Environmental Journeys: 1. The Hudson River
Some journeys begin with rivers. Mine begins with the Hudson. As a little boy, I experienced the river by crossing it, catching glimpses of wide stretches of sun-speckled waters flashing through the cables and beams of the George Washington Bridge linking Manhattan and New Jersey, the Tappan Zee Bridge connecting Westchester and Rockland counties, and the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge taking us toward the majestic Catskills layering the western sky. Huddled in the back seat and also the way-way back seat of our Ford country squire, my brothers, sisters and I relied on our parents to take us on these early journeys across the Hudson to visit relatives or drive to the high-plateau valley bordering the Schoharie in the Catskills to spend our summers. The crossings were filled with anticipation.
Over the years, I became increasingly connected to the Hudson. Regarding environmental awareness, I helped organize Earth Day on the Manhattan college campus where I was a biology student. That first Earth Day, the students of Manhattan focused on the Hudson as well as the urban environment surrounding us. I set up a music and visual experience in the Thomas Hall student center (Plato’s Cave) that included Pete Seeger’s My Dirty Stream. I remember the words well.
Sailing down my dirty stream, still I love it and I’ll keep the dream; that some day, though maybe not this year, my Hudson River will once again run clear.
It starts high in the mountains of the north, crystal clear and icy trickles forth; with just a few floating wrappers of chewing gum dropped by some hikers to warn of things to come.
At Glens Falls, five thousand honest hands work at the consolidated paper plant; five million gallons of waste a day, why should we do it any other way?
Down the valley one million toilet chains find my Hudson so convenient place to drain; and each little city says, “Who, me? Do you think that sewage plants come free?”
Out in the ocean they say the water’s clear but I live right at Beacon here. Half way between the mountains and sea tacking to and fro, this thought returns to me.
Well it’s Sailing up my dirty stream, still I love it and I’ll dream that some day, though maybe not this year my Hudson and my country will run clear.
My connection to the river became increasingly personal and professional. I was married on a bluff overlooking the Hudson in Yonkers New York; I began raising my family in the small town of Nyack nestled on the river’s west bank just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. My professional career as an environmental consultant began when I answered an ad tacked onto the job opportunities board at the college. A local environmental lab — QLM Laboratories — was looking for an aquatic biologist. I had just graduated college and had gotten married a month later. I needed work. And I was looking to apply my new biology degree toward some form of environmental science. I was already enrolled in the graduate program at the City University of New York in what was referred to as the City Institute of Oceanography. The Institute included university departments and faculty spread across City College, Hunter College, Queens College, and Brooklyn College. It also had academic relationships with the Lamont Doherty Laboratory of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History. I had followed my mentor Janis Roze who had taken a position with City University and had long been associated with the museum’s herpetology department. He was an expert on coral snakes.
While at Manhattan, I had taken a marine biology course in the Bahamas and an aquatic biology course at Mount Sant Vincent’s woman’s college in the Bronx. Janis was as the instructor for both. Janis helped me recognize interconnections and patterns within ecological systems, to interpret the ecosystem and species stories fashioned by evolution and environmental factors. These stories could be read through field and laboratory observations that explored how various levels of biological organization responded to physical, chemical, and biological conditions. Discerning these relationships eventually lead me into consulting applications involving risk assessment and causal analysis. None of that was known to me as I called the number on the QLM Laboratories job announcement. I got the job.
Environmental consulting firms with teams of biologists, chemists, and engineers were relatively new in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They emerged in concert with the growing environmental movement and regulatory programs. The most significant drivers during this formative period were the passage of the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the new role of citizen intervenors, the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental agencies, and the emergence of environmental litigation brought by citizens, Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) and others. These developments were swirling around the Hudson River when I was hired by QLM Laboratories as their fourth biologist in 1972, joining Bob Williams, Tom Gustainis, and Carter Braxton Dew. The lab supported the engineering firm Quirk, Lawler, and Matusky. We were shortly joined by Larry Gerry who like me continued a long career in the environmental consulting world. The first QLM Lab was located on what became a State Superfund Site known as the Tappan Terminal Site. One source of contamination was a dye manufacturing plant immediately adjacent to the lab. Larry and I recall seeing multi-colored (i.e., dyed) people coming out of that facility after work. Fortunately the lab soon moved to Nyack, just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge on the western side of the Hudson.
