Kennedy Praises Riverkeeper’s Vision
By ALEX NUSSBAUM, STAFF WRITER
HASBROUCK HEIGHTS – A decade after Hackensack Riverkeeper began its battle to save the Meadowlands’ much-maligned swamps, celebrities and local residents lined up Thursday to praise the group’s efforts.
Led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – a national environmental activist and nephew of the slain president – about 250 people attended a fund- raiser for the group founded 10 years ago by Secaucus cabbie “Captain Bill” Sheehan.
“To me the most important environments are not the Yosemites or the Yellowstones that most Americans will never see,” said Kennedy, the night’s keynote speaker at the Hasbrouck Heights Hilton. “To me, they’re the areas right here in our major urban environments. … And Bill’s one of the gurus of that form of environmentalism.”
Kennedy, whose Waterkeeper Alliance was a model for Sheehan’s grass-roots activism, said Riverkeeper’s highest achievement may simply have been reconnecting the public with a watershed long written off as a wasteland.
“People can come down to the Hackensack Meadowlands and experience the restorative spirituality” of nature, he said. “This is like the Serengeti Plains, but its five miles from midtown Manhattan and basically surrounded on one side by Newark. To me, those kinds of places are the most important to restore and most important to preserve.”
Kennedy also accepted the group’s lifetime achievement award during anniversary event.
Sheehan started his activism in the early 1990s when he noticed more and more of the Meadowlands swamps where he’d tramped as a boy being gobbled up by development. In the decade since he founded Riverkeeper, the group helped conserve the 600-acre Empire Tract, a marshland once slated for a shopping mall, and its popular boat cruises have introduced thousands of local residents to the river in their midst.
“This state has come an incredibly long way and it’s thanks to folks like Hackensack Riverkeeper,” said Adam Zellner, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection.
“All it needed was that push,” Sheehan said. “There was never anybody pushing in a positive way so the negative forces were always getting their way.”
Along the way, there has been criticism. Sheehan has supported controversial projects like Xanadu at the Meadowlands Sports Complex and the EnCap golf resort on nearby landfills. The environmental benefits promised by developers were worth the compromise, Sheehan argued.
Kennedy said Sheehan had fought and won plenty of battles against corporations looking to pave the region’s last remaining open spaces.
“It’s a reaffirmation of our democratic process,” he said of Sheehan’s work, “of the idea that one man can stand up for what’s right.”
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E-mail: nussbaum@northjersey.com
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