Fresh Water: Let Rivers Run Deep

JOHN CRONIN AND ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. In Search of the Beauty And Mystery of Home

Since the plane of John F. Kennedy Jr. went down on July 16, observations about the Kennedys have mainly connected the family with calamity and grief. But the environmental work of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his partner, John Cronin, remind one that the Kennedys are more lastingly characterized by public service. In May I went out with Kennedy and Cronin on New York’s revitalized Hudson River, a fluid monument to the devotion so many Kennedys have felt for the country.

What we will see on the river, John Cronin tells me, is the past, present and future–“what we have been fighting against and fighting for.” The against comes first. On a late-spring morning full of sunshine and blue water, we push off in a 26-ft. sportfishing boat used by Cronin’s watchdog group, Riverkeeper Inc., to patrol the Hudson. Heading north, about 40 miles north of Manhattan, we see the Lovett Power Station on the west bank. The old, dark, brick coal-, gas- and oil-burning tangle of structures looks like a giant outdoor furnace. Beside it is a quarrying operation that once dumped a load of sand and gravel from a conveyor belt into Cronin’s boat while he was in it, to discourage scrutiny.

“We were so dumb,” he laughs. “We watched the belt swing over our heads, never suspecting what they were going to do.”

On the east side is a plant that uses gypsum to make Sheetrock and that, thanks to Riverkeeper, has done a cleanup. Just beyond it rise Units 2 and 3 of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Two mosquelike domes flank a sky-high smokestack painted in red and white stripes. It looks like a lighthouse that has been converted into a festive nuclear missile. Beyond that, at Charles Point, lies a garbage-burning plant, which turns trash into energy.

All the plants, says Cronin, are located in exactly the wrong part of the river–the broad, shallow heart of the estuary that serves as a nursery for striped bass, bay anchovies and American shad. The plants suck in water with great force; Indian Point alone uses a million gallons a minute. Fish small enough to slip through the meshes are killed at once. Larger fish are impaled on the screens and killed or maimed. Riverkeeper has forced Indian Point to install $25 million worth of fish-saving equipment, and in 1994 the group successfully sued to make the Environmental Protection Agency set official safety standards for power plants.

This is what Cronin, appointed Hudson Riverkeeper in 1983, does for a living. He and his friend and chief prosecuting attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–two serious and good-humored men in their late 40s who look like kids, think like politicians and talk like poets–have formed a partnership based on vigilance and the law. With the help of students from the Environmental Litigation Clinic at the Pace University School of Law, Cronin and Kennedy have brought more than 150 legal actions against the river’s polluters. Their most important case to date led to the 1997 watershed agreement that safeguards New York City’s drinking water by protecting 19 upstate reservoirs.

The idea for a Riverkeeper sprang from the hard head of Bob Boyle, a writer at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and a sportfisherman who in the 1960s fought for clean waters and founded the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association–at the time an unlikely alliance of commercial interests and environmentalists. American environmental law came into its own in 1980, when the Con Edison power company, after a battle with the fishermen, dropped its plan to build a huge facility on Storm King Mountain near the Hudson that was designed to store water for hydroelectric-power generation but would also have damaged a major spawning area of the striped bass.

Cronin and Kennedy describe the movement to save the Hudson in The Riverkeepers, published by Simon & Schuster (website: www.riverkeeper.org) Today 23 U.S. Riverkeepers watch over lakes, creeks, ponds and bays from Long Island Sound to Cook Inlet in Alaska, and the first Canadian keeper program began last month on the Petitcodiac River in New Brunswick.

The present we see on the Hudson is a combination of the chastised, though often still abusive polluters and healthy signs of a waterway revived. Yet it is the past that most concerns Cronin and Kennedy–the past polluters, and the more distant past, in which they hope to see the future. The river is where they have found their home, and it has all the beauty and mystery of home.

For Cronin, the impulse for his lifework came from family history. “I was raised along the river,” he says. “I was in the first generation that was taught the river was unsafe–not because of tides that might pull you down but because of water quality. As a young adult, I found a legacy I had been kept from inheriting. The lives of my family had swirled around the river; my grandfather was a fisherman; that’s where families gathered. I discovered that connection. But then there was a larger connection. It seemed that every community on the river had lost touch with it and with the notion that the river was their home. The greatest single tragedy on the Hudson is that hundreds of years of history are disappearing. It’s like burning down a museum or trashing a library. The loss is devastating and profound.”

Family history also drives Kennedy, who has the civil rights spirit of his father. “To me,” he says, “this is a struggle of good and evil–between short-term greed and ignorance and a long-term vision of building communities that are dignified and enriching and that meet the obligations to future generations. There are two visions of America. One is that this is just a place where you make a pile for yourself and keep moving. And the other is that you put down roots and build communities that are examples to the rest of humanity.”

