Fisherman Learns New Language to Fight Pollution : Environment: With a donated boat and an eighth-grade education, a third-generation fisherman tries to stem the decline of the waters that sustain him. Terry Backer, the first Long Island Soundkeeper, considers his work a legacy to his children.

As the third generation of his family to earn a living from the rich shellfish beds of Long Island Sound, Terry Backer grew up well-versed in the language of the sea.

As spoken by his father and grandfather, it was an ancient language, as timeless and salty as the currents and tides.

In Backer’s lifetime, that has changed. New words--petroleum hydrocarbons, bacterial effluvium, polychlorinated biphenyls--have seeped into the fisherman’s vocabulary.

“As a child,” said the 36-year-old Backer, “I would yell at people not to throw things in the water. I’ve been hollering at my dad since I was 8 years old for throwing cigarette butts or soda cans overboard. It just struck me that they didn’t belong.

“Dad would say, ‘You can’t compare a soda can to 300 million pounds of sewage.’ The hell you can’t. It’s the exact same philosophy at work.”

If a man takes offense at a stray cigarette butt, how does he feel about PCBs in his bluefish? If he finds floating soda cans an affront, how does he cope with petroleum hydrocarbons?

Terry Backer has coped by learning a new language, peppered with such terms as “fax machine,” “environmental litigation” and “regulatory process.”

The time once spent fishing for oysters and pulling lobster traps is now given to tracking polluters and battling developers. Evenings once devoted to family are taken up with a steady agenda of speaking engagements at civic clubs.

‘The Family Farm’

Terry Backer, Long Island Sound fisherman, has become Terry Backer, Long Island Soundkeeper, an officious title for a $400-a-week job that carries no badge, no benefits and no illusions.

“I’m not naive enough to think that anything I do will have any immediate effect. It’s a long-term thing. I don’t think I can change the world. But I do need to start. We’re talking about the family farm.”

The “farm” is 1,300 square miles of water rimmed by 570 miles of coastline, home to 5 million people.

“The population is constantly shifting to get closer to the shoreline,” said Michael Ludwig, a Connecticut-based ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Easily between 300 and 500 projects a year are proposed for Long Island Sound. Even in this glutted market, it’s still the most desirable real estate in the world.”

The man who keeps watch has an eighth-grade education, a bad back, a wife, two young sons and a sense of urgency. He also has “hands-on, feet-wet experience, and an intimate knowledge of Long Island Sound,” neither of which can be found in a textbook. “Maybe the heart is more what this job needs than the book,” Backer said.

Maybe so, agreed the directors of the nonprofit Long Island Soundkeepers Fund, who chose him over college-educated applicants.

“He knows more about the water than most marine biologists we deal with,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., clinical professor at Pace University School of Law and supervising attorney for the Hudson River Fishermen’s Assn.

“Terry knows when there’s stuff missing. He has seen species disappear, acres of yield grass, smelt. He can say there used to be blue crabs here but there aren’t anymore. He has an institutional memory that goes back three generations.”

Unlike many fishermen, who have accepted the sound’s decline and taken part-time jobs to supplement their income, “Terry’s never accepted it,” Kennedy said. “He feels for the resource. He loves it. And he’s decided to make a stand and fight for it.”

Making a stand often means making enemies. Backer has been called everything from extortionist to ambulance-chaser by elected officials throughout the region.

“He goes into town board meetings where everybody hates him, the wealthiest people in these towns will be screaming at him, and he’ll state his arguments and fight with them,” Kennedy said.

“Developers hate him because one of the big battles is against shoreline development that requires marinas; marinas require dredging, which Terry opposes. Municipalities hate him because he’s sued every municipality from New Haven to New York.”

The suits were brought during his tenure as president of the Connecticut Coastal Fishermen’s Assn., a group he co-founded to help fishermen deal with regulatory agencies and polluters.

The Soundkeepers Fund was established with proceeds from the settlement of an association lawsuit against Norwalk in 1986, when local oyster beds were closed due to sewage contamination.

Publicity about contaminated shellfish beds “is a double-edged sword,” said Stonington fisherman Joe Gilbert. “On the one hand, we need municipal and federal agencies to take note.”

On the other hand, he said, such publicity causes sales to drop immediately, even though “pollution in one place doesn’t mean contaminated shellfish all up and down the coast.”

Nonetheless, Gilbert approves of Backer’s work. “Terry’s always working to improve the lot of fishermen. He goes to a lot of meetings, he speaks up, and he speaks for a lot of people.”

