Letter from the President
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Waterkeeper Movement
From the creation of our movement in 1966, Waterkeepers have known that there’s no more important human or civil right than the right to a clean environment.

Environmental injury is an offense against a basic human right and the injury always lands hardest on the backs of the poor. Four out of every five toxic waste dump sites in America are in a black neighborhood. The nation’s largest toxic waste dump is in Emelle, Alabama where 90 percent of the residents are black. The highest concentrations of toxic waste dumps in America are on the South Side of Chicago. The most contaminated zip code in California is East Los Angeles, and so on and so on. Why? Because polluting industries go where they can most easily dominate the local political landscape.

Public trust assets—or commons—are those resources that are not readily reduced to private property and by their nature belong to the community. They include oceans, lakes, flowing rivers, aquifers, fisheries, wandering animals, parks and public spaces. All are held in trust by the government for the people. They help define us as a community, they underpin our economy and culture and are the source of economic vitality. The first sign of tyranny is government’s complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain. Since the public trust is our community’s life support system, its theft is arguably the gravest threat to human rights.

The fundamental responsibility of government is to protect the commons on behalf of all the people. The best measure of how a democracy functions is how it distributes the goods of the land. Does it keep the public trust assets, the commons, in the hands of all the people, rich and poor alike, or does it allow them to be privatized and concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy or influential individuals?

This struggle for control of the commons defines the Waterkeeper movement. We recognize that we’re not protecting these waterways for nature, the fishes or the birds. We protect them because we understand that nature is the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to meet our obligation as a generation, a nation and a civilization to provide our children with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as our parents gave us, we must start by protecting our infrastructure: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the public lands that enrich us and connect us to our past and to our history, provide context to our communities and are the source ultimately of our values, our virtues and our character as a people.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Waterkeeper movement, let me tell you a little bit of history. Hudson Riverkeeper was established in 1966 by blue-collar commercial and recreational fisherman who mobilized to reclaim the Hudson River from polluters. The Hudson is home to a 350 year old commercial fishery, one of the oldest in North America. Many of our members come from families that have been fishing the Hudson continuously since Dutch colonial times. They use the same traditional methods taught by Algonquin Indians to the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam and then passed down through the generations.

One of the enclaves of the Hudson’s commercial fishing is Crotonville, New York, a little village 30 miles north of New York City on the east bank of the river. Crotonville’s residents were not prototypical affluent environmentalists; they were factory workers, carpenters, laborers and electricians. Many made their living, or at least some part of it, fishing or crabbing the Hudson. Most had little expectation that they would ever see Yellowstone, or Yosemite or the Everglades. For them, the environment was their backyard—the bathing beaches, swimming and fishing holes of the Hudson River. Richie Garrett, the first president of Riverkeeper, used to say about the Hudson, “It’s our Riviera, it’s our Monte Carlo.” Richie Garrett was a gravedigger from Ossining, NY. He often told his followers, “I’ll be the last to let you down.”

In 1966, Penn Central railroad began vomiting oil from a four-and-a-half foot pipe in a Croton-Harmon rail yard. The oil blackened the beaches and made the shad taste of diesel, leaving them unsaleable at New York City’s fish market. In response, the people of Crotonville gathered in the only public building in the town, the Parker-Bale American Legion Hall. This was a very patriotic community; Crotonville had the highest mortality rate of any community in America in World War II. Like Richie Garrett, a Korean War vet, almost all the original founders, board members and officers of Hudson Riverkeeper were ex-marines. These were not radicals, or militants; their patriotism was rooted in the bedrock of our country. But that night they started talking about violence. They saw something that they thought they owned—the abundance of the Hudson’s fisheries that their parents had exploited for generations and the purity of its waters—being robbed from them by corporate entities over which they had no control. They had been to the government agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution; the Corps of Engineers, the state Conservation Department and the Coast Guard. And they were given the bum’s rush. Richie Garrett and a pilot named Art Glowka paid some 20 visits to the Army Corps of Engineers Colonel in Manhattan begging him to do his job and shut down that Penn Central pipe. Finally, the Colonel told them in exasperation, “these [the Penn Central board of directors] are important people, we can’t treat them this way.” In other words, ‘we can’t force them to obey the law.’

By March 18, 1966 virtually everybody in Crotonville had come to the conclusion that government was in cahoots with the polluters. The only way they were going to reclaim the river was to confront the polluters directly. Somebody suggested that they put a match to the oil slick coming out of the Penn Central pipe. Somebody said they should jam a mattress up the pipe and flood the rail yard with its own waste. Someone else suggested floating a raft of dynamite into the intake of the Indian Point Power Plant, which was sucking in and killing close to a million fish each day and taking food off their family’s tables.

Then another marine took the microphone. Bob Boyle was the outdoor editor of Sports Illustrated magazine. He was a world famous angler and the author of several books on recreational fishing. Two years earlier he had written an article for Sports Illustrated about angling in the Hudson. His research had brought him across a federal Navigation Statue called the Rivers and Harbors Act, a law from 1888 which made it illegal to pollute any waterway in the United States and provided for high penalties. Surprisingly, the law included a bounty provision allowing anybody who turned in a polluter to keep half the fine. Boyle had sent a copy of the law over to the Time Inc. libel lawyers asking, “Is this still a good law?” They sent him back a memo saying, “It’s never been enforced, but it’s still on the books.” That evening, before 300 men and women angered to the point of plotting violence, he held up a copy of that memo and said, “We shouldn’t be talking about breaking the law, we should be talking about enforcing it.” They resolved that evening that they were going to organize themselves as the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association—which later became Riverkeeper—and that they were going to go out and track down and prosecute every polluter on the river.

Eighteen months later they collected the first bounty in United States history under the 19th century statute. They shut down the Penn Central Pipe. They used the money that was left over to go after Ciba-Geigy, Standard Brands and American Cyanide, many of the biggest corporations in America. One after the other they shut those polluters down. In 1973, they collected the highest penalty in United States history against a corporate polluter; $200,000 from Anaconda Wire and Cable for dumping toxics into the river in Hastings, N.Y. They used the bounty money to build a boat and hire a commercial fisherman, John Cronin, as the first full-time paid Riverkeeper. In 1984 John Cronin hired me using bounty money to be Riverkeeper’s prosecuting attorney.

Since then we’ve brought 400 successful lawsuits against environmental polluters on the Hudson and we’ve forced polluters to spend almost $4 billon on remediation. The Hudson today is an international model for ecosystem protection. This river, a national joke in 1966 is today the richest water body in the North Atlantic. It produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon, than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator. It’s the only river system on both sides of the Atlantic that still has strong spawning stocks of all its historical species of migratory fish. The miraculous resurrection of the Hudson has inspired the creation of over 150 Waterkeepers – Riverkeepers, Baykeepers, Soundkeepers and others – all across the country and around the world.

Waterkeeper Alliance issues licenses to use the Waterkeeper name after determining that a new program meets our strict standards. Each Waterkeeper has a patrol boat, they have a full-time paid Waterkeeper and they sue polluters. They make sure nobody steals our water from our communities and that those waterways stay in the hands of the public, where they belong.