(Very long but great.)
Well, it looks like the media and the EPA have done a good snow job onYet all this has now fallen under a shadow. In 2004, the Environmental Protection Administration will begin the largest dredging operation in history in a quixotic attempt to rid the Hudson of the last traces of a relatively harmless industrial chemical present only in a few parts per million-one ounce in 32 tons or a teaspoon over five acres. Working eighteen hours a day for five years, the EPA plans to excavate a 40-mile stretch north of Albany of nearly 2.65 million cubic yards of silt and mud-enough to cover 40 football fields to a height of five stories. These spoils will be carted off by huge dump trucks to who-knows-where, to be spread upon the landscape in "de-watering" ponds, then eventually embedded in concrete and shipped off by rail for ultimate disposal near Buffalo or Houston. When this is all done, the EPA will then dig up another 2 billion pounds of sand and gravel from somewhere and dump it back into the river, trying to recreate the aquatic environment.
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What is the purpose of all this? Ostensibly, it is to remove the last 150,000 pounds of PCBs, a chlorinated hydrocarbon that was dumped into the river by General Electric Company from 1947 to 1977. Once thought to be a serious cancer risk, PCBs have turned out to be relatively harmless. People who handled them for decades in an occupational setting have proved to have lower cancer rates than the rest of the population. Although the EPA never fails to mention "suspected carcinogen" in its press releases, the actual scientific justification for the dredging is some sketchy and contested evidence that PCBs may cause some temporary retardation in learning or motor skills among infants who are highly exposed in the womb. This kind of exposure would require a pregnant woman to eat a contaminated fish per day, every day. By its own standards, the EPA is preparing to spend $500 million-all of it billable to General Electric-to ensure that a woman with child can live by subsistence fishing along the Hudson River.
But that is only the official explanation. The real purpose of the dredging will be to prove to the people of the Hudson Valley that nineteenth and twentieth century industrialization was a gigantic mistake-a "pollution-based prosperity" that never should have happened in the first place. People actually living in these communities don't share this vision. But it has always been the favorite fantasy of the Hudson's landed aristocracy-possibly the closest thing America has ever come to producing a true leisure class. For decades this courageous little band of aristocrats and their admirers have fought a rear-guard action against power plants, factories, and anything to do with industrial life. In the process, they helped give birth to what is known as the "environmental movement."