My first supervisor at QLM — Tom Gustainis — greatly influenced my early development as an applied environmental scientist. I consider him one of my heroes. He was 27 when we met; all four of us biologists were young and part of a new industry of environmental consulting. Because there were only a few of us at QLM, I had the fortunate opportunity to work on all the biological tasks required in the laboratory as well as in the field. Tom instructed and guided me on my laboratory assignments. I learned to identify all the plants and animals living in the Hudson and spent 1000s of hours hunched over a microscope or standing at the fish table.
The plants ranged from microscopic plants known as phytoplankton to larger rooted aquatic plants. Pouring over the drawings and descriptions in Ruth Patrick’s book Diatoms of the United States, I especially enjoyed viewing and identifying the beautiful microscopic diatoms in water samples. They are tiny bejeweled silica pill boxes made of an upper and lower valve with a one cell plant inside. They live in houses made of glass. It is incredible to think that sediment deposits of the the seafloor and aquatic environments are made up of the ornate silica valves that housed these plants. These deposits are the source of diatomaceous earth. But the water samples from the Hudson were also periodically enriched with toxic algae, currently referred to as Hazardous Algal Blooms (HABs). Among these was the blue-green algal species Microcystis aeruginosa which forms clumps of numerous cells that float in the Hudson’s surface water during warm summers moths. These HABs can be toxic to animals and people who ingest water or inhale aerosols at high exposures. Examining numerous samples over time revealed the river’s biological pulse as phytoplankton increased and decreased. These pulses were manifestations of captured sunlight transformed into life.
The tiny animals living in the water — the zooplankton — tracked loosely with the seasonal pulses of phytoplankton upon which they fed. Through the microscope, I identified wriggling protozoans, rotifers swimming like ciliated champagne glasses, and tiny shrimp-like crustaceans of all shapes. These tiny animals are food for each other and for larval fish and certain adult fish such as herring species. These include alewife, blueback herring, and American shad that use their gills to filter the tiny animals and plants from the water. The zooplankton are crucial to life in the river.
I examined another important part of the river’s food web, the animals living in the sediments and referred to as the benthos. These include worms, crustaceans such as isopods and amphipods, mollusks such as clams and snails, and a diverse assemblage of aquatic insects. The aquatic insects are the young — the larvae or nymphs — of the adult flying insects found around water bodies. The most recognizable adult flying insects are the beautiful mayflies, damselflies, dragonflies, caddisflies, as well as the sometimes annoying swarms of tiny midges. Aquatic insects spend most of their lives developing in the water as young until they emerge, transforming into adults. Some aquatic insects spend months to years in the juvenile form living on the bottom of a river while the adult might live from a few days to weeks.
Emergence might occur at the water surface where adults escape their external pupal casts and fly free of the water. For dragonflies, the somewhat scary looking nymphs leave the water and seek out rocks, buildings, or trees to climb upon and latch onto. Molting occurs within a few hours and the adult emerges from the hardened cast shell of the nymph, leaving it behind, a memorial to amazing metamorphosis. Years later I wrote a poem as I appreciated the emergence of aquatic insects as a naturalist, a scientist, and as a fly fisherman.
Born of Water
Born of water, we’re lovers in air
Flying together from here to there
Spinning and climbing on wind gust and wing
Our lover’s dance will new life bring.
We dive to the surface in brilliant show
And return ourselves to the waters below.
Then rise again to dazzle the sun
All in a day life ends, and life’s begun.
The lab studied all Hudson River fish species. Some such as the endangered Shortnose Sturgeon were returned to the river in the field after basic measurements. We studied others such as the Striped Bass and American Shad in detail to provide input to mathematical models of their population dynamics within the river. Fish were identified, lengthed, and weighed. The relationships between weight and length are used to determine condition indices to distinguish healthy vs skinny less healthy fish. We took scales from some fish to determine their age by counting the number of rings and to examine annual variations in growth rate by measuring the distance between successive rings just as is done for trees. We then sexed the fish. This was not an X-rated activity; we simply determined gender. And we examined stomach contents to construct the interlinking food web of the river.
As a new employee, more daunting to me than the laboratory work was the prospect of “going into the field” to sample and make measurements. This sounded like lots of fun, but I had never gone into the field and knew little about real-world scientific field sampling, including what to wear or how to conduct myself. My anxiousness about a pending field trip was a sharp contrast to my earlier life spent wading through streams, walking beaches, and exploring forests and fields to see what lived there. In grade school and high school, I would regularly cut class to spend time outdoors exploring the environment. But those were my personal journeys and now I was part of a consulting company and would need to follow rules and learn specialized sampling skills. I didn’t know much about boats and my field work would require boats.
