Discussion questions

Hudson Riverkeepers

John Cronin This river belongs to the people who live here and I do not mean that philosophically, I mean that quite literally.  This water belongs to the public.  One of the things of the Riverkeeper Program does, one of the things we do best is we enforce the law.  We are citizens enforcing the law.  Under the Clean Water Act, citizens have the right to prosecute polluters who are violating the Clean Water Act if the government is not already prosecuting them.

We do not have a unique authority to do that, we can do that because we are citizens.

Robert H. Boyle And he said to me, “Listen, you wise guy,” he said, “You keep this up, I will have you in front of the grand jury.”  I said, “I will be there in 20 minutes, can I bring my friends?  I would love to testify in front of the grand jury.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. These are crimes.  They are really people who should have gone to jail and nobody ended up going to jail because it is so unusual for a prosecutor to actually prosecute environmental crime in this country.

John Cronin There was a whole—two decades where Hudson River shad, which is the most delicious of the Hudson River fish in my opinion, had a reputation for tasting like diesel fuel.  So, the Hudson has had rough times.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is the first time that I had been back to this creek since then.  It has been over a decade since I have been here and I am just curious to see what kind of fish are now living in the creek and in the mouth of the creek at its confluence with the Hudson River.

John Cronin They used to say, “Oh!  This is going to be like David and Goliath.  This is going to be like St. George and the Dragon.  This is going to be like Robinhood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.”  And this is the long list of things was going like, and of course the Exxon case proved him right.  That is exactly what it was like.

Walter Cronkite This is Walter Cronkite reporting from the Hudson River, north of Manhattan near the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. On January 23, 1966, CBS news broadcast the documentary anchored by Walter Cronkite entitled The Majestic Polluted Hudson.

Featured in the documentary was Robert F. Kennedy who had been elected senator of New York just 14 months earlier.

Walter Cronkite What are the economic considerations that make it impossible to order the cleaning up of the river?

Robert F. Kennedy One industry does not want to do it because it easier to discharge into the Hudson River than to provide for a sewage disposal system.  The federal government just has not done anything. To travel up this magnificent river with tremendous potential that it has and see the amount of pollution that has taken place—dead fish floating on the surface, the shores just junkyards for used automobiles or beer cans, completely the shore line, completely destroyed, places where 20 years ago, our children and grown-ups used to swim, now impossible, filled with disease and the fishermen put out of business.  This great potential that we have here in the state for all of our citizens and really such a landmark throughout the United States has been completely destroyed.

I do not think we have the right to do so and I think that we should do something about it.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I am Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  For the last 14 years, I have been the Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper.  Over the next hour, we will tell you how concerned citizens beginning with the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association did do something about it as my father had urged.  It is the story of what two generations of New Yorkers have accomplished in a long and difficult fight, but it is also the story of the fight to clean up every river, bay and sound and harbor all across the United States.

Terry Backer If tomorrow, you came to me and said, “Terry, I am giving you a choice, you give up your career as a legislator,” I have been in the Legislature for seven years now, “or you give up Sound Keeper, I would give up being a legislator.”  My first love is Long Island Sound.  I had the love, but I did not have tools or the skill sets and Cronin had very much helped teach me those tools, those skill sets along with Bobby and now, I try to pass some on to everybody we deal with.

Walter Cronkite A river and the life it sustains can stand a lot of mistreatment, but there are limits.  The Hudson receives its first massive dose of waste at Glens Falls.  There, the majestic Hudson becomes the polluted Hudson.  Forty-three percent of all the sewage generated by the four and a quarter million people who live between Troy and New York is dumped untreated into the Hudson.  Many of the fish that survive are inedible.

New York City alone bequeaths 400 million gallons of raw sewage daily into the defenseless river.

John Cronin By the mid 1960s, decades of sewage industrial waste being dumped into the Hudson River had brought the river, had brought Old Father Hudson into his knees, and the river had bottomed out.

Robert H. Boyle 1961, 1962, 1963—there was nothing on the Hudson.  The Hudson was the butt of Johnny Carson’s jokes, or Jack Par’s jokes on late night television.  I came back here, I had been a Time correspondent in San Francisco, I came back here in 1960 and I started exploring the Hudson.  I remember going into the State Conservation Department office and asking the biologist there, “What fish are found where the Croton River flows into the Hudson?”  And they said, “Well, we do not know, but if you find out, will you tell us?”

