When I was a child, my mother took me on a “cruise” of the Charles River. What do I remember of it? The closer we got to Boston Harbor, the worse the smell. You could see the luminous blue/green oil slicks on the surface. Your stomach would churn from the sewage routinely dumped from the upstream slaughterhouses and factories. The water was mostly sickening slime and sludge.

Decades later, as editorial director of WCVB-TV, Channel 5, I remember standing on Carson Beach with a camera crew, shooting an editorial. It was a sunny spring day, the sky was blue, and there was a gentle breeze. Shot from the right angle, it would have made a lovely postcard. Looking down, however, the picture was different. Washed up on the beach was partially degraded litter, pieces of toilet paper, used condoms, tampons, iridescent matter of indeterminate origin with noxious smell.

It was the first of many Channel 5 editorials, especially in the 1980’s, calling for action to clean up the harbor. Boston Globe writer Renee Loth and numerous others in the media were consistently on the case. Once I got called on the carpet for opening an editorial with video of my colleague’s hand flushing a toilet and announcing the results would soon be worsening the contamination of Boston Harbor. Seems some viewers didn’t like the image as they were sitting down for dinner at 6:55 p.m. I rather thought it made the point.

The message was further driven home while I was on a UMass-Boston environmental studies boat and the crew were hauling up fish that had cancerous tumors from swimming in the contaminated water. On another occasion, Bruce Berman of Save the Harbor/Save the Bay took me out on his boat to show me luminescent liquid spewing from the outflow pipes discharging into the Harbor near Charlestown. The lessons were all around.

Decades of dumping had turned the precious resource of Boston Harbor into an open sewer. Was this the promise of the Clean Water Act passed ten years earlier? The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, led by Doug Foy, certainly didn’t think so and, in 1982, filed suit (along with the waterfront city of Quincy) to address the problem. Judge A. David Mazzone agreed with the plaintiffs and made a series of demands of the new Mass. Water Resources Authority, the first of his orders 40 years ago this week.

For years, the stand-up man who became “the sludge judge” monitored compliance over the $4.5 billion project, overseeing the creation of a new sewer treatment plant on Deer Island (I walked that while it was under construction), a new outfall pipe, the turning of sludge into fertilizer and the extended plan for improving district storm water and sewer pipes. When he died in 2004, he turned supervision over to U. S. District Judge Rick Stearns.

Today we have clean beaches, edible fish, pleasurable water sports, a magnificent tourist attraction and the creation of the new Seaport Area (I won’t comment on the architecture.) There are so many people to thank for joining the crusade, including members of the Boston City Council, the Audubon Society and other civic activists, area fishermen and neighborhood residents no longer willing to put up with the stench.

What are your memories of then and now? What impact will Donald Trump’s rollback of environmental regulations have on the water quality we wouldn’t be enjoying without the Clean Water Act? We owe it to ourselves and future generations to press our representatives in Congress to hold firm on our longstanding commitment to clean water and not take the brilliant accomplishment of Boston Harbor cleanup for granted.

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