The day eventually came. Tom Gustainis told me I would be going into the field with Carter Braxton Dew, one of the four biologists and someone I was yet to meet. Braxton was always in the field; it was his domain. Tom told me where and when to meet him. A few days later I drove to a marina just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Fortunately, the day was not expected to be too cold or windy, and so I brought a light waterproof jacket.
I got there early. Braxton showed up in his truck, glared at me and said “So, you’re the kid biologist!” I nodded. Braxton was in his late twenties, much older from my perspective. “Just don’t drown!” He growled. I nodded. Braxton unloaded gear from the back of his truck. We lugged gill nets, an otter trawl, a beach seine and water quality measurement instruments to the dock and loaded the equipment onto a sleek 25’ center console Robalo.
We untied the boat’s lines from the dock. Conversation was sparse. Braxton cursed under his breath at whomever had tied up the boat the previous day. In his opinion they had tied the boat the wrong way, not allowing for the full range of the tide. I climbed aboard, and we headed out into the river to collect fish. That day we collected alewife and blue back herring, two herring species that swim from the ocean into the Hudson to spawn; white perch which migrate up and down the river; spottail shiner, a major forage species in the river; Atlantic sturgeon, a prehistoric fish that can grow to lengths of several feet; and, hogchokers, hand-sized slimy flatfish (like flounders) that stick to the floor of the boat.
So began my lifelong experience of sampling rivers, wetlands, oceans, deserts, island atolls, and tropical rain forests. I would get to know Braxton well over the years and we developed a mutual respect. He never lost his flinty edge and I smiled when I read many years later that he was a diver and fishery biologist with NOAA in Alaska, engaged in important scientific arguments about the causes of reduced king crab populations in the Bearing Sea.
Understanding the purpose and design of all this work emerged over time. I was initially a field and laboratory tech at QLM, generating but not utilizing data. But my understanding grew and my responsibilities as a data analyst and report writer eventually replaced my lab and field work within the company. Quirk left the firm, and the company changed its name to the remining major partners: Lawler, Matusky, and Skelly, otherwise known as LMS. The company was among the first environmental engineering consulting firms working on large-scale river and coastal water problems. LMS’s clientele included large energy companies such as Consolidated Edison, Orange and Rockland, and Niagara Mohawk as well as municipalities, such as New York City. The environmental implications of energy generation by steam electric power plants and hydropower were the core elements of the business with a lesser but highly expert focus on nutrient enrichment and regional water management plans.
Energy on The River
Two energy-related issues led to heightened environmental concerns and associated environmental studies, reports, expert testimony, and settlements for the Hudson River from the early 1960s through the rest of the 20th century. The first and perhaps most galvanizing for communities bordering the Hudson was a plan proposed by Con Edison in 1963 to convert majestic Storm King Mountain into a pump storage facility.
The idea was to hollow out the top of the mountain to create a one-mile wide, eight-billion-gallon reservoir to which the Hudson River water would be pumped using energy from existing power plants during off-peak hours. Then during peak hours, this water would be released back to the river by dropping it through electricity generating turbines. This pumped storage hydropower proposal drew multiple objections from citizens over the loss of the historically famous and beautiful landscape as well as the potential for adverse impacts on the Hudson’s fish populations. Scenic Hudson was formed with Frances “Franny” Reese as chair. The Hudson River Fisherman’s Association also joined in the opposition efforts. After two years of persistent wrangling, the circuit court delivered its ruling in 1965.
The “Scenic Hudson Decision” gave citizens the legal right to bring a lawsuit opposing the project. This was a game changer in the country for environmental litigation and the involvement of citizens in environmental decision making. And the Hudson is where this started, ultimately leading to the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws. To answer questions about potential harms to Hudson River fish and the ecosystem, numerous environmental studies and predictive modeling were carried out by environmental consultants including LMS. Additional work was performed on behalf of the intervenors as well as by the Fish and Wildlife Service National Power Plant Team and a team of scientists led by Phil Goodyear and later by Larry Barnthouse at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The second energy-related issue concerned the existing and proposed fossil fueled and nuclear power plants on the Hudson. Arguments were advanced that these together with the proposed Storm King project would have a cumulative impact on fish populations. The issues became intertwined from an environmental assessment standpoint. After much technical and legal wrangling, in 1979 Con Edison dropped its proposal to build the pump storage facility at Storm King for concessions on some of the electric generating plants. A formal “Peace Treaty” was reached in 1980 between environmental groups and utility companies. This was followed by decades of ongoing studies and legal actions. The 1980 agreement did not impose a requirement for cooling water towers and instead permitted once-through cooling to continue, at least for the time being.
