In September 2025, my colleague Ilana Newman and I canoed 50 nautical miles down the Hudson River to spend time in and report on the environmental issues faced by the rural communities between Albany, New York, and New York, New York. Our trip was led by journalist and filmmaker Jon Bonfiglio. Jon has canoed down the same stretch of the Hudson River every summer for a decade. In 2024, he produced Against the Current, a documentary film about the region’s history of music and activism. Jon lives in Mexico and is the Latin America correspondent for The Times newspaper in London.
What follows is a conversation between myself, Ilana, and Jon at a busy corner cafe in Kingston, New York, shortly after we concluded our canoe journey there on September 5, 2025. We began by sharing our observations from the interviews Ilana and I conducted while on the river, and we continued to discuss Jon’s relationship with the Hudson and his role as a semi-elusive journalist and filmmaker in the Americas.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Julia Tilton: We asked everyone [we talked to], “What’s your relationship with the Hudson River?” Then we asked, “What do you think the relationship is between New York City and your community?” We got really varied answers.
Ilana Newman: There’s a lot of interaction between the city and the river. We asked, “How does that affect you, personally, or your community?” Some people were like, “They’re totally separate worlds. I never go there.” Others were like, “It’s really a part of my life, using the river recreationally.”
North of the dams [in Troy, NY], people don’t use the river. They still see it as something that is polluted. It draws this line, the fact that it is both swimmable and you shouldn’t eat the fish from it. Both of those things are true.
Jon Bonfiglio: It pushes against the perception that it’s either all one thing or all the other. It occupies this in-between space where it’s harder to hold complexity in your brain.
Ilana: Yeah, which is such a common theme in every story. It’s not black and white. It’s never going to be. So, how do you tell a story that isn’t black and white, because everyone wants a conclusion and a perspective and a takeaway, when it’s just never that clear or simple.
Julia: I liked the front door, back door framing that Dan Shapley [Riverkeeper’s Senior Director of Advocacy, Policy and Planning] used. When the river was developed over the past century, the community was not facing it. It was something that happened out of sight, behind the back door. But now, there’s some re-thinking happening to have the river be a front door thing, where there’s recreation.
It really resonated with me, because I grew up by the Merrimack River in Southern New Hampshire, and only in adulthood, going back to this place where I grew up, am I realizing, oh, behind that strip mall or behind those box stores is actually the river. It’s just so forgotten about. There’s no front door perspective.
Jon: It’s a literal truth. The front door once faced the river because it was open to all river traffic, but now that roads have been built, there’s a complete 180-degree switch of perspective. It’s an interesting framing to look at other rivers too. It’s very tangible, because people often throw trash in rivers, but the river is also what sweeps up the trash where there’s no refuse supply chain. So then there’s piles of trash on the river, and people wait for the river to pull up and then take the trash down.
Julia: Ilana and I were talking about that too. There’s these different stories that are emerging. What’s the best way to tell them?
Ilana: It’s hard to tease away the threads to separate them. The stories of the river are so interconnected. So it’s so hard to say, this is a story about flooding, about pollution, when you can’t really separate any of it.
Jon: The thing that’s always marked New York out is that the Hudson is basically a one-state river. So initially, there was no federal funding. It wasn’t beholden into federal rules, to some extent. But also that means New York doesn’t have to deal with federal policymaking and all of that noise.
Julia: That reminds me of something that Dan [Shapley] said. These are not his words, but maybe this is a way of thinking about it, that it’s both a blessing and a curse that the Hudson feeds into New York City, because then there’s this heightened sense of awareness about it.
Ilana: Jon, what is your relationship with the Hudson?
Jon: I’m struggling to define it, and that probably is my relationship with the Hudson. It’s that I can’t distill it down to a thing. It’s evolving.
I think there’s lots of things that are clear points of engagement for me. One of the ones which I really appreciate is the relationship of scale between the size of the river and the tides and the smallness of us and the canoes. And what that means, what that does. Also, my relationship with the Hudson is a relationship with the communities of the Hudson.
My first point of inception with it was seeing this sign in Troy that it’s “the river that came back from the dead”. I really appreciate that narrative, of the river that came back from the dead, obviously as a river, but also just more broadly, metaphorically.
