5/14/97 Clearwater's State of the Hudson Report by Andre Mele, Environmental Director We frequently hear that the Hudson River has been cleaned up. The choice to believe or not believe such a statement must be based on the answers to two important questions: "Do the data support the conclusion," and, "Do I believe the person sponsoring the conclusion?" Before the Clean Water Act of 1972, which Clearwater played a major role in passing, inputs of nutrients from human waste had caused long stretches of the river to become virtually lifeless. Today those inputs have been reduced to the point where most of the river is swimmable. This is the environmental movement's greatest victory. Wholesale dumping of refuse into the river has all but ceased, and some protections exist for the tidal wetlands that nurture river wildlife. The Hudson is thus cleaner in some ways, but not cleaner in others. Our knowledge of health effects from invisible chemicals found in quantities once considered insignificant has improved greatly over the last 20 years, so in many ways our redefinition of a "dirty" river has outstripped any reductions in contaminant inputs. Laws which were supposed to call for the elimination and reduction of ongoing inputs of toxic chemicals have proven to be largely ineffectual. Every year a known 1.5 million gallons of toxic waste, and possibly many millions more that are not on the reporting list, flow into the Hudson from factories and wastewater treatment plants. Factoring out plant closings and changes in the ways chemicals must be reported, real reductions over the last decade have been very small indeed. Laws calling for cleanup of toxic and hazardous waste have proven to be similarly inadequate. There are hundreds of unremediated toxic and hazardous waste sites in New York State alone. PCBs are still flowing into the tidal Hudson, twenty years after the manufacture and use of PCBs was banned. The shale bedrock beneath one of the two General Electric plants near Glens Falls is so saturated with the chemical that nearly-pure oily PCBs are being forced hundreds of feet sideways through tiny fissures in the rock, and into the river at Hudson Falls, NY. Recent EPA studies have demonstrated that PCBs in highly-contaminated sediment below the two plant sites are re-entering the water, and are in fact the principal source of PCB fluxes to the Hudson estuary. PCBs cause cancer, but perhaps most relevant for the average Hudson Valley resident are two sets of low-level effects: endocrine disruption and neurotoxicity. In amounts that have been found in Hudson Valley residents' blood, PCBs are capable of acting as surrogates for the body's natural hormones -- but with a radically different and destructive "message" to the body. We have also recently learned that PCBs evaporate, and that people living near the river are inhaling the equivalent of one toxic fish meal per year. This may not sound like much, but inhaled PCBs go directly to the brain, avoiding breakdown in the metabolic pathways taken by ingested toxins. The immediate concern for PCBs in adult brains is a possible reduction in levels of dopamine, a vital neurotransmitter. Low levels of dopamine are associated with depression, aggression, and if extreme, Parkinson's Disease. Between endocrine disruption and direct neurotoxicity, the PCB problem in the Hudson Valley could potentially be the widespread diminishment of what Dr. J.P. Myers called "human potential." Ironically, one of the loudest voices claiming victory in the battle to clean up the Hudson is General Electric, which has the most to gain by telling us a feel-good fairy tale about Mother Nature, in the hope that we will be lulled into letting them off the hook for cleaning up what many researchers feel may be the world's largest PCB spill. The Hudson Valley is home to three of the nation's top-ten pesticide-using counties. Ulster is number 3, Putnam number 7, and Westchester 10. In addition to direct overspray and drift, pesticides come in contact with humans through runoff to ground water, as a nonpoint pollution source to the Hudson, and, of course, through ingestion of the foods themselves. The fact that the Hudson Valley is the only recognizable geographic feature on the breast-cancer mortality map from Benjamin Goldman's The Truth About Where You Live may be the result of human exposure to a multiplicity of harmful contaminants, and of synergistic processes among those contaminants. The keystone contaminant may be low-level radioactivity from the Indian Point nuclear reactors. According to scientists from Rachel Carson to Dr. Jay Gould and Dr. Helen Caldicott, radioactive isotopes enter our bone marrow and compromise our immune systems from within, making it possible for other contaminants, even in small quantities, to become destructive. There are other diseases which might also paint a similar picture of the Hudson Valley on Goldman's map, including Parkinson's Disease, thyroid dysfunction, and prostate cancer. There are other, less well-known problems facing the Hudson Valley. There is a dark cloud building over the coal-fired American Midwest, which will blow over us if utility deregulation is not managed with the environment and human health in mind. Unrestrained development has the potential to degrade virtually every aspect of the quality of life in the Hudson Valley. Two-stroke outboard motors remain the nations's greatest unregulated source of toxic water pollution. Thousands of them ply the waters of the Hudson River watershed every year, dumping over 1,000,000 pounds of hydrocarbons. So while it may be correct to say that the Hudson is better in some ways -- it is clearly still very much at risk.

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