OLEAN -- Rivers have always been an important presence in my life. I seem drawn to them. They silently influence our lives.
I grew up about 200 yards from the rushing Black River in the North Country of this state -- one narrow street and a small woods away from that torrent's deep, dangerous and unfenced gorge that my older brothers and I were forbidden to visit in early childhood.
Of course, my boyhood friends and I would creep up to the lip and stare at the chasm anyway -- wondering aloud if anyone had ever fallen there, or if we could throw a baseball, or even a rock across to the southern side. We tried and failed plenty of times. My brothers, later in adulthood, both told me they did the same thing.
In high school, our baseball home games were played on a field that was bordered in left by a fence, in center by another small woods, and in right -- incredibly enough -- by the same unfenced gorge. Oh, there was a tree line, and then a thick brush barrier separating the field from the gorge along that foul line, and a right fielder chasing a fly ball would have to crash through so many bushes and scrub pine branches first he was never in any danger of falling into the gorge. But it was there -- probably 450 feet or so away from home plate.
We'd sit on the bench, ruminating about the chances of anybody hitting one into the gorge. As far as I know, no one ever did, but there are tales of a few good high school sluggers coming close. (I was a slap hitter with a good batting average, going to all fields with singles and doubles. In a four-year varsity career, I can only remember hitting two pitches over an outfielder's head.)
My father managed a paper mill perched on the opposite cliff side about a mile downstream from our house. His office window opened directly on the river below. When I was of single-digit age, on Saturday mornings he'd take me in to work and I'd stare out that window for hours.
Just before I entered college, my family moved to Beaver Falls, N.Y. (another paper mill town), where our new house was a similar distance from the closer-to-surface Beaver River, which rises in the Adirondacks and flows into the Black River. My daredevil nephews used to ride their bicycles (illegally and foolishly) over the foot-wide lip of a dam across that waterway.
As an adult, I have lived or worked short distances from the Severn River (Maryland), the mighty Niagara (in the town where this newspaper publishes), the Potomac River (Virginia), the St. Lawrence (Canadian border), the Indian River (Florida), and the Arkansas River in that state. As I write this, I am looking out the window of my study at a rapidly running creek that dissects the front lawn and ends up in the nearby Allegheny River, which runs into the Monongahela at Pittsburgh. When I see twigs or chips of bark floating by, it is somehow soothing to reflect they could possibly end up in the Mississippi River in just a few days.
But the river that perhaps influenced me the most in my early years was the Hudson. My mother grew up north of Albany and talked repeatedly of its great beauty, and of its commercial and historical importance.
Her father was an Irish fiddler who ran bands up and down that river, and that charming old rogue spun many a tall tale to me about it when I was in my preteen years. I know I was driven across the Hudson several times as a small child on trips to visit my aunt in Boston, but my first realization of its majestic length and width and flow came on a Boy Scout trip to West Point and the U.S. Military Academy, perched high atop its western bank.
My first thought then -- maybe because of the military atmosphere -- was that the Hudson was invincible, a timeless force that man could never conquer, harness or ruin. I was, of course, wrong.
This was abruptly called to my attention with last week's mailed spring report of Riverkeeper -- one of the most successful environmental action groups in the nation -- founded more than four decades ago to protect and preserve the Hudson. Riverkeeper came to broader national attention in recent years when it was run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. -- Bobby Kennedy's son, not Teddy's, as I heard some dimwitted newscaster remark upon the news of Ted Kennedy's brain cancer.
The organization and its prowess in activating everyday citizens to defend the environment first came to prominence in the 1960s, when it fought and stopped Con Edison's ill-conceived plans to locate a massive hydroelectric plant on Storm King Mountain in the heart of the scenic Hudson Highlands.
That massive organizational and legislative effort sparked the modern environmental movement and helped motivate Congress to enact numerous federal laws that protect our air, water and open spaces.
That is, those laws are supposed to provide that protection. Under the numbskull reign and corporate concubinage of George W. Bush, the founding philosophies and resulting federal environmental agencies have been allowed to languish and deteriorate in a deliberate strategy of under-funding and neglect.