While at LMS in the early 1970s, I evaluated whether variances for power plant discharges were technically supportable and would assure the protection and propagation of the waterbody’s balanced, indigenous population (BIP) of shellfish, fish and wildlife. The Clean Water Act included two variances regarding once-through cooling: a 316(a) variance relates to the potential for harmful effects on fish populations and the ecological system resulting from elevated temperature in receiving waters due to discharge of the heated effluent from the cooling system; a 316(b) variance relates to the intake of the cooling system and the potential for population-level harm to fish as a result of entrainment of fish larvae and small fish into the cooling water system and also the impingement of juvenile and adult fish upon the intake screens designed to keep debris out of the system.
I understood the major concerns for the Hudson were that fish in the river and in particular striped bass and shad had to traverse a gauntlet of power plants as they made their way to their spawning grounds. Power plant specific and cumulative impacts were central scientific matters with respect to the potential for population-level effects. There was no question that baby, juvenile, and adult fish were being killed and that some fraction of their food base was being affected. The key scientific questions being addressed were: How much loss of baby, juvenile, and adult fish could occur without adversely affecting the populations? Is there technically supportable evidence that the power plants are or are not adversely affecting these populations either directly or be reducing their food resources? Is fish migration or movement being adversely affected by thermal discharge? Answering these questions meant learning about, quantifying, and predicting the magnitudes of these effects.
As a data analyst and report writer I learned early an important lesson: you can easily be fooled by looking for patterns and other relationships in the data when you really don’t understand the specific history and integrity of the data. On one occasion I was given a data set and asked to write a report on a power plant on the Hudson River. I discovered patterns in the data that seemed meaningful. But then the head of the data group informed me that the data were from a power plant on Lake Ontario, and I was interpreting these as though they were relevant to a power plant in a particular area of the Hudson. That was a shock. I was able to correct that situation, but it made me aware of how important it is to understand the integrity of the data and how mistakes can be made. I had a greater appreciation for the value of having work checked. It also made me aware of what to look for in other people’s work, especially when there was something off about their analyses and conclusions. That turned out to be a valuable insight in reviewing expert reports prepared by opposing experts in litigation. Learning about the possibility of making inadvertent mistakes was a very sobering but very constructive experience.
Much of the work we were doing at LMS was novel. One question raised was whether any, some, or all the fish larvae sucked into and through the cooling water systems were killed or injured. The amount entrained was enormous. To help answer this question, LMS constructed what we called the “larval fish table”, a large elevated sand box structure. A small stream of the cooling water that had passed through the power plant was tapped and diverted to the table, entering at one corner. The water spread out and slowed within the table. Young biologists — mostly undergraduate students — lined each side of the table armed with tweezers. They looked for and picked out the tiny whitish almost translucent fish larvae and dropped them into jars of water. They sorted among live, dead, and swimming-impaired fish. The live fish were held for longer term observations. The data generated from the larval table were used to refine the estimates of fish larvae mortality for the predictive fish models. Each summer the students would arrive to pick baby fish out of the water weaving through the larval fish table. I thought of these students as the “migrant larval pickers” and wrote an amusing story about them and the laboratory for their benefit. I’ve lost track of that story but can share that the work was intense, requiring enormous attention and quick hands. But it was also fun and the conversations among young folks surrounding the table often led to bouts of laughter.
Reflecting on My Direction
Working as an environmental consultant with a power company as a client caused me to consider the direction and purpose of my career. As a life-long environmentalist and organizer for Earth Day at Manhattan College, I wondered whether I was on the right path working for corporations. Was I supposed to be on a particular side of an environmental issue and choose clients based on that? I revisited this question on several occasions during my life. As I acquired experience and greater understanding of the world and myself, I arrived at the following reconciliation of myriad thoughts.
