When Joe Ritchie thinks of his childhood in public housing in Cohoes, New York, he thinks of black dust. As a kid, Ritchie remembers playing on his neighborhood playground and watching dark dust clouds form across the street, less than half a mile from the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. During the winter, Ritchie would have only a few days to play in fresh snow before a layer of black dust settled on top of it. In the warmer months, Ritchie remembers working alongside his grandfather to clean off the family’s window air conditioning units. The paper towels they used would come away black.
The source of the pollution was Norlite LLC, an industrial plant and hazardous waste incinerator located 400 yards from Saratoga Sites, the public housing development where Ritchie grew up. A subsidiary of the Spanish company Tradebe, Norlite mined shale onsite next to a small tributary to the Hudson River. At the time, the company used a pair of kilns to transform the shale into an aggregate product of sand, gravel, and recycled materials to be used in construction and manufacturing. Norlite fueled the kilns by burning forever chemicals, or PFAS, and it stored industrial byproducts from the process in large, uncovered piles. The pollution from the kilns and the piles wafted downwind to neighborhoods like Ritchie’s in the riverside towns of Cohoes and Troy, New York.
“Sometimes, we couldn’t even go outside because the stench would be so strong,” Ritchie told us during an interview on the banks of the Hudson River in September 2025. Now in his twenties, Ritchie remembers feeling stuck next to Norlite. “It’s not like we could move, you know, we were in public housing for a reason,” he said.
Joe Ritchie was one of over a dozen community members we met while on a week-long canoe journey down the Hudson River in September. Together with documentary filmmaker and reporter Jon Bonfiglio, we paddled 50 nautical miles through the rural riverside communities nestled between Albany and New York City. What we found was a rich history of environmental action on the Hudson River, and a legacy of stewardship and activism still present today.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, rural communities played a key role in cleaning up the Hudson River, which was at that point one of the country’s most polluted waterways after generations of industrial activity. Now, as the Hudson region has begun to recover, PFAS pollution and climate change are introducing new threats to the “river that came back from the dead.”
Paddling on Rondout Creek in Kingston, New York underneath a railroad bridge. Kingston faces extreme flooding due to sea level rise and storm surge. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
The Makings of a Superfund Site
By the time Ritchie became an adult, local pressure against Norlite was mounting. A grassroots advocacy group called Lights Out Norlite formed in 2020 after years of residents’ concerns. Ritchie became chair of the group and in 2022 led an effort to get the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to authorize the closure and relocation of Saratoga Sites, the public housing development where he grew up. Then, in March 2024, Norlite announced it would pause the operation of its kiln amidst an ongoing legal battle with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (NYDEC) over the facility’s pollution. Now, over a year and a half later, Norlite’s kilns are still closed, although mining operations continue at the site, and dust piles remain uncovered allowing silica dust to be swept into the air any time the wind blows. Litigation between Norlite and NYDEC is ongoing.
Ritchie said Lights Out Norlite’s success in getting Saratoga Sites residents relocated and the kilns shut down showed the power of grassroots activism and gathering communities together to say “enough is enough.” Ritchie still lives in Cohoes and is currently serving as the chair of Lights Out Norlite.
About 100 miles south of where Ritchie lives in Cohoes, the community of Newburgh, population 28,000, is also fighting PFAS pollution. In 2016, residents’ primary source of drinking water was declared unsafe due to PFAS contamination. Runoff from the town’s Stewart Air National Guard Base flowed across the street and into the town’s reservoir, Washington Lake, which is located about a half mile from the Hudson and sits within the same watershed. In 2016, the reservoir was named a New York State Superfund site.
Joe Ritchie stands in front of an exhibit showing the Hudson River at the Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston, New York. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
At the national level, superfund is the common name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) enacted in 1980, which allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up polluted sites. The law created a tax on polluters with the idea that the funds collected could be used to clean up polluters’ messes. Of the 1,343 sites on the Superfund National Priority List, 83 are in New York.
A similar superfund law was passed at the state level in New York in 1986, giving the state the authority to identify, investigate, and clean up sites where hazardous waste is present. Under the law, parties responsible for contamination are required to pay for the investigation and cleanup. When the source of the contamination is unknown, New York can use money from the state superfund, established by the 1986 law, to fund investigation and remediation efforts.