I ask him, “Why choose this front rather than other humanitarian battles?”

“To me,” he says, “the environment cannot be separated from the economy, housing, civil rights and human rights. How we distribute the goods of the earth is the best measure of our democracy.” He gestures at the open water. “It’s not about advocating for fishes and birds. It’s about human rights.”

Accordingly, their vision of nature is as realistic as it is romantic. Kennedy says he has seen an adorable-looking otter torture a catfish by biting off its scales on one side, making it swim in circles.

On the river, these two behave toward each other with the casual care of brothers; they intuit each other’s presence, but they rarely speak, except in a code born of their joint mission and of the fact that “we talk 10 times a day.” One will say, “Smith called. He didn’t like what we wrote.” The other will say, “Did you read what the EPA said yesterday… Once they acknowledge that, they’re screwed.” I have no idea what they’re talking about, but everything has the tone of frontline bulletins. Standing beside Kennedy near the bow, I realize he looks like a Kennedy. He has made me forget his lineage until, as part of something else he is saying, he adds, “when my uncle was in the White House.”

As we head upriver, away from the power plants, I ask whether the river, let alone, would repair itself. Not always, they say. The toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs, which were discharged into the river by General Electric plants until the company agreed to stop, do not biodegrade; they have to be removed. Pollutants have a cumulative effect–what Cronin calls “the death of a thousand cuts.” An individual polluter says, “What I alone am doing is not harming this river,” which may be so. But Kennedy and Cronin insist the plants that we passed–four in five minutes–are working together, even if they adhere to EPA standards, to slowly destroy the estuary ecosystem.

Different pollutants work differently. Some, such as PCBs, are subtle. A female striped bass produces 6 million eggs in a lifetime. If some die from PCBs, it won’t be noticed. But humans are also affected when they eat fish contaminated by PCBs; the chemicals can cause cancer and disrupt the functioning of hormones in the body. Other forms of pollution, like nitrate and phosphate runoff from farms, kill the ecosystem by starving fish. These nutrient pollutants are found in fertilizer and in sewage, and they cause excessive growth of aquatic plants when they hit the water. Algae, during their natural course of life, die and sink to the bottom, where they are devoured by bacteria, which use oxygen. Too many algae deprive fish of oxygen.

Yet as he indicated earlier, Kennedy does not see factories as blights on Eden but as signs of a rich and useful economy. Neither he nor Cronin is opposed to industry, condominium construction, powerboat use or anything that might bring the fullness of communal American life into contact with the river. They simply oppose anyone destroying the river. “This is a fight to save a resource for as many constituencies as possible,” says Kennedy. “Here there is room for everyone.” As he speaks, a trio of ducks puts on a brief air show high above the electrical wires that cross the river. A great blue heron is spotted over the Lovett plant.

“The beauty of my job,” says Cronin, “is that it allows me to be in touch with the rhythms of the river and to understand what it means to fit the rhythms of your life around those other rhythms. When you are a fisherman, one of the rhythms is the tide. To fish for shad, you go out two hours before high tide, but every day the hours change. One week you’re having breakfast at 7 a.m., the next at 2 in the afternoon. And all this extends to life on the shore, to the people who come down to watch the boats come in. The whole community participates in the rhythms of the river.”

What Riverkeeper has been fighting for, then, is biodiversity–a complex way of life sustained by various hectic interdependencies, for which the Hudson is the pumping heart. All the same, when we finally come to a point near the Hudson Highlands that is without power plants and condos–where the water gets bluer as one looks into it and the ripples touch the brown rocks on the shore and the thick hills rise like tufts of broccoli–one’s own heart lifts with gratitude for untrammeled nature, and with ancient expectation.

We are in a bend in the river, and suddenly everyone is still–the way, I imagine, that all people have been stilled since coming upon the first bend in the first river. Here too is the past, and it re-creates the eternal sense of promise and danger that river bends have always presented and that have bred civilizations. America itself was a bend in the river, and on days like this it still is.

Kennedy says his happiest moments are when he takes his kids camping on the banks, where they fish out of tents and hear coyotes “in the jet-black night.” Cronin recalls a different, untamed moment in 1982, when he was working as a commercial fisherman, setting crab traps near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

“Suddenly a storm came rolling over the mountains out of the Highlands,” he says. “We were heading back with a couple of bushels of crabs, and out of nowhere we were beset with winds and darkness. We raced to beat the storm, but it overtook us. The mountains shone a brilliant green. The sky exploded. I was never so aware of how little control I had over the environment, how the forces of nature can play with us. It was a defining moment in my relation to the river. It put me in my place.”

Roger Rosenblatt, an editor-at-large for Time Inc., is the editor of Consuming Desires, a new collection of essays on consumption and the environment, published by Island Press