Alexandersmap

    Tag: Nashua River

    • Clean Water or Jobs?

      In 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire.  It wasn’t the only time – the river had caught on fire at least 13 times in 100 years.  This wasn’t a case of a temporary oil spill sparking a fire, it was a case of a river so polluted that it would just CATCH ON FIRE.  Time Magazine described it as the river that “oozes rather than flows”.  The 1969 fire had one benefit, it was a catalyst for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.  People had had enough of disregard for the environment and this gave enough political will for Congress to do something about it.

      Closer to my home, the Nashua River famously changed colors daily depending on what they were dumping into it that day.  There’s a great story in the Huffington Post that describes how the efforts of one woman inspired other to join in to save the Nashua River, once, like the Cuyahoga River, one of the ten most polluted rivers in the country.  When people questioned the reasoning of companies dumping waste into the rivers, which was legal until 1962, one industrialist smugly replied to an employee; “Which would you rather have—clean water or your jobs?”  

      The Nashua River flows into the Merrimack River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean.  Cities like Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, Massachusetts tap into the river for drinking water.  I still remember when I went to college in Lowell in 1984 and first smelled the water.  It was a smell you got used to, but it wasn’t comforting.  And that was almost twenty years into the cleanup of the Nashua River and other upstream tributaries.

      The Housatonic River is a Superfund site because GE dumped PCB’s into the river for years…  after all, it was legal to do so, and what would you rather have – clean water or jobs?  Onondaga Lake in Syracuse was considered the most polluted lake in America because of a lovely combination of human sewage and Honeywell PCB’s and other chemicals being dumped into the lake.  Boston Harbor was considered the most polluted harbor in the country back in the 80’s until a massive cleanup effort and the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant finally began operating in 2000.  So why the hell did we let our waterways be treated so badly for so long?

      There are different categories of disregard for the environment, running from casual disregard to malicious intent.  Most people fall into the ignorant category.  People who throw their trash out the window of their car are no different than the person dumping chemicals into the river.  Their problem goes away, but it becomes someone else’s problem.  Selfish, narcissistic behavior that requires societal intervention ranging from public shaming, to fines to prison time.  Tossing your McDonalds bag of trash out the window might make your car cleaner, but it’s an eyesore for the rest of us.

      Not in my backyard.  It doesn’t matter that the river is bright orange as long as I’m not tapping into it for drinking water.  It doesn’t matter how many PCB’s are flushed into the lake because I don’t live on that lake.  Its okay to have more coal burning power plants because I won’t be around when the planet is a vast wasteland.  It’s okay if we erode the power of the EPA because shareholder value increases when enforcement gets swept under the rug.

      I had a roommate in college who got all of the people in the apartment together at the beginning of the semester to agree to a dirty dish enforcement policy.  If your dirty dishes where left on the counter or in the sink instead of cleaned after you made a meal the dishes were put into your bed.  This proved to be surprisingly effective, because it was hard to ignore a pile of dirty dishes piled on your bed.  It’s easy to ignore things until it directly impacts your quality of life.  That applies equally to a pile of dishes as it does for a polluter or litterer.  There’s a great video of a person sweeping the road when someone throws their trash out the window right at the feet of the person sweeping.  Another guy sees this, walks up and borrowed the broom and dustpan, swept up the trash that was just dumped out and dumps it into the car of the litterer.  It’s viral because most of us would love to do that to the person dumping the trash.  It’s the equivalent of putting the dirty dishes in the bed of the offender.  I’m all for taking the CEO of GE or Honeywell and having them swim in the Housatonic River or Lake Onondaga, or taking those PCB’s and dumping them in that CEO’s pool.

