New York: Save the Hudson River!

You probably know the song “If I Had a Hammer” even if you weren’t around in the 1960s. It was composed by Pete Seeger, one of the greatest folk singers America ever produced. An icon of alternative culture, an environmentalist and peace activist, Seeger was from New York State and grew up around the Hudson River. 

First observed by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Hudson is a curious river, its shores lined with stories. The surrounding area actually holds one tenth of the US population! 

sleepy hollow 

Did you know that the Hudson River runs in two directions? That the Hudson Valley is the oldest wine-making and grape-growing region in the United States? And that 19th writer Washington used the name of a village on the river – Sleepy Hollow – in the title of a famous story? And last, but not least, that it also became the birthplace of the American environmental movement? 

pollution 

From 1949 onwards Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi lived in Beacon, one of the Hudson riverside towns. They found spirituality in nature, and the river, in particular, but it was a nature that was compromised. For decades, the river had been contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals from power plants and factories. 

In reaction to this, in 1966 Pete Seeger and friends built a replica Hudson River sailboat. Over 30 metres long, the Clearwater is modelled on old Dutch riverboats. The water at that time was dirty, but Seeger’s idea was that by engaging with the boat, people would engage with the river and care about it. 

In 1970, Seeger and friends sailed to Washington, D.C., to deliver petitions. Two years later, the Clean Water Act was passed.

yes, we can

Pete Seeger was “America’s tuning fork,” as Barack Obama said when the singer died in 2014. He remained an active political presence in the Hudson Valley throughout his life. The Clearwater is still used as a platform to educate thousands of schoolchildren and the general public about the ecology and history of the Hudson River. 

Recently, the restored Clearwater sailed to Washington, D.C. to fight for clean water once again. And for the past 50 years, the annual Clearwater festival has brought a spirit of celebration and music to Pete Seeger’s spiritual home.

(Play the audio)

Interview: if i had a river

At the inauguration of President Obama in 2009 Bruce Springsteen performed alongside an 89-year-old singer whom he called “The father of American folk music.” His name was Pete Seeger and he co-wrote such famous songs as “If I Had a Hammer.” But Seeger, who died in 2014, was also a pioneer environmental activist. He lived in a place called Beacon on the Hudson River in upstate New York where he operated a campaign boat called the Clearwater. Today the boat still functions as an educational project. As its director, Dave Conover, explains, the Hudson is rich in both wildlife and history: 

Dave Conover (Standard American accent): We have a lot of different species of fish that use the Hudson as a nursery ground and a... a spawning ground. There are fish that spend most of their lives out in the ocean, and then in the springtime come up the river to spawn, and some of these are very dramatic episodes, like the striped bass is big. And sturgeon, we have sturgeon in the Hudson that can get quite large as well. So there’s a lot of amazing natural history stories that you can find in the Hudson. And then of course the Hudson has also been very important in the human history of the region, from the Native American times through Dutch settlements, English, and then of course the American history as well. 

a national joke

Unfortunately, the presence of humans wasn’t kind to the river. Local factories used it as it as a dumping ground: 

Dave Conove: There’s a famous story about a General Motors plant that used to exist in Tarrytown, near the Tappan Zee Bridge. It’s no longer there but when it was in its heyday you could tell what colour they were painting the cars by looking at the colour of the Hudson River. So if the river was red, that meant they were painting the cars red that day, which of course means they were getting rid of a lot of waste chemicals and a lot of waste paints in the Hudson. And that was not unusual for companies to see the Hudson as a cheap way of getting rid of things that they didn’t want. 

So by the time the 1960s came around the Hudson River was a bit of a national joke. There were times when the oxygen levels in the water –  that’s critical to support fish – were close to zero, so fish were dying. And the sewage and waste oil and other pollutants, the trash and that sort of thing, made the Hudson a place to avoid.

taking to the water

That was when Pete Seeger decided to do something: 

Dave Conove: Pete Seeger and some friends of his came up with this idea to build this replica sailboat. And people thought that was kind of crazy: why do you want to build this beautiful sailboat, and sail it on this horrible water? And the reason was that if you were going to try to get the river cleaned up, you had to change attitudes about the river, and you had to give people kind of a new first impression of what the Hudson was all about. Everybody’s impression was that the Hudson was beyond hope, so you had to give them some cause for hope and make it so it’s not just a hopeless endeavour.

renaissance

And yet Seeger’s project was to have a massive impact. Dave Conover believes that the Hudson is the home of the American environmental movement:

Dave Conove: So by sailing on the river people saw its potential, and created some grassroots support for a really important laws that came into being, such as the Clean Water Act, which is one of the big federal legislation that came about in the early ‘70s that Clearwater played an important role in supporting. And what that did was it started to change people’s minds, that rivers were not meant to be places to get rid of pollution, sewage, chemicals, that sort of thing. And the support built into a political will to devote money to upgrade sewage treatment plants, and also to strictly regulate how rivers were used to dispose of wastewater. So that really was the start of the Hudson’s renaissance, the modern renaissance of the river.  

For information on sailings, deck tours and volunteering: www.clearwater.org