Mapping America’s Disgusting Waterways

Northern California’s Russian River tends to be a pretty sedate blur of sandy beaches and redwood groves, so when Joe Whitworth and his team row a camera-studded green orb down a 60-mile stretch one morning, they catch some long stares. “You with the government?” asks one swimmer. Another points at the eye of the Google Trekker, essentially a raftborne version of the search giant’s Street View cars, and asks, “What’s your crystal ball for?” Whitworth’s modest answer: saving the U.S. water supply.

Whitworth is president of the Freshwater Trust, a 45-employee Portland (Ore.) nonprofit taking on the unenviable task of fixing America’s broken watershed. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies 79 percent of freshwater lakes, rivers, and streams as threatened or imperiled because of pollution, excess quantities of nitrogen or phosphorus, or water that’s warming too much for fish. The Freshwater Trust has joined with Google to take the first step toward a solution, using its advanced cameras to more quickly survey waterways.