      The world is a fragile place.  We only have the one planet, but there are too many people who think the world is flat, that climate change is a scam or political ploy, that jobs are more important than clean water.  When Marketing genius Seth Godin proposed changing the discussion point from “Climate Change” to “Atmosphere Cancer“, there were some indignant bloggers whining about the insensitivity towards people with cancer.  They completely missed the point as usual.  At one point when the Cuyahoga River caught fire and the Nashua River flowed a different color every day we reached a critical mass of people who said enough is enough – we don’t want orange rivers or rivers of flamable sludge.  We don’t want to be forced to wear a pollution mask when we take a walk.  We’d like to have things like coral reefs and glaciers and plastic-free oceans.  The race is on, will we reach the resolve needed to course correct, or will we slide into Exponential View’s Climate Calamity.  The choice is ours.

    • The Merrimack River Frontier

      Yesterday I dove deep into the Cape Cod section of John Seller’s Mapp of New England.  Today I’m looking at another fascinating section – the border between “civilization” and the “wilderness’.  I’ve written before about place names like World’s End Pond in Salem, New Hampshire.  Nothing hammers that home like seeing a map from 1675 showing the Merrimack River towns of Haverhill (“Haveril“), Billerica and Chelmsford (“Chensford“) Massachusetts as the frontier towns they were at the time.  North of the Merrimack River is wilderness in this map, South are the growing settlements of Massachusetts.  The river serves a critical role for settlers and Native Americans alike as both transportation and a border.  Settlements at this time were largely along the rivers and their tributaries, the Concord and Nashua Rivers.

      That bend in the Merrimack River northward was a critical point in the understanding of this land.  Isolated outposts like Billerica, Groton and Lancaster represented the outer reaches of people like us.  The map shows Lake Winnipesaukee and its many islands, so there was clearly knowledge in 1675 of what lay beyond, but it remained for all intents and purposes a vast, dangerous wilderness for another century until the fortunes of war, attrition in the Native American population and the shear mass of settlers from Europe turned the tide.

      It’s no surprise that the most notable Indian raids of the day were happening along the frontier.  York, Haverhill, Andover, Billerica, Chelmsford, and Groton all suffered Indian raids during the series of wars between the French and British.  Further west Brookfield and Deerfield had similar raids.  These frontier towns were dangerous places, and the settlers there would rarely venture out to tend their fields unarmed.  Towns like Haverhill were building fortifications and the brick 1697 Dustin Garrison for a measure of protection in the years spanning King Williams War and Queen Anne’s War.

      There were a series of conflicts between the English settlers and the Native American population that impacted northern New England.  In all cases the underlying conflict between the expansion of English settlements and the encroachment on the Native American population was a key factor.  French influence on the Native American tribes also contributed significantly in many of the raids in Merrimack River Valley from 1689 to 1713 as raiders were offered rewards for scalps and prisoners.  Living in this area for most of my life I see many reminders of that time in our history, and I always glance over at World’s End Pond and the Duston Garrison whenever I pass either.  Duston’s wife Hannah was famously kidnapped during King William’s War, her baby and many neighbors killed, marched through the town I live in by Abenaki warriors, and later escaped back down the Merrimack River on one of those raids.

      Wars Impacting Northern New England in the Early Colonial Period:

      • King Philip’s War 1675-1678 (Northeast Coast Campaign vs. Wabanaki Confederacy)
      • King William’s War 1689 – 1697 (French and Wabanaki Confederacy)
      • Queen Anne’s War 1702–1713 (French and Wabanaki Confederacy)
      • Dummer’s War 1722-1726 (Wabanaki Confederacy)
      • French and Indian War 1754 – 1763 (French and Mohican, Abenaki, Iroquois and other tribal alliances)

      So Seller’s Mapp of New England was a living, breathing document that was strategically important to the British and by extension the English settlers living in New England.  If matters were largely settled with the Native American population in the Southern New England areas by 1675, they were anything but settled in Northern New England.  Northern Massachusetts, including what is now coastal Maine and New Hampshire were the literally on edge, looking north and west for raiders.  That they would ultimately overpower the Native American population and New France settlements was not a foregone conclusion at the time.  Another reason it completely fascinates me.