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Robert H. Boyle to Receive First "Hero of the Marsh" Award From Constitution Marsh
Robert H. Boyle will be the first recipient of the "Hero of the Marsh" Award at the annual fundraising party for Constitution Marsh Audubon Center and Sanctuary held at Cat Rock on Sunday, May 6th from 4-7pm. The event is sponsored each year by the Advisory Board to help continue the marsh's very important education, science and Hudson River stewardship programs.
Robert H. Boyle first became involved in the environment in 1959 when, as Sports Illustrated's West Coast correspondent, he hunted butterflies with Vladimir Nabokov in Arizona and exposed a plot to lay waste to the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in northern California, one of the most important in the world for migratory waterfowl. Returning to New York in 1960 as a senior writer for the magazine, he wrote about a variety of subjects, as well as pioneering articles on the state of the environment, from the country as a whole to the Hudson River in particular. Never hesitant to pursue an issue professionally or in private life, he soon became the father of environmental activism on the river based on his faith in science and the law.
With his knowledge of striped bass and shad in the Hudson, he played a vital role in the 17- year long Storm King Mountain case, which became the basis of environmental law in the United States by establishing the right of citizens to sue the government to protect natural resources. In 1966, after exposing the extensive fish kills at the Indian Point nuclear plant, he founded the Hudson River Fishermen's Association, and, based on the Federal Refuse Act of 1899, a forgotten law he discovered, led to the first cases ever against water polluters in the country. In doing research for his 1969 book, The Hudson River, A Natural and Unnatural History, he collected fishes from the river for the American Museum of Natural History and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service under scientific license. In the late 1960s and early 70s, he arranged to help National Audubon assume management of Constitution Marsh and acquire Ramshorn Marsh near Catskill.
In 1970, Boyle became the first person to discover PCB contamination of fishes in North America, including striped bass he took from the Hudson. He was also the first person to write about the subject. In 1980 while negotiating an end to the Storm King project and settlement of other power plant issues, he originated the idea of an independent Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research and successfully demanded that the utilities that had abused the river endow it before he would agree to settle lawsuits brought by the Fishermen's Association.
The Hudson is now the only river in the world with a significant endowment. In 1982, he modified the role of keepers on private trout and salmon rivers in Britain by appointing a Hudson Riverkeeper to act in the public interest, a concept that has since spread to other water bodies here and abroad. In the 1980s, faced with yet another threat to striped bass, he had the Fishermen's Association intervene in the law suit that put an end to the Westway Project, a $4 billion Manhattan highway and real estate boondoggle backed by two presidents (Carter and Reagan), two senators (Moynihan and D'Amato), two governors (Carey and Cuomo) and one mayor, (Edward I. Koch). Later he initiated and served as a co-chairman of the 1994 International Conference on Sturgeon Conservation and Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History.
In 2004 the Hudson served to send Boyle to Dublin to the Bloomsday 100 Anniversary as the delegate of the Finnegans Wake Society of New York where he presented his thesis that rivers, fishes, and fishing constitute the major theme of the Wake, the most inexplicable novel ever written.
Besides the Hudson book, now being revised, other works include Sport, Mirror of American Life (1963); The Water Hustlers (1971) with John Graves and T. H., Watkins, in which he dealt with the history, pollution and future of New York City's water supply; Malignant Neglect (1979), about the known or suspected causes of cancer in the environment with the Environmental Defense Fund; and Acid Rain, (1983) with his son Alex. As early as 1987, Boyle wrote a lengthy SI article about global warming, and in 1990 the book, Dead Heat, The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect, with Michael Oppenheimer. Skeptics abounded, including Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould who wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Why make such hyped-up claims?" His most recent book is Dapping, The Exciting Way of Fishing Flies that Fly, Quiver, and Jump, with photographs by his wife, Kathryn.
Honors include Outdoor Life's Conservationist of the Year Award in 1975, the 1981 Conservation Communication Award of the National Wildlife Federation, the establishment in 1996 of the Robert H. Boyle Environmental Advocacy Center at Pace University Law School, and the William E. Ricker Resource Conservation Award of the American Fisheries Society in 1998, the same year that Audubon magazine named him one of the 100 Champions of Conservation for the Twentieth Century.
Attendees are invited to park at the Desmond Fish Library and carpool to Cat Rock. If you would like to attend the event please call Connie Mayer at (845) 265-2601x10 for tickets.
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