Hudson River has run through his life

Lee Ferris/Poughkeepsie Journal John Cronin, former Riverkeeper, addresses questions following a press conference held at Dennings Point announcing Beacon will be home to the Rivers and Estuaries Center on the Hudson.

John Cronin, a Cold Spring resident, is the spokesman for the governor's Rivers and Estuaries Center on the Hudson project. In his 30-year career on the river he has gone from volunteer on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater to being the first full-time Riverkeeper. He has been involved in some of the pivotal cases against polluters on the Hudson River. He spoke to Journal reporter Dan Shapley Monday in Beacon about the Hudson River -- past, present and future.

Q:   Go back to how you first got involved. Tell me about your first experiences with the river:

A:   I can tell you exactly because it's actually kind of a funny and interesting story. I was born in New York and traveled around the country for a couple of years. I ended up back here and ended up living in the Mid Hudson because, actually to save money and get myself started. I'd taken a job I heard about at Lake Minnewaska. I fell in love with the Hudson Valley working at Minnewaska and I fell in love with the Shawangunk Mountains, I actually lived and worked there. So I got to start to know the region. Then I traveled around the country for two years and I couldn't find any place as nice as the Mid Hudson so when I came back here I moved back here, I lived in Clintondale.

  One day I heard on the radio that this big boat I'd never heard called The Clearwater was coming to the area … to Beacon ironically … with a load of pumpkins. It was around mid-October of '72 and I decided, `Well, that sounds like fun.' So I went down to the waterfront and Pete (Seeger) was
on Board which doesn't happen that often and he points to the old Beacon ferry dock and said we're going to start to rebuild this dock as a place to land in Beacon and I volunteers to help build the dock. So I volunteered two or three weekends. It was 6 or 7 people and me and Pete and then for a couple weekends it was 4 of us and Pete and then for about two or three weekends it was just Pete and I. And you cannot spend that amount of time with him without him suckering you into something, you just can't.

  You know, `You know John if we all work together we can clean up the Hudson River' and I thought, Oh this guy is ... I love him, he was a hero. Actually being with him was like being at a Pete Seeger concert because it's true, you'd sit there working with him alone, his back would get stiff from hammering away at this dock, he'd stand up, stretch and yodel. He'd just start yodeling across the river. My God what is going on here. Then he'd be banging away and if we were banging too slow, he'd start singing a work song. He'd get the rhythm going and then he'd get going at one of his little homilies, we can all work together to clean the Hudson River.

  So I ended up volunteering for Clearwater and we started this project called The People's Pipeline and the '72 Clean Water Act was just passed and what we would do is we would take these permits that industries were get ting and we'd look to see what industries were allowed to do. We'd go out and visit these places and see what they actually were doing.

  And the first place I visited… again coincidentally … was Tuck Tape in Beacon, NY on the Fishkill Creek. They had a permit for two discharges and we found 26, collected all the evidence, brought it down to the U.S. Attorney's Office, they were prosecuted, they paid a big fine and of course I was stunned. I just didn't think it was going to work that way. Because when Pete said we all work together I was like, `In your dreams.'

  ... The thing was that back then anywhere you went, you would find the evidence of pollution whatever that company was doing, just blatantly. The Candle Company in New Windsor. You went out behind the company and
there was wax everywhere in the trees on the ground. At Tuck Tape, there was waste adhesive all over the ground. Dye Works, Beacon Text Print … you'd go one day and the creek was red, one day it was blue, this is the way it was 30 years ago. It was quite shocking.

  And so I was involved in the first prosecutions. In fact Beacon … Tuck Tape … I believe, was the first successful prosecution of the Clean Water Act in New York State. And they were convicted and so that got me started as a volunteer... Clearwater hired me to be on their full time staff which I was on the full time staff for 3 years, I went to work after that for
a group called the Center for the Hudson River Valley, it was started by a group of people from Scenic Hudson which then merged with Scenic Hudson years later. Then I worked for Congressman Fish briefly, and then I worked for Maurice Hinchey. And then I quit to become a commercial fisherman.