The river was neglected.  It was considered a dump.  I remember one scientific society put out a map of the rivers of the East Coast of the United States and the Hudson was colored black and I said, "For what reason?" and they said, "Well, it has been decided that this would be an industrial river."  On whose authority?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  In 1966, I mean, from an environmental point of view, the country really was a disaster and I remember what it was like before Earth Day.  I remember the Cuyahoga River burning.  I remember that we could not swim in the Potomac when I was little.  I remember what Washington D.C. smelled like, which was not an industrial city, but going into Washington, your eyes burned.  Going into Georgetown, there was a cement factory there that had plumes of black smoke pouring out of the stacks.

When I was boy, I could go down to Washington D.C. to see my uncle in the White House when I was nine years old and I was always interested in hawks and falcons from when I was little and I could look up in the old Post Office building in Washington D.C. and there was a pair of eastern peregrines which is the most beautiful predatory bird we had in this country—salmon pink that flew 200 miles an hour and I could watch them come down Pennsylvania Avenue at those speeds, pick pigeons out of the air over the head, 40 foot over the heads of the pedestrians and fly back to the Post Office and to me, seeing something like that was more thrilling than visiting my uncle at the White House.

But my children will never see that because that bird is extinct today.  It went extinct in 1963 from DDT poisoning.

Bob Gabrielson I was primarily a shad fisherman—very effective, I did very well with shad, probably more than anybody in New York State.  I have been here a long time.  I started fishing here when I was 12 years old and in the 60s, it was horrible.  I used to catch a fish that was not right!

I found fish that had eyes that looked like a moon was inside their pupil, a moon!  That was all of this pollution from these people.  I could see the time when—I guess they had a water screen over in General Motors across the river and they paint cars.

Robert H. Boyle GM was painting blue trucks, the river would be blue; red trucks, the river would be red etcetera.

Bob Gabrielson We would be out there fishing, and all of a sudden, here comes green!  The next day, they are painting blue and here comes blue!  And then the fish, if you did not catch it and the fish came up, the stripers came up to this—man, we had a bad reputation of kerosene-flavored fish into the market.

John Conin The river was still biologically productive to a certain degree.  It was not a dead river, but it was not living well, and so by the mid 1960s, not only did the Hudson have a reputation for being sort of the premier example of the polluted industrial river, but also started becoming a symbol, a national symbol of it is time to do something about water pollution in this country. And at the same time, small group of people on the Hudson—fishermen, decided, “We have had enough!”  Even if the law does not stand behind us, even if we have no Federal State Laws that say that the Anaconda Company cannot dump its copper into the Hudson River, there is something we must be able to do about it and we are going to fight back whatever the cost.

Robert H. Boyle  So I got together with some other people, a friend of mine who was a biologist, people I knew who cared about the river—there were just a handful of us who used to fish and people felt we were nuts.  What do you mean there is fish in the river?  There were!  But there were problems in the river.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. These were people who were not radicals.  Their patriotism was rooted in the bedrock of this country, and yet they began talking that night about violence.  Somebody suggested that they drop a match onto the discharge from the Penn Central pipes, somebody—and blow it up.  Somebody else said they should jam a mattress up the pipe.  Another person said that they should float a raft of dynamite into the End Point power plant intake which was at that point killing upwards of a million fish a day and taking food out of their families mouthes and at that point, Bob Boyle stood up and Bob Boyle was a writer for Sports Illustrated who had been an outdoor writer, who has now been there I think 45 years. He had, two years before, researched an article about the Hudson River for Sports Illustrated and in researching it, he came across two statues, the 1888 Refuse Act and the 1889 Rivers and Harbors Act, and these statutes made it illegal to pollute the waters of the United States and that it provided a high penalty if you got caught polluting.

But not only that, there was a bounty provision that said that anybody who turned in a polluter, got to keep half the fine and he read them.  He read them the statutes that night and he said, “We should not be talking about breaking the law, we should be talking about enforcing it.” And at the end of that evening, they resolved that they would start this group, the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, and that they were going to track down and prosecute every polluter on the Hudson River.