Cleanup efforts are ongoing at Washington Lake, where PFAS contamination remains today. Responsibility for these efforts has fallen to the U.S. Department of Defense, as the Stewart Air National Guard Base was found culpable for the pollution.
The River That Flows Both Ways
Around midnight on the first night of the trip, we put our canoes in the dark water of the Hudson River to paddle from Coxsackie, New York to Germantown, New York, a distance of about 14 nautical miles. That night, the inky black water and the soft splash of paddles kept us company as we traveled until sunrise, with only the lights of factories and bridges offering reprieve from the darkness. Every so often, an Amtrak train whizzed by, whistle sounding as it passed through each of the small towns that pepper the banks of the river.
Why were we paddling in the middle of the night? Because the lower 153 miles of the Hudson River are a tidal estuary. It’s known as the river that flows both ways: when the tide comes in, it flows north, and when the tide goes out, it flows south, towards New York City. Traveling by cargo ship or motor boat or even by an aerodynamic kayak, it wouldn’t be necessary to time the tides, but traveling in a canoe that may or may not have a leak in the bottom of it (spoiler alert, it did), you need all the help you can get.
Daily Yonder reporter Julia Tilton paddles into the rising sun on the Hudson River in September 2025 after canoeing through the night. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
The mighty Hudson was once at the heart of the steam-power era. It offered transportation from the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest via the Erie Canal. Before modern refrigeration, the Hudson had a booming ice harvesting industry during the colder months. Factories along its banks produced everything from clothes to bricks to soap. For over a century, it was completely acceptable to dump industrial and domestic waste into the river, until federal environmental legislation like the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.
Folk singer, activist, and Beacon, New York resident Pete Seeger built and sailed his sloop, the Clearwater, to Washington, D.C. on the first Earth Day in 1970 to deliver petitions in support of the Clean Water Act. Seeger’s efforts and focus on environmental action can be felt all over the Hudson Valley. Many people we spoke to still credit the late folk musician as their inspiration to protect the Hudson River.
Even after the Clean Water Act was passed, however, General Electric continued releasing over a million pounds of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) into the river, contaminating nearly 200 miles between Albany and New York City. That stretch was listed as a Superfund site in 1984, and is still among the largest superfund sites in the U.S.
Now, the focus for many environmental activists in the Hudson has shifted to climate change, although pollution continues to be an issue.
From Stinking Shame to Community Pride
Our canoe journey came to an early end in Kingston, New York, due to a forecast of heavy winds. There we met Dan Shapley, the director of policy and advocacy at Riverkeeper, a nonprofit that monitors water and environmental quality along the Hudson. Shapley grew up along the river and has seen things change drastically over his lifetime and that of his parents.
Wappinger Creek ran alongside Shapley’s childhood home in Dutchess County, part of which is another Superfund site, and he spent his youth playing in and around the creek. “That was my playground,” he told us outside his office in Kingston, New York. He credits this upbringing with instilling in him a passion for the Hudson River basin and, more broadly, a passion for clean water. Shapley’s father also grew up in Dutchess County, which sits along the east side of the Hudson River.
Fifty years ago, homes along the river may not even have had back porch steps down to the water. That’s because it was uninhabitable – you couldn’t swim in it, you couldn’t drink the water, you couldn’t eat the fish. But things have changed in the past few decades. That’s due to the work of Pete Seeger and the greater environmental movement along the Hudson, a movement that became one of the catalysts for the Clean Water Act.
“The older generations remember more the visceral sense of the stinking river, or this river turning different colors [from] the factory effluent,” Shapley told us. During Shapley’s lifetime, with more focus on environmental regulations and cleanup of pollution, he’s seen attitudes toward the river change. It’s become something that communities want to embrace, instead of something to turn away from, Shapley said.
“I have seen a lot of the communities turning back towards the river. It was the back door, it was behind everything,” Shapley said. “It’s become the front door. Everybody wants their waterfront to be a big part of the community.”
Dan Shapley stands on a dock on Rondout Creek in front of the Wurts Street Bridge. Shapley is the director of Advocacy, Policy and Planning for Riverkeeper. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
Ritchie’s experiences in Cohoes mirror Shapley’s downriver, with some caveats. Along the Hudson in upstate New York, there’s an inevitable connection to New York City. The Hudson Valley’s economy is often dependent on the city’s industry and on tourism from its residents. Yet for many of the rural people we met, the Hudson Valley is home. There’s not a lot of interest in migrating towards the population center of the Big Apple.