  And then the Riverkeeper with Hudson River Fishermen's Association offered me the Riverkeeper position. It had been tried once before, but wasn't successful. ... I say I was the first full time Riverkeeper because they couldn't raise the money to do it. In 1983 we decided to start it up again and we got a boat built for us up in Kingston at the Hudson River Maritime Center and then we launched it and then that summer within two months of having launched it was my first big case as the Riverkeeper.

Q:  . A lot of people might not remember that that was right off the shores of Dutchess County.

A:   It was the Exxon case where we discovered Exxon oil tankers coming up the Hudson rinsing themselves out into the Hudson at Hyde Park and Port Ewen and loading up with fresh water and bringing the fresh water down to Aruba to run their oil refinery. If they had water left over they would sell it to the island.

Q:   So they were actually after the clean water, more than they were trying to rinse out?

A:Yeah, because they weren't making any deliveries on the Hudson River, the reason they came up the Hudson River was in pursuit for the fresh water to fill up the fresh water they had to rinse out.

  So my first big case as Riverkeeper was the Exxon case and they sold some of the oil … they said they didn't sell it, they received money for it. I love that. But what was interesting, this got a lot of coverage. When NY Times wrote about it they talked about the water taking. Poughkeepsie talked about pollutants being dumped into water. Poughkeepsie Journal was the one who got it right and really put us on the map.

  Exxon ended up settling out of court for a couple of million dollars which created the Hudson River Improvement Fund.

  That's what we ended up doing. Were weren't sure what we were going to do when we started to be honest about it, but I got tipped off by a state trooper, who heard that tankers were going up the Hudson.

  That launched the Riverkeeper program nationally. If there was already a tanker at Hyde Park and another one came up, it would anchor at Port Ewen, 1,500 feet from Port Ewen drinking water. It was a big case and then we went onto at least 100 more. I can't remember how many we did all together. I was Riverkeeper for 17 years.

Q:   Just about when you started this project?

A:   Yeah and then I was on a leave of absence. I had already decided
that I wasn't going back because, well it had a lot to do with my wife's condition, but she's fine now. But the government wanted us to do this project and I decided that I really wanted to be a part of the planning of this.

Q:   So how did you get started? Did you approach the governor? Did he approach you?

A:   John Cahill (former commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation) and I just started talking about it and I called him up and told him that I would really like to be part of this. He asked me if I wanted to be hired. At the same time Pace University asked me to work at the University as their resident scholar in Environmental studies. The contract was with Pace University.

Q:   What got you so excited about the project?

A:   Advocacy, it's not pleasant. We use the language of war. It wasn't completely inaccurate, because after every war there's the rebuilding that comes afterward and you know we had a lot of warfare in the Hudson River and we had to start turning our attention in how to start rebuilding this ecosystem. It's not enough to just say, `Let's get the pollution and the polluters and everybody to start obeying the law.' We also have to turn our attention to (the question of) how does our living near the estuary start enhancing the estuary. That's part of the rebuilding process. We need to rebuild the way we live so that the way we live complements the estuary.

Q:   How does it continue what you started as Riverkeeper, patrolling for illicit polluters?

A:   Controversies and issues are exciting, but after a while you start feeling like a punch drunk fighter and you start thinking, `What am I going to do with the rest of my life?' I started thinking, `There's got to be someone who takes our place.'

  I'm part of the generation that's kind of a parent to the contemporary environmental group. I'm old enough to be that. I was 20 on the first Earth Day, but I started working at the Clearwater when I was 23. We're now becoming the grandparents of the environmental movement. The legacy can't just be case work, it can't just be victory, that's not enough to pass along. You've got to pass along something that transforms the way we live. In advocacy you don't build a new way of society. You don't build a new way of living through litigation. You build it on transforming people's values and doing business differently and to do that we had to start exploring the river … not just exploring its problems.

  And the education side after years and years of teaching people what the threat of what pollution means and why its important to save the river in relation to the things that threaten it, we had to start educating about the river for its own value. To do that we are going to have to build an institution. So the governor made this announcement and really tuned into what I was thinking after 27 years of advocacy. That it was time for that transformation and the way it was going to happen was really to build up your institution figuratively, physically, virtually … build an institution that was about the Hudson River.