Robert H. Boyle And we decided to report the violations to the law to the United States attorney.  The very first target that we chose was an oil pipe coming from the New York Central Yards at Harmon, right at the mouth of the Croton River where it emptied into the Hudson.

Everyday, this oil would vomit in.  Ducks drowned there.  You could see oil everywhere.  The pipe had the date, 1929 on it.  I remember calling a US attorney in the southern district, —Reams something was his name—and he said to me, “Listen, you wise guy,” he said, “You keep this up,” he said, “I will have you in front of the grand jury,” I said, “I will be there in 20 minutes.  Can I bring my friends?  I would love to testify in front of the grand jury.”  We finally got $2,000.00 from that and that set precedent. It was the first time the law had ever been enforced in the United States.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  And then they went after Standard Brands and Ciba-Geigy and Tuck Tate.  In 1971, they got the highest penalty ever against a polluter in U.S. history, $200,000.00 against Anaconda Wire and Copper in Hastings, New York, and they used the money from those penalties ultimately to build a boat and patrol the river.

John Cronin  Those fishermen tapped in to the early—at that time, almost radical sentiments of the blossoming environmental movement, what was growing out of Rachel—what Rachel Carson had started.  By the time, Earth Day 1970 rolled around, those people were in full force.  They had already brought Penn Central Railroad to its knees, they had brought Anaconda Copper to its knees right here on the Hudson River and they had started to prove that a handful of individuals can make not just an enormous difference, but probably changed the course of this river and its future.

So, it is what the fishermen saw.  They were—and the reason it is what the fishermen saw is because you have to understand that in the mid 1960s, people had started to turn their back on this river.  People were not flocking down here to be near the water in the mid 1960s, the only people who were on the water in the 1960s were fishermen and they decided to do something about it and they formed the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association which eventually formed the Riverkeeper Program.

Robert H. Boyle When the Revolutionary War started, the British grand strategy was to seize the Hudson River Valley and divide the colonies into two.  This is the only river that penetrates through the Appalachians.  Congress, to thwart the British, had Washington come here and fortify the Hudson Highlands.  He selected the narrowest part of the river with the highest hills, West Point!  The British later sent Burgoyne down from Canada with an army, he was defeated at the Battle of Saratoga.  They really lost the war then, fairly early on, but they did not realize it.  They then attempted to get Benedict Arnold who was in charge of West Point to betray the fortress.  Arnold was willing to do that.  Arnold lived right down here, right at the end of that little green field in Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance.  His plan was exposed and he was beaten.

So the reason this country exists is because of this river and the hills, the topography.  This was our Gibraltar.  We would not be here, we would not be here otherwise, but this is not the reason why we fight for it.

Walter Cronkite A new bird, five miles up the river from West Point, the nation’s oldest state historic site commemorates the location of George Washington’s revolutionary headquarters in 1781.  The monument was put up in 1850, the junkyard came later.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Back in the 1960s, Newbury had a reputation among environmentalists and other people as being Dodge City on the Hudson because of the lawless attitude of its government and its public servants towards the environment and this little urban corridor through here and the Newbury shore line were the most notorious parts of the city.  In this little section, there were a half a dozen dye houses.  When I came here in 1984, this Creek was a different color every day.  One day it was yellow, one day it was purple, another day it was green, and another day it was blue.  In one end since we walked up this creek and into a pipe that led us into the bowels of this dye house here, there were giants vats of dye that we photographed being dumped into the Quassaick Creek and we were able to bring that case to the United States attorney and get them prosecuted under the Refuse Act of 1899.

Now, today, coming back, I can see that it is the same attitude and the same ethic has reasserted itself.  You can see over there, there is a pile of broken cinder blocks and construction and debris material.  It is illegal to dump that there.  That is a violation, not only to the state laws, but it is a violation of federal laws and citizens like citizens group like the Riverkeeper have the right to take whoever dumped that and the property owner there to court and force them to clean that up and that is something that we will do.

But again, this is an illustration of the quandary that environmentalists face, it is that you can never drop your vigilance.  You have got to constantly patrol because the polluters will come back as soon as you walk away from a site like this.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is the same net that you pull out from the beach and it is a way of sampling the kind of fish that we have in the river.  The place where we are right now is the mouth of the Quassaick Creek and this creek was the target of an enforcement action investigation that Riverkeeper conducted 14 years ago.  It was my first set of cases.  I walked this creek from its mouth seven miles up to Chatsworth Lake.  Over a period of several weeks and documented 24 separate polluters on this river.  We brought lawsuits against all of them and in the end, they all settled with us, so they went to court and we won those cases.