But wealth inequality exists within the Hudson Valley too, not just when crowds come in on holiday weekends. It’s where wealthy people have moved to escape the city — migration increased during Covid — and in some towns, the money is obvious. Ritchie told us how places like Kingston have more money, and equally, more access to the river. He wants to even the playing field.
“There’s actually a lot of power in upstate New York,” Ritchie said. “We just have to work together, learn from each other. Why can’t we have a river pool in Cohoes, New York? Why can’t we have beaches and beautiful marinas up and down the river?”
Shapley and his colleagues at Riverkeeper are hoping to lay the groundwork for exactly this kind of future. The organization has boats patrolling the Hudson from where the Mohawk River converges north of Troy all the way to New York City. The boats identify and report polluters as well as assist with water quality documentation and other research and advocacy.
Shannon Roback, Riverkeeper’s science director, told us the patrol boats sample water from over 120 sites every month, measuring things like fecal bacteria, dissolved oxygen, water turbidity, and nutrients. Riverkeeper uses the water quality data the boats collect to create interactive maps that help river users understand how clean their water is for drinking, swimming, boating, and fishing.
When we spoke in October, Roback was concerned about a seasonal harmful algal bloom, which had prompted Riverkeeper to up its monitoring efforts in the area.
This massive algal bloom, detected on September 10, 2025, just five days after we wrapped up our trip in Kingston, was found by researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. An eight-mile stretch of the Hudson River had been affected between where we were in Kingston and Staatsburg to the south, and the bloom was confirmed as toxin-producing cyanobacteria that can be harmful to people, pets, and wildlife. Researchers wrote that it was the largest bloom of its kind that they had observed in almost 40 years of monitoring the Hudson River.
Miranda Evans, Daisy Spurrier, and Lila Vail get into a canoe in Germantown, New York. Behind them, bright green algae has accumulated. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
“The scale and intensity of this bloom on the Hudson River is unprecedented,” Roback told us. Historically, Roback said the Hudson wasn’t thought to be particularly susceptible to harmful algal blooms since it isn’t a stagnant body of water like a lake, pond, or reservoir.
“Now, because of climate change, things are warmer,” Roback said. “It’s easier for those cyanobacteria to grow. We have drought conditions, so we’re not getting a big influx of fresh water into the system that could disrupt that stagnation.”
Harmful algal blooms are just one impact of climate change that the Hudson region is experiencing. As communities like Kingston return to the water for recreation, erecting parks and beaches along the riverbanks and building houses that face the river instead of the hills, they’re increasingly met with the realities of sea level rise and severe storms.
A Changing Climate
Canoeing down the river, many of the houses we passed had manicured lawns mere feet above the river’s edge. Rock and cement walls jutted up from the banks, erected to stop erosion and keep floodwaters out of residents’ homes. Other properties we passed had more natural-looking protection, such as piles of boulders or cement blocks, known as riprap, that allow for plants to grow while helping to absorb waves during a storm surge.
Regardless, one thing was clear as we journeyed downriver: many of the properties were one large storm away from being underwater.
While battling fierce winds on a 12-hour paddle between Germantown and Kingston, we chatted with Liam Henrie, one of the captains of the Clearwater Sloop, Pete Seeger’s boat.
Today, the Clearwater still sails up and down the river every summer, and it advocates for clean water and climate resilience in the Hudson River basin, Henrie told us. Henrie’s colleague, Jen Benson, is the director of advocacy and communications for Clearwater, which is now a nonprofit. She told us about what she sees as the most important issues the Hudson river currently faces.
Jen Benson and Liam Henrie stand in a garden in Kingston, New York. Benson and Henrie both work for the Clearwater and advocate for the Hudson River. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
“Climate change affects every piece of the river,” Benson told us later in Kingston, during a conversation around a picnic table in Henrie’s backyard. “[It] leads to more severe weather, both on the drought side, but also on the wet side. Both put stress on the Hudson.”
As a tidal estuary, the Hudson rises and falls based on the tides. Coastal storms and full moons can make those tides even more extreme, Benson said. Many Hudson River communities are facing regular flooding as a result of stronger storms, and some are working to build flood-resilient infrastructure.
Benson said that it’s very normal for parts of Kingston to be flooded by the tides, including a section of road outside of the wastewater treatment plant in town.
