A Bronx Tale

On a warm afternoon in late May, a group of teenagers launch a flotilla of five wooden rowboats onto the Bronx River, then take the oars and begin pulling swiftly upstream--past a scrap-metal yard, a furniture warehouse and a defunct cement plant. On the bank, yellow irises grow amid poison ivy; three cormorants sun themselves on a half-submerged log. A subway train rattles past on an elevated track, then the only sounds are the trill of a red-winged blackbird and the rhythmic splash of the oars.

When they reach a cluster of buoys, the crew begins hauling up mesh traps, checking the day's catch against an illustrated chart. The students are participants in an environmental education program run by the youth development group Rocking the Boat; today they are conducting a creel survey, an informal fish census. A small ripple of excitement spreads among the boats when someone identifies a tiny silvery tomcod. Its presence upriver, explains Joseph Rachlin, an aquatic ecologist at Lehman College who advises the program, shows that the Bronx River estuary is becoming "an important nursery ground" for marine fish.

Across the country, from Providence to Los Angeles, urban rivers that were polluted and even paved over are being restored. But the revival of the Bronx River is unusual. Traditionally advocates for the environment and for low-income communities have had little to say to each other; but because the Bronx River traverses some of the country's poorest neighborhoods, a few of its advocates are navigating new territory by connecting environmental issues like water quality and habitat restoration to economic issues like job creation and training. As Majora Carter, founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, has said, "Economic degradation begets environmental degradation"; if the problems are linked, the solutions must be linked too.

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