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."
PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
