Books: World's End, Hudson Division

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THE HUDSON RIVER by Robert H. Boyle. 304 pages. Norton. $6.95.

Nowadays, those little men in the funnies carrying signs reading THE END OF THE WORLD IS AT HAND need only walk as far as the nearest publisher's office to get the message printed. The latest Jeremiah to join the prophets of ecological disaster is Robert Boyle, who is concerned with the Hudson River and man's efforts to turn this noble flood into a squalid sewer.

If this were all, Boyle's book would be merely a timely polemic on an important and fashionable topic. But Boyle, a staff member for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, is more than an enraged critic. He is an accomplished journalist-naturalist with a curious blend of love, knowledge and perspective that help turn his "natural and unnatural history" of a river into what should become a small classic.

Crime Supplement. Fish are clearly Boyle's primary fixation. He keeps an aquarium in his Croton-on-Hudson house, partly for receiving specimens he seines from the river, partly to exercise his empathy for finned creatures. The striped-bass fingerlings, he comments cheerfully, "were gamboling all over the tank like Labrador pups." Just as canaries were once carried into coal mines to warn the miners of poisonous gases, Boyle tends to use fish as a measure of man. Bass taken from the Hudson off Bayonne have a taint of petroleum; shad roe is more than just fishy; sturgeon taken below Consolidated Edison's plant at Indian Point (those that manage to survive its giant water-cooling intake pipes) should be checked for radioactivity.

Because of a certain monomania in Boyle, large portions of his book read like a crime supplement to the Rivers of America series, which set out to celebrate the belief that America was still the Beautiful. Boyle follows the river down from its source at Mount Marcy (where the great conservationist Theodore Roosevelt received the news of McKinley's death by assassination) and finds its enemies innumerable. Thrifty upriver towns happily send their raw sewage roiling southward toward foul and wicked Manhattan. Tankers leak oil. Corporations discharge incalculable quantities of industrial waste. They always seem able to find a tame scientist to testify before civic bodies that acids, oils, oxides and industrial Dreck of all sorts are only minimally harmful. When that fails, they pay minimal fines and cheerfully go on polluting.

The worst areas are the Albany Pool, the section below Troy and Rensselaer, and the approaches to New York harbor—but industrialization has already begun to zero in on the relatively clean areas between. Consolidated Edison appears as one of Boyle's main targets. Despite some effort by the company to modify its plans in the face of public pressure, Boyle regards the controversial projected Con Ed installation at Storm King as a threat with an ultimate effect on wildlife that cannot be measured but will surely be dangerous.