Those notions of being able to come back from the worst excesses, and being able to come back not because the government declared something, but because people just went ‘okay,’ and they didn’t even decide it collectively. All these different little micro communities through shared experience said, “Okay, this is not going to happen again.” So what you end up getting is lots of different stories, but actually the same story, all the way along the river of micro organizing. I personally find that narrative speaks to me.
Ilana: During our interviews yesterday, I was starting to get overwhelmed, or just kind of depressed, by all these stories of pollution, including the current pollution that we’ve been hearing about. Then something Dan said was very powerful. He said something about how we’ve spent 400 years since colonization, messing everything up. But we’ve only spent 60 years trying to not mess things up, to do slightly better, and, of course, we’re not doing it perfectly. But there are regulations in place.
Jon: This is geographically unrelated, but we do a lot of work in Baja California, which has a really motivated populace around defense of the ocean and the land. For years, I’ve worked with a guy who used to be the head of Greenpeace in Mexico, who now works for the Center for Biological Diversity. There was this new mine being proposed, maybe five, six years ago now, and he was talking about it. He was talking about resistance strategies and stuff.
I, to my eternal shame, said something semi-dismissively about how, with these stories in Latin America, developments tend to be persistent. Movements fracture and pick people off, and then the development project may evolve, but it ends up coming in and existing in some way. And he just looked at me. He said, no, you know, completely matter of fact, we’re gonna win this. It was like there was not a question in his mind that they were gonna win it. And they won it.
Oftentimes, the adversary is faceless. Big business tends to screw things up because it doesn’t have a memory, because it is faceless, whereas these communities are clearly built on individuals. So corporations often go about decision-making blithely, and they bite off more than they can chew because they think it’s just going to be straightforward, because they don’t have that sequential memory that exists at a grassroots level.
Ilana: I see that in my community too, where people show up and think that they can just come in and do whatever they want, and then they get 150 people showing up at a public meeting because the organizing is so powerful. My community truly shows up for every single thing.
Jon: You have to. There’s never going to be a final victory. Activism also humanizes us. If you think about people who have inspired you, and the stories that you cling to, I think it’s when you see people doing things. It’s not because the teachers told you, this is what’s happening, it’s the personal experiences that have shown you.
I really like the concept of human lighthouses. Communities, organizations, or whatever, they build around lighthouse individuals. Those lighthouse individuals, they don’t just do one thing. They maybe do literacy, they probably do women’s rights. They definitely do some sort of environmental custodianship. They’re just active in the community. It’s those individuals that are almost like magnets, that communities and activism are built around. And I bet the vast majority of the people you ask wouldn’t see themselves as leaders. They wouldn’t define leadership as being something that they do.
Ilana: How do you see yourself in all of that?
Jon: I was just thinking as I was saying this, because I’m very resistant to the notion of leadership. I don’t think it’s helpful to us. So how I see, or how I like to see myself is just as an individual that does things, that tries to have a particular relationship with the world, and that chooses to do it in a local, small-scale, human way. I’m aware that there’s flaws in that, that sometimes it gets away from me. It’s almost like a fight to keep it personal.
Julia: You’ve said before that you think of yourself as a writer, and that you use that word as opposed to other kinds of words, but that it’s not just about the act of writing.
Jon: I think being a writer is a way of engaging with the world. Recently, I’ve talked a fair bit about input and output. The output is fundamentally uninteresting to me, whether it’s the journalism bit or something else. Because you’re stuck with a form.
Ilana: I love that you say that because the input is always so much more fun and interesting to me. Sometimes the output, I’m like, oh, I have to do an output now.
Julia: It sometimes feels forced. With modern journalism, and the way that journalism has manifested in our attention economy, it feels like there is such a pressure to produce, produce, produce, rather than focus on the input part.
Jon: The only thing we can control is the input. The input becomes who we want to be, and that’s the writer bit, or the poet bit, the “how do you see the world?” part.
Ilana: How do you think that your relationship with these communities and with the Hudson River have evolved over the past 10 years of spending time here?
Jon: I mean, I knew nothing. Initially, for the first couple of years, I had the Hudson water trail maps, where you could see where parks are, but now that’s just not relevant. There’s this sense of maps being a sort of tool that can guide us, that maps are truth-tellers. But I’m just not convinced that that’s the case. I think, as much as anything, they can distract from things that are taking place.
