Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 65
The fight continues
In the ensuing decades, the three environmental groups have waged battles large and small
in order to bring the Hudson River back to life. Riverkeeper began patrolling the river in small
boats to keep an eye on both polluters and the health of the Hudson. Scenic Hudson worked
to preserve land and build new parks throughout the Hudson Valley, restoring watersheds
and the river’s coastline. And the Clearwater continued to sail up and down the river, bringing
scores of school children on board for trips and inspiring future generations of environmental
leaders.
Time and time again, change came not from the top down, but from everyday citizens
putting pressure on governments and corporations to stop treating the river as a sink for
disposal and instead as a public resource. The river began to get noticeably cleaner, and
people’s perceptions of the river began to slowly change.
n 2007, another one of Pete Seeger’s long-held dreams came to fruition when the River Pool
was built and installed in the Hudson River in his hometown of Beacon.
The 20-foot long rainbow colored pool floats near the river bank and gives kids a safe - and
free - place to swim. Every July, hundreds of people swim across the river from Beacon to
Newburgh in order to raise funds to keep the pool going. A pool in the Hudson would have
been unthinkable forty years ago; now the state of New York will start testing its own larger,
filtered river pools in the Hudson this summer.
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