The Clean Water Act of the late 1970s is a good example. That act resulted in a new sewage treatment infrastructure along the Hudson (and elsewhere) that is now almost 35 years old.
For a while, the Hudson made a dramatic comeback. The fish population -- especially bluefish and striped bass -- markedly improved. Bald eagles started nesting once again along the shoreline and on islands in the river.
But now, once again, Hudson fish species are "in various states of long-term decline," according to Riverkeeper president Alex Matthiessen. Once plentiful eel, shad, sturgeon, smelt, perch, herring -- all are threatened. Swimming in the big river for humans is no longer considered safe.
As the treatment plants age, heavy rains cause raw sewage to enter aging storm sewer runoff pipes, and by the time the Hudson reaches New York City, the once-improved Hudson is again putrid and dangerous. It's a problem for the Capitol District, too. Riverkeeper has identified 92 routine "combined sewage overflows" in the region around Albany, Cohoes, and Watervliet and Green Island.
Last year, New York State identified 148 clean water infrastructures -- sewage plants and such -- that needed upgrading, repair or new building, at a projected cost of $3.8 billion. There was a time when federal loans for such financing needs was just about automatic under the Clean Water State Revolving Fund.
Under Dubya, the feds answered the $3.8 billion New York request with a measly $118 million in loans. This year already, the state has identified 392 such clean water projects that need $4 billion in funding. No answer yet from Washington, but the federal government, in budget bills, has already slashed the depleted 2007 funding level for clean water measures by $395 million.
As if these policy woes weren't enough, in Dubya's two terms the politically stacked Supreme Court (the one in Washington) -- its majority composed of right-wing business-lovers -- has deliberately thrown the Clean Water Act's scope of jurisdiction into what Riverkeeper calls "an unfortunate state of grave confusion" with two controversial decisions.
Riverkeeper counsel and policy analyst Jennifer Kahan says the pair of decisions (Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Rapanos v. United States) have "opened the flood gates for opponents of strong water pollution controls, including the Bush Administration, to instigate federal agency rollbacks limiting the effectiveness of the Clean Water Act."
That's why Riverkeeper, an effective lobbyist group, is pushing hard in support of the still-deliberated Clean Water Restoration Act of 2007 (H.R. 2421) and the Water Quality Financing Act of 2007 (H.R. 720). The latter would restore the aforementioned revolving loan fund for states to previous levels -- $14 billion over a four-year period.
Riverkeeper currently has four active lawsuits going against various entities -- one against ExxonMobil for a huge oil spill in Brooklyn, two against lax enforcement agencies (the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection), and one against a developer-friendly township.
Much of Riverkeeper's focus, however, remains on mega-utilities and their power plants along the Hudson.
Entergy, now the owner of the controversial Indian Point nuclear power station, recently applied for a 20-year extension of its operating licenses. Indian Point uses an outdated and environmentally devastating once-through cooling system that flushes billions of gallons of the Hudson's water per day through the plant to absorb heat and cool reactors. The overheated water is discharged back into the river.
This outmoded system (newer, safer, affordable, more ecologically friendly cooling systems are available) kills billions of fish -- many of them trapped and suffocated against huge filtering screens -- each year.
As part of the relicensing process, Entergy submitted a disingenuous environmental report claiming Indian Point has "no adverse impact" on Hudson River fish and that the waterway has a "healthy and robust fish population."
Riverkeeper wasn't buying it. The environmental group hired a top British research firm -- Pisces Conservation Ltd. -- to analyze Entergy's claims and do its own study of the Hudson fish population.
The Pisces group found that of the 13 major Hudson fish species studied, 10 "are in significant decline." Besides damage from power plants, Pisces pegged blame on habitat loss, overfishing, river warming, inadvertent commercial netting, lower oxygen levels, and renewed pollution. Concluded Pisces: a number of the Hudson's "signature fish could be a thing of the past unless aggressive measures are taken."
Write your Congress persons. Tell them to vote for the above-mentioned pieces of federal legislation, or you'll leave big burlap bags of dead fish on their porches. That's probably what my mischievous grandpa would have done.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 3 2008 |