Hudson River Watershed: Shared Landscapes and Civic Responsibilities
Nowhere has the confluence of human and natural history been more striking than in the Hudson River valley and its environing watershed. Consider the Adirondack Park; the Catskills and its reservoirs; the island of Manhattan with its surrounding rivers and estuary; the industrial development of the Hudson River valley from the 17th century on; the art, architecture, and literature spawned by the interactions of the Hudson region’s nature and its human inhabitants. The region’s human communities share their landscapes with the natural flora and fauna and abiotic systems that underlie and engender Hudson River watershed “biotic communities,” including their soils, water, and air.
What will become of these Hudson River biotic communities, humans included? This is a pressing and outstanding question and call for regional civic responsibility. We must assure a long-term, viable future for Hudson River humans and nature. Unfortunately, this is a moral and civic challenge for which we are ill-prepared. As yet we do not adequately know how to think and act regionally. We do not know how to think humans and nature—cultural and nature history—together. We grope in the face of numerous human and natural crises: urban sprawl; out of control economic development; the protection of land, water, and air; population growth and use of natural resources; global warming, climate change, and rising sea tides; human poverty and inequalities; how practically to prepare for a good, biologically and culturally diverse future.
Several institutions and organizations propose to come together in common cause: the American Museum of Natural History, the New-York Historical Society, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities (40+ members), as well as colleagues in the Adirondacks. By critically considering the Hudson region’s natural and cultural history, we will explore a regional civic vision for the future. We will educate ourselves on how most effectively to think humans and nature together, how most productively to consider human and natural interactions with the aim of building up the region’s biological and cultural diversity, multiple values, and resilience. We will envision our moral and civic responsibilities to the Hudson region and the wider biocultural regions within which it is embedded, up to and including the earth’s ecosphere and the globe’s cultural communities.
Within this broad context and framework of thought, we will explore specific long-range issues: for example, public and private property relations (rights and responsibilities); the impact and mitigation of climate change on the watershed; energy use; agriculture and conservation of native flora and fauna; development pressure and the region’s natural and cultural history.
The aim finally will be to help build civic cultures of conservation in the many communities along the Hudson River and in its watershed. In this effort, the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities will play a crucial role, not only by strengthening environmental programs in its member institutions, but also by fostering civic conservation efforts in their surrounding communities. By these efforts, among others, we hope to build up a region wide culture of conservation—human communities recognizing their interactive connections to nature and each other. Such efforts will be required to face civically the many pronged challenges that will confront Hudson River watershed citizens in the coming years.