ALBANY — Two emails about one of the world’s great rivers landed in my inbox within an hour of each other.
The first was about a city of Albany effort to boost waterfront access. The new gateways, the city says, will provide those wanting to see the Hudson “with clear directions to the riverfront and its many recreational assets.” Sounds good.
The second email was about a bill proposed in the Legislature that would ban the dumping of nuclear wastewater into the Hudson, as planned by the company that’s decommissioning the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
And there, in a nutshell, is the story of the Hudson River. Progress met by regression. Headway met by stupidity. We want the river to be an asset. We want to enjoy its beauty.
And yet we still treat it as a dumping ground for toxins.
This contradiction is not new, of course. Artists so celebrated the beauty of the Hudson that there’s an entire school of paintings named for it. Still, we industrialized much of the river and treated it as an open sewer, hideously epitomized by the decades-long General Electric practice of pouring PCBs into the water.
The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, helped end the worst of those practices and has led to significant improvements in the cleanliness of the water. Yet municipal sewage overflows continue to pollute it.
Think about that. Here in one of the nation’s highest-tax states, our infrastructure is still so inadequate that human waste flows into the river when there’s heavy rain. It’s an appalling failure that, as the Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein recently reported, makes swimming in the river a risky proposition.
“I recommend people think about what the weather was like a day or two before they go to the beach,” said Dan Shapley, director of advocacy and policy at the environmental group Riverkeeper. “If there was a big thunderstorm that rolled…
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