  On reflection, it's really amazing after all decades of full-time vigilance on behalf of the river that we haven't been doing something already. It's more surprising than the fact that we are going to build something. As he often does, I think this was very much hatched into the governor's mind like the Watershed Agreement and the Environmental Bond Act. He surprised us all with this idea, but it really was the right idea. He looked at the history and looked at the fact that we had to institutionalize the river and not in the cold sense of the word, but that the river should be an institution within our own lives as well as an institution that makes the Hudson its own life.

Q:   Hearing about your experience with Pete Seeger and that transformation of your life that turned you toward the river as an advocate … it struck me that was the mission of Clearwater to get people out to the river and get them excited about it and this seems like a similar goal, maybe just bigger.

A:   It's operating at a different level. Clearwater operates at a very important level that will always be necessary. Pete's active genius was to say that we are going to save the Hudson by making people experience the Hudson. If you look back on it now from a vantage point of 30 years when Clearwater was first conceived, it's one of those simple acts of genius… that the river will save itself if people get the chance to experience the river.

  And now what we're talking about is really following up on that idea in a sophisticated fashion.

  We pull out species from the river and put them in an aquarium, do art work about the river. We need to figure out a way for people to experience the mysteries of the river in a way that hits people not just emotionally but intellectually and environmentally as well. The Hudson Riverscope (a project funded under the aegis of the Rivers and Estuaries Center) will give the opportunity for people to see something that they otherwise would not see, experience something they otherwise would not experience. You're limited by what you can see. It's not the Caribbean. There's a dark mysterious river out there, but we can see that and understand that through ways we haven't explored yet through using your ears, eyes, your hands. Bringing this home to people … it also has great practical value. If we're able to do that, that means that people can see what is happening now. One of the most frustrating things with the PCB issue is that when the time comes to sit down and put this all together, the data is five years old. The controversy is living in real time, but the river is not.

  One of the exciting things about Pataki and Pete … all great changes and great institutions… begin with an act of the imagination. The imagination is a great underrated quality and is extraordinarily important. For somebody to say that in a world full of big expensive institutions we're going to build an institution for the Hudson River requires an act of the imagination. And then it takes the courage to build on that. It's one of the things that I learned in advocacy and I had the opportunity to learn it from the best … Pete, Bob Boyle (founder of the Hudson River Fishermen's Association and author), Frannie Reese (founder of Center of Hudson River Valley), another one who had imagined the future and had the courage to pursue it. But sometimes you're imagination can start to suffer, you forget the importance of it. I've done it myself. Everyone can't be doing what you're doing. You also need people imagining a different future, but in the end if we don't have any polluters it opens up the river to more polluters.

  In my career as well as in my own personal vision of what I thought the next chapter was for the Hudson River, Governor Pataki's announcement rang really true and I really want to be part of it.

Q:   You mention Bob Boyle. He coined that famous phrase about the Hudson: `the Hudson River is the most beautiful, messed up, productive, ignored and surprising piece of water on the face of the earth.' I don't think you could call it ignored anymore. In the future, what do you think the phrase will be to describe the river?

A:  That's a good question. I think the River will always be surprising, and 50 years from now there's going to be somebody my age sitting at another restaurant table with another reporter saying that this is the most surprising body of water and my hope is that this is the one phrase that survives. I hope that people will always have the imagination and intellectual curiosity to be surprised by the river.

     And that's what drives good research too, that's what drives good science … it's the willingness to be surprised. Science is about testing ideas and testing those ideas with theories are not always the product of science themselves, it's a product of keen observation, a willingness and ability to be surprised, trusting what you see and use your imagination to say this is what we'll test.

     Same is with education, you want to be able to surprise your students. So I'd be happy with the phrase, `The Hudson is the most surprising and well taken care of river in the world.' That would make me a very happy man.

     I actually think that we can get there. When I first started I was 23, I believed that I would see a fully functioning and recovered Hudson River ecosystem in my lifetime and now that I've turned 53 there's still a long long way to go. With the large issues there's still all the small issues. There's petro chemicals running off parking lots, there's acid deposition coming from all over the globe sometimes. It's a big complex world out there and now my hope is that someday my son or daughter's children are going to be able to say … look at this restored river.

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