Ilana: They’re not dynamic. They don’t actually evolve as fast as life does.
Jon: Being on the river can be counter to our usual way of experiencing the world, especially when you don’t know what’s coming up ahead. That doesn’t happen now in the way that it did in the first few years. In the first few years, you’d see something up ahead, you wouldn’t have any idea what it is, and your question about whatever that thing is up ahead might take anywhere from half an hour to five hours to evolve through until you finally work out what it is.
So that’s about being patient with how a narrative in space reveals itself, because it is not natural to us in modernity.
Julia: I’m just picturing you in the back of the canoe looking up ahead in the dark at some lights and not knowing what it is, and it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to five hours to figure it out. It’s kind of a metaphor for how you approach life and storytelling, and particularly the Hudson. You’ve spent a decade here figuring out what’s happening. You’re not immediately looking for answers, but letting them unfold.
Jon: Pretty much the only articles I write these days are long-form articles. There was an editor the other day where there was some discussion about a piece, and he said, yeah, just put the pitch to me in more detail. That relationship went nowhere, because I don’t know what the article is going to be until I write it.
Ilana: Can you tell us about your radio show?
Jon: I cover Latin America for The Times in London and some other outlets.
Ilana: How do you do that? That’s reporting. That’s fast, structured storytelling.
Jon: In my brain, big scale, geopolitical reporting is distinct. And also, although sometimes I report, generally, what I do is analysis.
Ilana: So mostly you’re just paying attention to things.
Jon: I think there’s deep memory, and then there’s new information, breaking news. The deep memory I can do. I’ve been in Latin America for 25 years. There’s pretty much no topic that I couldn’t respond to in some kind of detail and analyze. The harder thing is when something’s just happened, because sometimes the story is ahead of you, so somebody in the newsroom may see something which, as you’re speaking live, you don’t have access to. I got asked once at the beginning of a program that’s a round up of different things, and the guy said, “So we’re hearing about an earthquake in Chile in the last few minutes.” I hadn’t even heard about it.
It happens a lot. The first I hear of a story is somebody saying, can you talk about this? I won’t have come across it before, but in that context, it was fine, because you just have to get your head around the fact that you’re not trapped into answering the “what’s happening” bit. The context is that Chile has a history of earthquakes, but it’s generally a pretty well-prepared country.
Julia: Earlier you talked about how you use the word local in terms of how you engage with things, but then you also do this really meta scale, geopolitical analysis. How do you reconcile that you are existing in a very hyper-local context, but all around the world? It’s not only in the Hudson Valley. You’re also in Mexico and New Mexico and in all these different spaces that are hyper-local. But then every week for Times London, you’re doing this geopolitical analysis. Those are really big differences of scale.
Jon: The discord is big, right? I have no ethical issues, because I do feel that it’s a bit counter-narrative, counter-structural. Then there’s also some fundamental truths to that. One is that I enjoy it. I don’t find it too difficult, because it’s just an extension of who I am anyway. So I don’t have to prepare for days. I need to update a topic. I don’t need to go back and begin a topic at the beginning. Second thing is, I find it stimulating, a mental challenge, and the live component also switches me on. There’s a kind of pressure to it, that it’s just 20 minutes and then you’re done.
The third truth, well, there’s two other truths. One is it pays, and we all need to get something that pays. And then the fourth thing is that being the Latin America correspondent for the Times helps me leverage a lot of things because it’s an entry point. They might say no, but they’re actually going to read it and engage.
Ilana: I’m sure it helps with customs too.
Jon: Yeah, it’s my default response. I used to say different things at customs. I kept getting into trouble and pulled into dark rooms. So one time I was like, okay, I’m just gonna say I’m an explorer, which is kind of true. The guy’s eyes just lit up and he started asking me questions which weren’t related to my entry. Like, where have you been? Who have you worked with? That kind of stuff.
He was just engaged. Since then, I started using explorer. Now I use the journalist thing, but for a while, I just used explorer all the time. I would have expected to have a lot of trouble with explorer, because I used to have trouble with writer. Like, what kind of writer? What do you write? With explorer, nothing. The last time I was going through New Mexico, the guy asked some questions, and then he said, have a great day, Jonny. I’ve never been called Jonny in my life.
Ilana: Explorer Jonny.
Jon: The word obviously does something to the American psyche.
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