The Riverkeepers by John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

It goes without saying that so many of us stay appalled by the continuing devastation to the mountain state. It is always something – exploitation of the land and its people by coal interests, clearcut logging, road building and sprawl, pollution of our waters, you name it. It is doubly appalling that the exploiters seem to so often get a free reign from those very agencies that are supposed to be our watch dogs. Those we elect to office to guard our interests, and the administrative offices they set up and sanction seem to be blind to what we have to say in terms of providing for our interests instead of those of the exploiters.

You can take heart, if that is a correct way to put it, in knowing that there are other states with the same kinds of problems. It is becoming apparent that there is a uniform script continuously being played our which aligns the "common folk," namely us, against those who exploit and destroy our environment for profit in tandem with the very people who are supposed to be watching out for our interests – the politicians and bureaucrats.

On reading the Riverkeepers, I was obligated to stay angry for much of my sledding into the depths of the book. It was something like those old cowboy movies when the bad guys were ahead and doing perfectly terrible things to the good guys until near the end when the hero rides into town and with a small posse of locals, cleans out the nest of evil. Problem is, with these environmental stories, the evil nests keep appearing again and again like the heads of the Hydra.

I can vouch personally for the fact that the Hudson River is one of the most scenic and awe-inspiring rivers in our country. The many times in the 50s and 60s that I’ve crossed it or otherwise been aware of its attributes, I had no idea that its waters were so incredible befouled that most fish in it were unsafe to eat. I did not remain around long enough to catch the odors, but if I had I’m sure I would have guessed something was amiss. The Riverkeepers is the story of the community of residents along the Hudson’s banks who were being impacted in a plethora of negative ways by large corporations and corrupt municipalities. It is inspirational for the fact that a small minority of very courageous residents would not give up against the great odds against them in an effort to get the river cleaned up. These good folk were up against the crooked politics of some of the cities along the Hudson, multinational corporations like Exxon and General Electric, and mostly the state and national bureaucratic structures that were in place for the very reason to minimize the effects of pollution.

In the early 70s it was found that the General Electric Corporation had dumped about two million pounds of PCBs into the river. The fish in the river became so dangerously polluted that there were advisories to not eat the fish. There were people who made their livelihoods for almost centuries on catching fresh fish for the big markets like those in New York City. These folks were effectively out of business, businesses that had been passed down for generations. General Electric’s response was to issue threats if they were to be held accountable. "It issued notices to its workers ... that PCBs were a phony controversy cooked up by environmentalists to destroy their jobs." Is this a familiar sounding scenario?

Another major polluter was the Exxon Corporation through having its tankers come upstream by the dark of night to clean out their tanks and dump the residue in the river. The stealthy way in which they operated forever gave them the stamp of a deliberate attempt to avoid responsible action. It was very hard to catch them sufficiently "red-handed" to provide an air tight case against them. All this had to be done by volunteer workers since the government agencies were loathe to doing anything to antagonize Big Business. In most case the government agencies not only didn’t help, but did what they could to make it harder for these volunteers.

The way that this small dedicated but financially strapped group operated was to first get as much publicity as possible out on the outrages involved. Several of the big environmental organizations like the NRDC put some of their resources into the fray, and also newspapers like the New York Times did articles. It was getting the word out to the general public and making them aware of what had been going on, as well as some well-placed legal action, that started to turn things around. When enough folks demonstrated outrage to the politicians, things started to change. The most intransigent were the New York state agencies who were mostly led by industry toadies. (Again, sound familiar?).

The book reads like an adventure story. The authors give some background on their own lives to help the reader to see why they got involved to the extent they did. You can be with them when they do an illegal trespass to find evidence of major pollution. You can be with them on the river at night when they take samples of polluted water next to a large tanker. Just as the community of residents of Southern West Virginia do not want their mountains destroyed, so the community of river people did not want to see their waters polluted to such an extent that the fish were unable to sustain themselves and unfit to eat.

The last chapter gives an overview of the contrasting American environmental destruction and environmental protection. Historically, there are "boomers" and "nesters," terms which originated with the western writer,Wallace Stegner. The boomers are those who are restless and mostly afflicted with greed. Too much of the American dream is about striking it rich and ending up on easy street. On the other hand, the nesters are those who build communities and stay in one place. Stegner sees both impulses within himself, and which path to choose is essentially a moral one. Wendell Berry says that the preference of settlement is a commitment to caring. The persons who settled the West were those driven to find riches and to rape the land to do it. (Perhaps they have a tradition of thinking this way in the West since some of our very worst anti-environmental politicians and activists come from the still frontier-like Western states)

"The sound-bite platitudes of "property rights" and "free markets’ and "states’ rights" are repeated by boomers with such mantric regularity that they have become gods unto themselves. While all of them are important elements of our heritage, they are only legitimized in our political, legal and religious traditions so long as they build communities. Part of the pain of caring and living in a community is exerting restraint and acknowledging that our claim to possession of the land is not absolute but limited by our obligations to the community and future generations. The rights of the individual are important, but individualism alone, without a balancing commitment to community, is a disastrous social formula. Environmentalism is about asserting the power of community, which is the primary source of human dignity in the post industrial age."

Do you suppose that Cecil Underwood or John Crites would have an inkling about the words in the above paragraph? The historical and cultural overview in the last chapter, alone, is well worth the price of the book.