We ended up extracting about $300,000.00 from the polluters, which went to the rehabilitation of Quassaick Creek and we got them all to clean up their messes.  This is the first time that I had been back to this creek since then.  It has been over a decade since I have been here and I am just curious to see what kind of fish are now living in the creek in the mouth of the creek at its confluence with the Hudson River.

This is actually not the best time to stay in this creek because it is high tide and it is much more preferable to go out at low tide, but like every other fisherman, I want to set up my excuse before I go fishing.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I was interested in hunting and fishing from when I was a little boy.  I started keeping homing pigeons from when I was seven years old and raising them and breeding them.  I started training hawks when I was eleven years old and I still do that today.  Nature to me was always something that was important.  It was always a place that I went for something important in my life to fill some emptiness inside of me.

I want that around for my children.  When I was young, I wanted to be a veterinarian and if anybody asked me, that is always what I said.  After my father died, my aspirations changed because I think I felt some duty to kind of pick up the herald that he had dropped and worked on social justice issues as he had been doing.

In 1983, I made a reassessment in my life and I decided at that point to follow my own heart and do the kind of stuff that I always wanted to do which was to work with environmental issues and wildlife issues and I took all the training that I had had as a District Attorney, as an attorney and a prosecutor and landed up with the Fishermen which was the perfect place to land because this was a group that was extraordinarily litigious, very aggressive, very prosecutorial in a way that they thought. And I quickly began to see that the environmental issues and human rights issues and social justice issues were really intertwined and I saw this in every aspect of my work almost from day one that the people who were shouldering the disproportionate burden of environmental injury were the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society and in the case of the Hudson, it was the fisherman, the commercial fisherman who did not have the clout, they did not have the money to get lobbyists up in Albany the way that General Electric did and Newburg.

I could see that it was the poor neighborhoods where the dumps were landing, that is where the toxics went and we see this all over the country.  Four out of every five toxic waste dumps in this country is in a black neighborhood.  This was a connection that I had not known about before.

And just like a baby—these were introduced into the river (holding up a fish).  They are not made of—they were introduced here by a man named Henry Robinson in 1879 and they were given away by Tammany Hall to people who were good Democrats.  They put them into—and they made their way in the Hudson River.  These are little herring and the carp actually was a huge industry in the river.  They are the source of gefilte fish and during the Jewish holidays, there was a giant market for carp in the Hudson River.  It is related to the goldfish, the only difference is that it has this little moustache that is called a barbel.  It is a beautiful fish and it is great to be able to find fish like this, even carp and herring.  This is a herring run now which we just saw a lot of those in the net too in a creek that a few years ago was completely dead, 20 years ago, it was completely dead and that we found it a really polluted cesspool when we came here in 1985.  But now, it seems pretty clean and there is a relative abundance of fish in it.

Walter Cronkite Those who would keep the river relatively unspoiled—watched New York’s first nuclear power generating plant go up near Peekskill.  Soon, they learned of another power plant under consideration, a yet, unbuilt one near Cornwall on Storm King Mountain.

John Cronin  Environmental history was made on the Hudson River in many ways.  One of the ways, one of the cases that is best known is the Storm King case.

Robert H. Boyle The Consolidated Edison Company proposed building a so-called pump storage hydroelectric plant.  The turbines would be set at the base of Storm King Mountain.  The turbines would initially be used to pump water back up about a mile and a half to a reservoir that would be created to hold this river water and then when ConEdison wanted electricity, it would pull the plug on this high mountain bath tub, the water would come down the tunnels and this time generate power with the turbines.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The Storm King battle was a battle to fight—to stop ConEdison from decapitating a national monument, the Storm King Mountain which was one of the most spectacular geological sites on the east side of Mississippi.  It was so beautiful that it was almost an obligatory subject for the Hudson River school of painters, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Samuel F.B. Morse had gone up there and painted.

John Cronin  Worse though, the Storm King Project was going to destroy millions of striped bass.  Possibly, remove as much as 30% to 40% of the striped bass from the East Coast population of striped bass—it was that one small location on the Hudson River.