“I drive a little car. I won’t drive my car through it, it’s like two feet of water, and my car’s six inches off the ground,” she said.
This section of Rondout Landing road by the wastewater treatment plant, along Rondout Creek, tends to flood when the tide is high. These “Road Closed” and “Flooded Area” signs remained even when the road was dry. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
Climate change is already making the Northeast wetter, meaning heavier rains and storm surges are becoming more common in the Hudson Valley. Over the next several decades, climate change is projected to raise sea levels in the Hudson River estuary, compounding the impacts of flooding.
Many other areas we paddled past or visited during our weeklong canoe trip, including the house where we stayed after our nighttime paddle, would be underwater with as little as two feet of flooding. That’s a very normal amount to have during a storm surge from a hurricane.
Data from Scenic Hudson shows that sea level rise in the Hudson River could be as much as six feet by the year 2100. In Kingston, that projection puts 91 households at risk of inundation, or being underwater at high tide, by that same year.
Furthermore, six feet of sea level rise would inundate significant sections of the Kingston waterfront, including Kingston Point Beach and the downtown area along the Rondout Creek tributary, per a Climate Central sea level rise map. The Hudson River Maritime Museum, where we met Shapley, would be at least halfway submerged.
Recently, the city of Kingston received $1.5 million from New York state to fund two climate resiliency projects, including protecting Kingston Point Beach from sea level rise and erosion from flooding. After embracing the river as a front yard, the city now needs to address the safety of both the river and the community.
This Climate Central map for Kingston, New York’s waterfront shows land that would be inundated by a six-foot rise in the water level above the average daily high tideline shaded in red. This kind of water level increase could come about through a combination of sea level rise, king tides, and storm surges (Climate Central).
The Hudson Valley Flood Resilience Network emerged as a response to the looming threat of flooding across the region. The organization is a coalition of municipalities and organizations all focused on flood resilience. Both Riverkeeper and Clearwater are partner organizations in the network, which is co-managed by the Hudson River Watershed Alliance. Before her time at Riverkeeper, Jen Benson worked at the alliance. She told us that flooding is just one extreme with which riverside communities are having to contend.
“Too-dry and too-wet conditions can both put stress on the Hudson,” she said.
Drought conditions can exacerbate something called the salt front, or the leading edge of salty ocean water in a freshwater environment, like a river. During dry conditions, the salt front can move higher up a river because there’s less fresh water to dilute it. Roback, Riverkeeper’s science director, said too much salt can cause issues for the many Hudson communities who get their drinking water from the river.
“We are seeing the salt front this year migrating much further northward, at a higher concentration than last year,” Roback said. “We have probably a combination of sea level rise and drought that is allowing that salty water to push northward, and if it gets too salty, then it starts to be a problem for those drinking water treatment plants.”
When we spoke in October, Roback told us that the salt front had reached the Poughkeepsie area, further north than it would typically be under wetter conditions.
The Hudson River Maritime Museum also houses the Riverkeeper offices upstairs from exhibits about the history and future of the Hudson River. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.
Progress Flows Onward
The day we interviewed Shapley in Kingston, the afternoon sun bore down hard, glinting off the river behind us. An installation on the side of the Hudson River Maritime Museum showed future high water marks as a result of sea level rise. By the year 2100, the first floor of the building could be underwater. Shapley joked that they chose the museum’s second floor for Riverkeeper’s office so that it wouldn’t flood.
A sign outside the Hudson River Maritime Museum shows how high sea levels could rise. Photo by Julia Tilton/Daily Yonder.
His take-it-as-it-comes attitude belies a measure of necessary preparation. Living by the Hudson his entire life has honed Shapley’s approach to stewardship. His relationship with the river is one of commitment, and it’s emblematic of the one that rural communities have with the watershed, too.
Meeting the pollution crisis head-on in the 1960s and 1970s established a tradition of dedication to the health of the Hudson that continues today. Now, as rural communities along the river are at the frontlines of climate change, there is a humble optimism about the future. The region will adapt, because that is what it has always done, is Shapley’s perspective.
“Since colonization, we’ve had 400 years, roughly, of screwing things up. We’ve only been trying to fix things for like 50, roughly,” Shapley said. “We made a lot of progress…We could imagine some continued progress in that way at the same time.”
The post After Fighting for Clean Waters, Rural Communities along Hudson Take on Climate Change appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
