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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.