The fight to stop Storm King started as an aesthetic fight—It is going to be ugly; this is a beautiful mountain, a landmark in the Hudson River—quickly grew into the fight over the striped bass fish.

Robert H. Boyle I got involved because I brought up the striped bass issue.  ConEd’s chief witness had testified that no fish would be affected and it turned out that he had hired the two biologists who had found the striped bass spawning grounds there.  Federal Court of Appeals, Judges Lombard, Waterman and Hays overturned the license, remanded it and they said that the striped bass as a fish issue had to be looked at.

John Cronin What the Storm King case did is it gave citizens for the first time the right to go into Federal Court to protect their right from environmental abuse.  This has never happened before and this set a precedent for all the environmental statutes that followed.  The case was upheld in the appeals court, it was upheld to the Supreme Court.  It became the law of the land that I as a citizen, that you as a citizen have the right to defend your community in a proposed environmental abuse.

Robert H. Boyle That site went on for 17 years—it wasn't resolved until 1980.

Robert H. Boyle  We got 80% of what we wanted.  We did not get absolutely everything, but as I told Charles who was the Chairman of ConEdison, we got destruction of your fleet, we got the return of—but you can keep the coal mines and the saw. And I made them also endow the Hudson River.  I made them put up the money to endow the Hudson River, we now have the Hudson River Foundation for Science in Environmental Research and the endowment has since grown as it now approaches $40 million, maybe it is more, the only river in the world that I know of with its sizeable and independent endowment.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  In Storm King, the environmentalists got together and this was the battle that brought my father to the Hudson River and they sued ConEd for what was going on in Storm King and ConEd said, “No, you cannot sue us.  This is a public corporation and we have a permit to do this,” but the court said for the first time in history, after two months of litigation, that the environmentalists have standing to sue.  Its citizens can sue to protect the resource if they can show that they hiked on it or that they fished in it or that they fished in it or they take some kind of a spiritual and aesthetic pleasure from it.  They do not actually have to own it and that case—in a Storm King doctrine that came out of it was upheld by the Supreme Court and it opened the door to environmentalists to come into Court and start bringing these lawsuits.

John Cronin  Absolutely revolutionary!  Started right here and is now taught in every environmental law program in the country—it is the Storm King case, a famous environmental case.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  In 1970, 20 million Americans came out on the street and they demanded that our political leadership restore to us the ancient environmental rights that have been taken from Americans during the previous 80 years and the political system responded, Republicans and Democrats got together and they crafted this extraordinary jurisprudence, 19 major federal environmental statutes that were passed during the next 10 years, EPA was created.

John Cronin Today is the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Federal Clean Water Act.  This was a revolutionary law, not just for the Hudson River, but for the entire nation.  For the first time in our nation’s history, pollution was going to be regulated and in fact phased out.  What this meant for the Hudson was the construction of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sewage treatment plants.  Actually, well over $2 billion worth of sewage treatment plants for the Hudson and the rest of the New York State.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Today, those statutes give us the basis, give communities the basis to protect their local environments.  We did not have that in 1966 when my father toured the Hudson River.

John Cronin It is 1969 book on the Hudson River, Bob Boyle came with this idea that there should be a Hudson Riverkeeper.  The idea was based on an old British idea really where they had riverkeepers that took care of the private trout and salmon streams were private fishing clubs.  While environmental groups are nothing new, the idea of riverkeepers or baykeepers or sound keepers is very different and hatched fully out of Bob Boyle’s mind, it has always stayed true to his mission, which is that you have got to have living, breathing people who do not work for government, who do not work for industry who represent the public interest, who are out there bearing witness, collecting evidence, monitoring not just the health of the waterway, but what people are doing to it.  Not just sticking a test tube in the water and sampling it, but going out and saying, “There is the bad guy, this is his name.  This is what he did.  This is the date he did it.  This is why it is illegal.”

And we started doing that in this program in 1983 with the Exxon Oil Company.  This is the first case I worked on as Riverkeeper, almost my first day on the job, and on board, I had a news crew.  Here I found myself in the middle of the river up against seven hundred foot oil tanker owned by, at the time, was the largest corporation in the world.  With a network news crew on board, as if this is what I do every day.