A Legacy

Though he still manages to go oyster fishing, Backer’s campaign on behalf of the sound is a seven-day-a-week job. “It’s the house I don’t own, the novel I didn’t write. It’s the legacy I will leave my children.”

He is thickset and stocky, with Popeye biceps, unanchored shirttail and a face that evokes a Connecticut autumn: sky-blue eyes, wind-chapped skin and a chin full of reddish-gold scrub. A tiny gold anchor pierces one earlobe, and a faded denim cap stained with fish blood moors his hair.

A self-described “walking contradiction,” he’s a smoker who worries about air quality; a fisherman who frequents a seafood restaurant, then orders hot dogs for lunch.

He’s also a pollution fighter who objects to being called an environmentalist, “a word that conjures up images of kooks in canoes, tree-huggers, liberals.”

He prefers “fisherman,” and when asked why, cites King James: “My God, it’s a noble trade! It was the apostles’ own calling.”

“There is something noble about being a fisherman, about producing food for people to eat,” Backer said.

However, it was restlessness, not nobility, that led him to choose his father’s lobster boat over a high-school education. He also worked at a gas station, then set off at 16 to see the world.

“I picked crops in California, I logged in Oregon. To give you an idea of the politicizing of Terry Backer, I once owned a T-shirt that said, ‘Sierra Club: Kiss My Ax.’ There is some confusion in society about just what natural resources are for.”

The T-shirt is long gone, as is any confusion on its owner’s part. “The Earth is for everyone,” Backer said.

“I’m not against progress. But if progress means water you can’t drink, plants you can’t grow, fish you can’t eat and air you can’t breathe, we need to redefine progress.”

His effort on behalf of the sound began in earnest after a fishing trip to Alaska in the early ‘70s. “It was very beautiful--as pristine as you can get. Then I came back here to work with my father and one day, while looking over the side of the boat, I saw that the place had really gone downhill. There were rafts of human sewage floating downriver.

“Each generation leaves less behind. My grandfather didn’t know it could all be consumed, that it could be possible to dig out all the marshes. How we got here is ignorance. How we stay here is arrogance.”

Backer’s credentials as a fisherman help buttress his argument. “He’s not an ivory-tower environmentalist,” Kennedy said. “He can be much more persuasive because he’s able to say, ‘I’ve got a family that may go hungry because you are discharging this stuff into Long Island Sound and I want you to stop.’ Or, ‘Because you are dredging this shoal for your pleasure boat, I’m going to lose income this year.’ ”

“The idea that environmentalists take jobs away from people is still very prevalent,” Backer said. “We’ve become supermarketized. Clean water and the first 6 inches of soil are what keep us all going.

“People say that you can’t compare worms and clams with people. What I’m trying to tell them is that when the worms and the clams go, we are not far behind.”

He uses a donated 19-foot powerboat to look for things that don’t belong: dead fish, raw sewage, detergent foam, spewing pipes. The boat is small for a reason. “Most of the problems are right around the edges,” in shallow water. With 86 sewage-treatment plants all emptying into the sound, there’s always something to find.

On this particular Sunday--”Sundays are good days to catch people doing things they shouldn’t be doing”--he finds a solvent leaving a sheen on the surface of the Norwalk River.

Backer frowns at the sight of a hen mallard dipping her bill into a tiny oil slick, then follows the trail until the river narrows, forcing him to turn back. He’ll cover the rest of the distance on foot.

“When I find something in the water, that’s when the real work begins.” Tracking the culprit could take weeks. Much of the work is done in the office, the second floor of an aging clapboard house overlooking an inlet.

A hand-lettered sign over the door says “War Room.”

“It’s considered good form for people involved in causes to say things like, ‘There are no enemies here,’ ” Backer said. “But there is an enemy. The enemy is people, companies, municipalities. Whoever puts that dollar ahead of the environment that’s going to sustain my kids, you’re my enemy.”

Far more battles take place in the hearing room than the courtroom. “Every problem doesn’t need to be addressed with a lawsuit,” Backer said. “If I can go to a community and talk to people, write letters, or show up and do interviews with the local newspapers, a lot of times that’s all it takes to get people thinking differently.

“Government works best when people participate. Without citizen input, the guys in the $800 suits are going to get what they want for the people they work for.”

Though the battles continue, Backer believes he and the sound already have won the war. “What we’ve won is an awareness around the area that someone is here, and someone is watching.”