The Hudson, 400 Years Later (NYT Editorial)

All this week, a mighty procession of ships and boats is sailing and motoring up the Hudson River from New York Harbor to Albany, stopping in harbor towns and cities along the way to the roaring of cannons and pealing of church bells. It’s a big event for a big anniversary: the 400th year since Henry Hudson made the same voyage in his little ship, the Half Moon. It is also an opportunity to take stock — to see how far the Hudson has come and how far it still has to go.

The river is a living logbook of environmental destruction and rebirth. Having suffered a century of industrial despoliation, it inspired the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s, starting with the successful battle to stop Consolidated Edison from building a hydroelectric plant on Storm King Mountain, south of Newburgh.

Landfills were plugged; power projects thwarted. And after decades of delay, General Electric has, at last, begun to dredge PCB’s from the river above Albany, slowly clearing away the final dark stain of the Hudson’s industrial past. As all the blue crabs, striped bass and bald eagles would tell you if they could, the river flows far cleaner than before.

But the job is far from finished. When the flotilla heads upriver, it will pass gleaming parks and river walks, and go under a historic railroad bridge that is being turned into a soaring public walkway. It will also pass condominium sites in places like Yonkers, where development threatens to turn the riverbanks into the high-rise equivalent of stadium bleachers, and the aging Indian Point nuclear plant, whose outdated cooling pipes suck up and kill billions of fish and fish eggs. For all the progress, many of the Hudson’s fish populations remain seriously threatened.

The river’s fiercest advocates — among them Pete Seeger, who turned 90 this year; Riverkeeper; the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries — know the struggle is far from over. One of them, the nonprofit Scenic Hudson, recently began an all-out campaign to protect 65,000 acres of land along the Hudson from sprawl and overdevelopment. This is a 10-year project that will require cooperation among various land trusts, New York State and the federal government.

The goal is noble, its future uncertain. The financial crisis has put a huge dent in both public and private resources. But economic recovery will come someday, and the river will still be here. Long after this week’s party ends, there will still be serious work to do to preserve the Hudson River’s long-term vitality, and we are counting on New York State to dive back in.

From the New York Times Editors