Word: cronin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...whether the river, let alone, would repair itself. Not always, they say. The toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs, which were discharged into the river by General Electric plants until the company agreed to stop, do not biodegrade; they have to be removed. Pollutants have a cumulative effect--what Cronin calls "the death of a thousand cuts." An individual polluter says, "What I alone am doing is not harming this river," which may be so. But Kennedy and Cronin insist the plants that we passed--four in five minutes--are working together, even if they adhere to EPA standards...
...indicated earlier, Kennedy does not see factories as blights on Eden but as signs of a rich and useful economy. Neither he nor Cronin is opposed to industry, condominium construction, powerboat use or anything that might bring the fullness of communal American life into contact with the river. They simply oppose anyone destroying the river. "This is a fight to save a resource for as many constituencies as possible," says Kennedy. "Here there is room for everyone." As he speaks, a trio of ducks puts on a brief air show high above the electrical wires that cross the river...