Tom Brokaw, NBC News  This is an Exxon tanker dumping saltwater into the Hudson River and taking on fresh water from the same river.  The Exxon Enterprise came to light when a new environmental watchman on the Hudson spotted the tankers.  He is John Cronin, known as the Riverkeeper.

John Cronin  S.O. Palm Beach, S.O. Palm Beach, this is the Riverkeeper again, this is the Riverkeeper, over!

Male Yes, Riverkeeper, go ahead.

John Cronin All the seawater you are pumping, are you replacing that with freshwater from the river, over?

Male  Report to my company, Exxon International.  He will give you the explanations, over.

Tom Brokaw, NBC News  After watching one tanker, Cronin returned a few days later to take samples from another.  He says that lab tests identified four toxic substances.

John Cronin What we found in the Exxon case is that Exxon was discharging benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene into the Hudson River.  It was loading up with Hudson River freshwater—all the way down to Aruba, and whenever it had excess water, sell the remaining water to the island of Aruba.  It was a case of corporate chutzpah—like nothing we had ever seen.  Exxon ultimately pulled all of its tankers out of the Hudson River.  It paid $2 million for what it did.  That money was invested into a fund that still—is still spent on doing physical improvements to the Hudson River, and it put the Riverkeeper program on the map.

I used to say to Bob Boyle when we were first starting this program and we were being interviewed about it, I would say, “How do we describe the Riverkeeper Program?  I mean, yeah, we are the eyes and ears of the public, we are going to bust polluters,” and he used to say, “This is going to be like David and Goliath.  This is going to be St. George and the Dragon.  This is going to be like Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.”  I mean, there was a long list of how things were going to be like, and of course the Exxon case proved him right.  That was exactly what it was like.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is Bear Mountain, the name came from the Algonquin Indians who used to live here.  You can see this is the head of a bear that is lying down, the shoulders are up there, the haunches and right at its hind foot is Bear Mountain Bridge which you might notice is shrink wrapped with plastic because of a lawsuit that we initiated to stop the Department of Transportation from dumping lead chips into the Hudson River.  The Governor stepped in and intervened and said, “We are not going to do that anymore,” and they actually developed this new technology for covering the bridge with plastic and sucking out the plastic chips so none of them end up in the river.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. One of the first great battles in the environmental—in this country, it was the fight over the Indian Point Power Plant.  This plant was one of the first commercial reactors in the country and some salt water fisherman from Long Island Sound and some Hudson River fishermen discovered in the early 60s that the intake valves were killing sometimes millions of fish a day.

John Cronin The sad irony of the way Indian Point operates is that when I was a commercial fisherman, if I had fish in my boat that were either out of season or undersized, I could be fined $250.00 a fish.  If I had a hundred fish, that would be $25,000.00 in fines.  What Indian Point can do is Indian Point can kill millions of undersized striped bass, out-of-season striped bass and never pay a nickel in fines.  In fact, it has permission to exploit and destroy fish in the Hudson River.

Indian Point uses a million gallons of Hudson River water a minute and whatever fish that are in that million gallons a minute, it gets sucked into the plant and actually get mechanically destroyed.  Where it stands now is that we are in the 25th year, almost the 30th year of a never-ending battle, not only with the Indian Point Plant, but with four other power plants on the Hudson River to force them to either install fish-saving equipment, institute operating procedures like reducing flows or best of all, to install close cycle cooling that will reduce the amount of Hudson River water they use.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  John is one of the most brilliant strategists that I have met in the environmental movement.  I think that one of the reasons he is so effective is the background of his experience.  He worked in politics, he worked in policy, he wrote legislation, he has participated in litigation, probably as much as any environmentalist in this country.  He knows how to deal with the political system and how to make things happen in the political system and he also understands the legal system.

A couple of years ago, the Pace University actually gave him a law degree to recognize his legal accomplishments.

John Cronin  I was part of the first generation of kids who grew up in the city of Yonkers believing that the Hudson River was something to be stayed away from.  To us, the purpose of the Hudson was to separate New York and New Jersey.  It was not for swimming, it was not for boating, it was not for fishing, it was something you stayed away from.  It was not until I was in my 20s that I found out and realized that my grandfather was a Hudson River fisherman, that my family had gatherings on the river.  My father learned how to swim on the river.  My parents dated on the river.  It had been a big part of my family, but not a big part of my upbringing.  I was part of that generation that grew up with the river that was too polluted for any of those things.