Environmental issues are complex and involve many stakeholders including regulatory agencies and communities as well as the party that is the source of the potential environmental problem(s). One or more consultants may be hired by any of these stakeholders. Within this mix of parties, credibility, capability, and honesty on the part of a consultant are of paramount importance. Partisanship and advocacy may occur on the part of some consultants but that can compromise credibility; lack of capability can impair the process or lead to a technically unsound outcome; failing to be honest is the ultimate failure. I came to accept and cherish my role of bringing credibility, capability, and honesty to finding acceptable solutions to environmental problems. I also understood that “acceptability” was a destination that was often reached through interactions at various levels with all parties. That was a skill I strove to develop. I saw myself as an environmental path finder. I felt that diversity of clients was important, especially for credibility. While my clients were comprised mainly of companies, I sought out and worked for state, federal and international governments especially the U.S. EPA and environmental NGOs such as the Sierra Club and Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Graduate Research
I depended on the Hudson not only for my initial job as an environmental consultant but also for my Ph.D. research. As a biologist at LMS I had gotten to see the ecological significance of shallow water regions of the river. While these were small fractions of the river, these areas supported submerged macrophyte plants (pond weeds). When I inspected these plants, I saw they were rich with invertebrate life including aquatic insects, crustaceans, and snails. I analogized the plants as high-rise biological condos such as those at City Island in the Bronx. The plants covered the shallow shoreline regions and supported dense assemblages of the animal life that served as food for fish. Moreover, these areas offered shelter for small fish. I reasoned that the food availability of animal life could be much higher in these areas than elsewhere in the open non-vegetated benthic region of the river. My PhD was designed to look at that proposition.
The production of animal life is referred to as secondary production. This distinguishes it from primary production which involves the growth of microscopic and larger plants. Primary production is generally straightforward to measure. This is done either by measuring the uptake of radiolabeled carbon or by measuring changes in the standing stock of the plants over time. However, the measurement of secondary production is more challenging. My work involved following cohorts of these animals in the river through time to determine changes in abundance and body size. I also used the environmental chambers at Lamont Doherty to set up experiments for measuring growth rates at various temperatures. I measured rates of predation using lab and field experiments.
One experiment had an unexpected outcome. I placed enclosures in aquatic plant beds to exclude fish. My plan was to compare the abundance of the young of small insects known as chironomid midges inside and outside of the chambers after a few weeks. I expected to see larger numbers of these tiny insects inside the enclosure than outside because fish predators were excluded by the enclosure; I presumed the difference would tell me something about loss due to predation. But I got the opposite result, the abundances of tiny insects were lower in the enclosures. On the other hand, the abundance of the predaceous dragonfly and damselfly nymphs were higher in the enclosures. I had simply protected one group of predators from another. The protected dragonflies and damselflies were at liberty to consume the tiny chironomids. So, I didn’t get the answer to what I was looking for, but I learned something else instead, and gained insight into the food web of the Hudson River.
My research brought me my most intimate experience with the life in the river. Because I was working at LMS and doing graduate research at the same time, I would start the day before dawn. If I wasn’t analyzing samples, I would venture into the field to collect samples. I was following cohorts of aquatic insects as they changed in abundance and grew over time and so I had to sample frequently. Those mornings of sample collection were eerie. The temperature difference between the water and the air often drew a shroud of mist over the surface of the river. I wore a wetsuit to sample and would wade out into the river and into this mist. Looking around me as I waded reminded me of a scene from the Creature From The Black Lagoon.
That creature was always emerging from the mist. As I looked out over the water, I imagined the outline of that creature shimmering at the edge of my vision. So, with my heightened state of awareness, I almost jumped out of the water when a huge orange head emerged and looked up at me and laid its chin on my leg. I was on the receiving end of an amorous and willing carp. It was a huge animal. Carp can grow to three feet in the Hudson. I remember looking down into those moon eyes. It seemed to recognize me. At least it knew I was not a carp. The big fish slid back into the water. But I felt its touch and its intent. I researched my encounter later and decided it was likely a male attracted to my splashing sounds. Groups of females and pursuing male carp create splashing sounds in shallow waters, an acoustic aphrodisiac.
Leaving for Massachusetts
I finished up my graduate work at City University of New York, but still had my dissertation to write. I knew that to advance in my consulting career I would probably need to change jobs to get a quantum step in salary and position. I had learned this lesson from talking to others, and in witnessing the progression of people through the company. At the end of my graduate school coursework, I began looking for opportunities. One came from a company called EG&G located in Waltham Massachusetts. I had never been to Massachusetts, but it seems like a good place to go with my young family and images of the Old North Bridge, the Minute Men, and beautiful New England country side and towns.
I wished my LMS gang goodbye. My friend Judy Berkun organized a huge party to wish me well. As I was readying to leave New York for Massachusetts, a new issue was arising in the Hudson. The newspapers were carrying articles about General Electric and a group of chemicals called PCBs. There was a call for studies and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation was concerned. There were arguments over what was permitted and not permitted regarding PCB discharges from GE. LMS Engineers was becoming involved. But I was leaving them. It was time to move on. I didn’t realize then that years later I would return to the Hudson River to study PCBs.
