John Cronin is an unlikely hero in one of the great success stories of the modern environmental movement.
The son of a 1950s working-class family from Yonkers, N.Y., Cronin, 46, is a college dropout who spent his youth drifting from one job to another.
He worked as a stablehand, a dishwasher, a grocery bagger, a door-to-door salesman, a house painter, a roofer and a commercial fisherman.
A constant in his life was pessimism. “I believed you couldn’t fight city hall,” he said. “I believed the little guy couldn’t win.”
Turns out he was wrong. His is a story is about a little guy who learned to beat city hall–and the statehouse, the federal government, the electric power industry and corporate polluters including Exxon, Mobil Oil and General Electric.
Cronin is a riverkeeper. Since 1983, he has been patroling the Hudson River’s 315 miles as the eyes and ears of a group of outdoorsmen who call themselves the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association. He works the front lines in what he describes as a war against environmental lawbreakers who pushed one of the world’s richest waterways to the edge of death.
Cronin and his famous partner in the eco-crusade, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tell their story in “The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right” (Scribner, $26).
While they write about lofty legal principles, they also tell tales about scaling fences in the dead of night, tunneling under waterfront factories and bouncing up against giant tankers to capture evidence of pollution.
“We talk about what happens when everyday citizens roll up their sleeves and confront polluters face to face,” Cronin said from Garrison, N.Y. “This is about holding somebody responsible.”
Kennedy, 43, the son of Robert F. Kennedy, is the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law and chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper organization. He was raised with a sense of stewardship for the environment.
Cronin grew up in an apartment a mile from the Hudson. He swam in the river as a boy, before much was known about the river’s pollution.
But he had little connection with environmental issues until the early 1970s, when he volunteered with a grassroots conservation group, Clearwater, and helped collect evidence that led to the successful prosecution of a polluter.
The company, which had been dumping chemicals into the river, paid a $200,000 fine and helped change Cronin’s life.
“I knew then that it was possible for the little guy to win, and to win against incredible odds,” Cronin recalled.
At the heart of Cronin and Kennedy’s work is an ancient legal principle: that the air, waters, dunes, tidelands, river and bay bottoms, fisheries, shellfish beds and migratory animals belong to all people.
“Government trustees are obligated to maintain the value of these systems for all users, including future generations,” they write.
“Like other rights, public trust rights are said to derive from `natural’ or God-given law. They cannot be extinguished.”
But as Hudson fishermen learned in the 1960s, when they organized, the government can’t always be relied on. It was the government, after all, that had been allowing General Electric to dump fluids containing cancer-causing PCBs into the Hudson for more than 30 years.
With activists dogging the case, GE paid a $7 million fine, but it was too little too late. The PCBs had contaminated 200 miles of river bottom and left most of the river’s fish inedible. The pollution effectively killed the river’s venerable commercial fishery.
Since then, the Hudson Riverkeeper organization has been involved in 90 or more confrontations with polluters, and its fame has grown. There are now riverkeepers patroling 21 waterways from Alaska to Maine.
“Most important is that people’s attitudes have changed,” Cronin said, though the fishery is still dead. “In the ’60s and ’70s, people expected to see oil slicks and floating sewage in the Hudson. These days if someone sees the tiniest sheen on the water, our phones ring off the hook.”