When I rediscovered the river, which was quite by accident in my 20s as a volunteer, I started to find my connection to the river and I started realizing, “Hey, what happened to my family’s river?  This was my inheritance, and I have lost it.”  It was taken away from me.  I became part of the fight to take that river back.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. There are a lot of eels in there.  These things are hard to pick up.  They can also live out of water.  They can breathe either air or water.  These are mostly white perch.  That is a tomcod, this is a shrimp—see that, that is a little sand shrimp from the Hudson River, striped bass and this is a very big white perch, which has got a problem.  He has got some fin rot there.  We have been finding a lot of that this year on the Hudson.  100% is the white perch have bad cases of fin rot.

John Cronin You get an idea of how abundant the life is here.  You see how wide the river is here?  The river is 3.5 miles wide, the opening of this troll is only about 12 feet.  So what we have combed in essence is 12 feet wide by about this deep of 3.5 miles of water with an average depth of 15 feet.  So the life here is incredibly abundant and the sad thing is, that right in the middle of it all, if you look right across the river here, is another power plant.

So, they have cited these power plants right in the heart of the estuary, not only causing damage to the Hudson River, but causing damage to the East Coast fishery was well because that is where many of these fish are headed like the striped bass.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The Hudson—because it is brackish, has all the salt water species, so you get striped bass and you get blue fish, shad, sturgeon, eel—in addition to that, particularly if you go along he shorelines near Croton Point, you can catch a tremendous numbers of tropical fish, things like angel fish and sergeant majors and seahorses.  In fact, right over here in the beach, a couple of years ago, Bob Boyle found a fish called a mangrove snapper whose only known habitat is in the Congo River in Africa, so now the fish is listed for the Hudson and for the Congo River.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. One of the critical parts of the Riverkeeper program is our environmental litigation clinic at Pace University Law School in White Plains, New York.  Pace is a law school that specializes in environmental law and we have 10 students who by a special court order are permitted to practice law under our supervision as if they were attorneys.  They can do anything that a lawyer can do.

John Cronin Enforcement is at the heart of the Riverkeeper Program, collecting evidence does not mean a heck of a lot if you do not have a way of hauling the polluter into court and that is where the environmental law clinic comes in.  The environmental law clinic—those are our prosecutors.  Those young students have gone up against some of the most experienced corporate attorneys and corporate law firms in the country.  Some of the most experienced government attorneys in the nation as well, and we win and we consistently win.  Our students albeit some of them are in the court restroom throwing up before it, but making their first oral arguments in front of a federal judge—doing things that a second, third year associates in law firms do not get a chance to do.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Since we started the clinic, over a hundred successful cases against polluters, we have forced polluters to spend about half a billion dollars in remediation the Hudson River.

John Cronin I always like what we are doing here to like what they was doing in the condemned shipyard in the solidarity movement in Poland.  He believed that in one small locale on the Hudson River, we could start something that would change the face of the American environmental movement. And he used to tell me, “John, we are going to have keepers everywhere.  There is going to be a San Francisco baykeeper.  There is going to be a Long Island Sound keeper,” he would run down this list and I would say, “Yeah, I am sure you are right, Bob.”  And I would repeat what he had said to reporters who asked, but sure enough now, it is 1997, we have got 23 programs around the country from Cook Inlet up in Alaska down to the Chattahoochee River in Georgia.  We have got people interested in starting a program virtually every week.  I suspect by the end of this decade, we will have 50 or 60 programs around the country.

Rick Dove Well even before I knew about Riverkeepers, my foundation, the foundation that sponsors me, had read about John and his work on the Hudson and after researching the successes that he had, they decided they wanted the Riverkeeper Program because they wanted the same thing for the Neuse that John had been able to do for the Hudson. 

Terry Backer The story was related to us how someone by the name of John Cronin and his partner, Bobby Kennedy, had set about doing things in the Hudson River to reverse that course of degradation.  So we said, “OK, who are these guys?”  So we got introduced to them and laid out a plan for Long Island Sound.

