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 Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability." October 2001
In 1966 Penn Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four-foot pipe in the Croton-Harmon rail yard. The oil went up the Hudson, blackened the beaches, and made the shad taste of diesel, so they couldn't be sold down in Fulton Fish Market in the city. The people of Crotonville came together, in the only public building in that town, the American Legion Hall. There were 300 people that night leaning against the rifle racks, standing room only-virtually everybody who lived in that town was there. They were angry and began talking about all the original founders. A very patriotic village, it had the highest mortality rate during the first two years of World War II. Many of them served in the Marines and were combat veterans from World War II and Korea. These weren't radicals; they weren't militants. They were patriotic people. And that night they started talking about violence. They saw something that they thought they owned-their rich fisheries-being robbed from them by large corporate entities. They'd been to the government agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution-the conservation department and the Coast Guard-and they were given the bum's rush. Virtually everybody in Crotonville had come to the conclusion that government was in cahoots with the polluters and the only way they would reclaim the Hudson was if they could find the polluters themselves. Somebody suggested that they put a match in the oil slick coming out of the Penn Central pipe and blow it up. Somebody else said they should jam a mattress up the pipe and flood the rail yard with waste. Another person said they should float a raft of dynamite into the Indian Point Power Plant, which at that time was killing a million fish a day on its intake screens and taking food off the family tables. Then Bob Boyle stood up. He was a former Marine and a longtime outdoor editor of Sports Illustrated. He was a great fly and spin fisherman, has written a half-dozen books on fishing, and is one of the gurus of dry flytying in America. Two years before he had written an article about angling in the Hudson for the magazine, and in his research he had come across an ancient navigational statute from 1888. It said that it was illegal to pollute any body of water in the United States and that you had to pay a high penalty if you got caught polluting. Also, there was a bounty on polluters that said that anybody who turned in the polluter got to keep half the fine. Boyle sent a copy of this law to five lawyers at Time Inc. and asked them, "Is this still on the books?" They sent him a memo back saying, "It's still the law. In 80 years it's never been enforced, but it's still the law." As the men were talking violence, Boyle waved a copy of the memo. He said, "We shouldn't be breaking the law, we should be talking about enforcing it." They agreed that night to track down and prosecute every polluter on the Hudson. Eighteen months later they collected the first bounty in U.S. history on this 80-year-old statute. They got $2,000 and shut down Penn Central yard for good. This was a huge amount of money in Crotonville in 1968. There were two weeks of celebrations in town, and they used the money that was left over to go after Ciba-Geigy, American Cyanamid, and so on. In 1973 they collected the highest penalty in United States history: $200,000 from Anaconda Wire and Cable for dumping toxins. They used the money to construct a boat that they called the River Keeper. Today four River Keeper boats track down polluters on the Hudson. In 1983 they used the bounty money to hire their first full--Time River Keeper operator, a former commercial fisherman named John Cronin. He hired me as prosecuting attorney, and we started the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University Law School, in White Plains, New York. We have ten third-year students who, by a special court order, are permitted to practice law under our supervision. We give them each four polluters to sue at the beginning of the semester. They file complaints, do discovery, take depositions, go to court, argue their cases. If they don't win their cases, they don't pass. We have brought more than 200 successful legal actions against Hudson River polluters to date and have forced them to spend more than $2 billion in remediation. Today the Hudson River, which was a national joke in 1966, is an international model for recovering ecosystems. |
