Getting young people involved in the environment and allowing them to see they can make a difference . . . that’s huge.”
Phillips helps students care for raptors; maintain Turtle Beach, one of the last few remaining wetlands along the Anacostia River; and learn about the power of storytelling and environmental education through ECC’s Youth Media Arts program.
The ECC program works with youth from many different backgrounds, including students coming from the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.
“These are youth who are often counted out, and [now] they’re doing conservation work,” Phillips says. “It’s amazing; I never thought the environment would be the thing that would take young people out of their current [difficult] environment, and it is.”
Washington, D.C., has been in a budget crisis for the better part of 2025. The problems started in March when the House of Representatives passed a federal government funding bill that would force the D.C. Council to revert to its 2024 budget parameters. This move left a $1.1 billion gap in a previously balanced budget midway through the financial year. Months later, a fix for the budget has stalled out at the hands of ultraconservatives, with their insistence on more limits on voting rights and abortion. While city officials have added some money back to the budget, many cuts have been made to plug the enormous hole.
The budget crisis has resulted in the termination of funding that supported the free educational Anacostia Riverkeeper boat tours. There are also now no funds for the organization to monitor water quality, or to maintain trash traps that capture floating debris in the water.
“We’re coming to an inflection point now,” says Sherard. “We need to keep moving forward and not risk losing ground as we lose investment.”
Under the Trump Administration, the nonprofit landscape has entered uncharted waters with organizations facing the possibility of losing government funding or their tax-exempt status if they are at odds with the White House. For organizations that rely on government grants, like Anacostia Riverkeeper, this can be a devastating blow to operations. Sherard says the administration is relentlessly attacking environmental initiatives and organizations.
“Philanthropy largely backed out of this watershed a little while back after it got it from ‘worst’ to ‘OK,’ ” says Sherard. Anacostia Riverkeeper has seen a small uptick in philanthropic donations, but not enough to cover foundational needs. “We hope that big philanthropy will step in while clearly the government is unable to do so, but we don’t know, and that uncertainty is a big stressor.”
“The river is this beautiful green and blue way through the middle of Northeast and Southeast D.C.,” he adds. “Someone who hasn’t seen it firsthand can’t really truly understand that.”
While political shifts have disrupted Anacostia Riverkeeper, momentum continues forward through new and old partnerships, with a swim event still set as a long-term goal. Since the swimming ban in 1971, the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment amended the rules in 2018 to permit single-day swim events if certain healthy conditions are met. There is no date on the calendar for a 2025 swim event, as the permitting process can take months, but Anacostia Riverkeeper is hoping to host an event in 2026.
Chestnut is excited by the prospect.
“I still have the same attachment to the river as I had as a child, and I hope to be able to swim in it again,” he says with a big smile. “This community, full of natural resources, has done a lot for me and I just feel so very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be here and still be here.”
Despite the recent financial setbacks and a grim political landscape, Chestnut is heartened by the efforts of his community in Ward 7 to restore the river.
“I feel good about where I see things,” Chestnut says. “If we keep going in this direction, and get future generations involved, it’s going to be the kind of river we should have in the nation’s capital.”
This story was produced with support from the Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative at Wake Forest University.
Paul Gordon is an environmental journalist and urban forester. His pieces appear in The Nation, Grist, Sierra magazine, Belt Magazine, and In These Times. He has worked for the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, National Audubon Society.
Read more by Paul Gordon
January 2, 2026
5:30 PM