The first step was to create the Connecticut Coastal Fisherman’s Association and I was elected as President of that, so we went out and filed, I think eight or nine lawsuits under the 72 Clean Water Act, with the help of John and Bobby and we won almost all of those. We actually never were litigated, they settled them out of court.  They knew they were beat.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Terri’s story is a really interesting story because it is the same that we have seen with these keepers all over the country.  Terri was a high school dropout who never participate in the political system, never dreamed of running for political office and he got angry about the environment and when he found out that these laws were out there and that he had a role, he had the capacity to participate in enforcing these laws, it was an empowering experience for him.  People in Norwalk were so happy about what he was doing with the waterways that bumper stickers began spontaneously appearing around Norwalk saying "Backer for Mayor" and I guess that put an idea in his head and two years later, he ran for the state legislature and he won an assembly seat and now he is second in line for chair of the appropriations committee.

Terry Backer Politicians and lawyers and defendants and utilities say to me, "What gives you the right to do this?"  I give them John’s line, “I live here.  I do not need any other right than that to do this.”  Now, of course, under the—we never know where life is going.  I have been elected to the state legislature, I am vice chairman of appropriations of the general assembly.  Life has taken some strange turns since I started doing this. 

Rick Dove I can tell you, you can talk to any Riverkeeper in that room and they will all tell you the same thing, “We will not fail.”  We will not!

Terry Backer If it touches Long Island Sound, I have something to do with it.  If it is swimming, oystering, subsistence fishing, if it is public access, boat building and communities, if it is votes in the legislature, if it touches that Sound, which changes the oil in your car, it is my responsibility as a keeper to help the society pick a better policy and if they fail to pick the policy, to use the laws of this nation which are very unique to make sure that they do.

John Cronin The river is in better condition now than it probably has been any time during the industrial age.  That said, the river still has a lot of problems.  Its biggest problem in terms of pollution is PCBs.  Its biggest problem in terms of the health of the fishery is power plants, which still kills millions of fish a year.  This river belongs to the people who live here and I do not mean that philosophically, I mean that quite literally.  This water belongs to the public.

What the law says is that not only are we all owners, but no one of us is allowed to do anything that diminishes that river for the rest of us.  And part of what the Riverkeeper program stands for is it stands for the right of the individual, not only to defend that waterway, but for the right of the individual to have a clean waterway, to have that inheritance, to have access to it and to have free use of it.  This is as old as American law.  It is as old as English common law, it dates back to Roman law.  It is what is called the Public Trust.  It is a beautiful phrase, the Hudson River is part of the public trust.  It is held in trust for all of us.  It is held in trust for the next generation, it is held in trust for the generation after that.  We have an absolute right to it, we have an absolute right to defend it, we have an absolute right to enforce the law.

Riverkeeper is about exercising those rights, but it is also making sure that those rights are protected.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. We are not protecting nature for nature’s sake.  We are not protecting those northern force in the Pacific Northwest as they would like to say for the sake of a spotted owl, we are protecting those force because we believe that trees have more value to humanity standing than they would if we cut them down.  John and I are not fighting of the Hudson River for the sake of the shad and the sturgeon and the striped bass, but because we believe our lives are going to be richer and our communities are going to be richer and our children’s lives are going to be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson River and where our children can go to the banks and see the fishermen do what they have been doing for generations and or they can reach out and touch those things that men are fixing their nets and waiting for the tide and in that way connect themselves to 350 years of New York State history and understand that they are part of something that is larger than themselves that they are part of a continuum.  That they are part of a community, and I do not want my children growing up in a world where there no commercial fishermen and where we have lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to 10,000 generations of human beings that were here before laptops and that connect us ultimately to God. And I do not think nature is God and I do not think we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I think it is the way that God communicates to us most forcefully.

And for me, therefore, destroying these things is the moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last Bible or Torah or Talmud or Koran on earth. It is a cost that I do not think it is prudent for us to impose upon ourselves, I doubt if we have the right to impose it upon our children and ultimately, what we are doing here is recognizing we have a debt to our children and we have a debt to the people in our society who do not speak loudly and that is a recognition that we live in a community and being part of a community is painful because you cannot just make decisions based upon your own self interest.  You have to account for the cause and impacts those decisions on other people and that is really what environmentalism is about.  It is about recognizing that debt to others.