‘A pandemic-level shock to the system’: RFK Jr’s old environmental group weighs EPA cuts | Trump administration

Donald TrumpThe payment to re -offer the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid financing discounts and employee losses is a major threat to water safety and environmental progress in one of the great environmental success stories in the United States in recent decades: cleaning the Hudson River.

Once the Hudson River is recovered, it is partly due to the work of Riverkeper, an environmental, non -profit organization that has created a model for legal activity for water protection and inspiring more than 300 world -class programs. It is also where Robert P. Kennedy Junior He cut his teeth as an environmental lawyer, before becoming a great member of the right -wing cabinet in Trump.

The political threat to the American environment in general and more specifically shocked that the work of Riverkeeper was shocked by the organization’s president, Trissy Brown, who spoke to the guardian from its headquarters in the city of Ossing Hadeson.

She was considering the effect of Salvo’s recent EPA Lee Zeldin: ending $ 14 billion in grants that Biden began on three climatic groups, which were now banned by a federal judge, as well as plans to eliminate 1155 chemicals, biology scientists, poison scientists, and other scientists from the research and development office at EPA.

“No one at the Environmental Protection Agency was ready to attack his leadership, and they did not have a playing book on how to deal.

The cat and mouse game between the administration and the courts will take time to play, but the implicit meaning: relying on federal government research in danger and with it the effectiveness of groups such as Riverkeeper, which relies on environmental protection agency data to direct its efforts, Including climate evaluation and industrial pollution assessment.

“We are in a moment when the environment changes. We see the climate changes the circumstances in which we live and we need to tend to know to know what changes and how we do better to prepare for changes,” said Brown, frustrated. “But at that moment we try to understand what is changing, we lose research.”

For Riverkeeper groups and other groups, this means building scientific knowledge to move from the restoration of the Hudson River to adaptation, including measures to reduce the impact of flooding from increasing the frequency of heavy rain events that cause loss of habitats and property.

One of those areas is to remove dams in the industrial age from rivers and tables for tributaries to allow fish to reach the spawning lands that were cut from slow floods. But removing the dams of the cards and old textiles also risk the release of PFA pollution in the sediments behind the dams.

The removal of the dam has already proven to be a controversial problem when Trump blamed the removal of dams in northern California due to a lack of water to fight the Los Angeles fires in January.

Brown is afraid that the federal financing to remove the dam along the length of Hudson is 315 miles (500 km) now as a question, along with the hopes of stopping or the opposite of the loss of fish stocks in fresh water.

“The full program for adaptation projects at the infrastructure level is in danger,” said Brown. “These dams were not designed for heavy storms and the type of bombing they are taking now, so there is urgency or we can see the unplanned dam’s failures.”

While the proposed declines have struck groups such as Riverkeeper, there were fears of those present to speak among environmental protection advocates. “I have begun to hear a general sense of fear and madness among people who do this,” said Brown.

In May, Riverkeber has the large annual river cleaning. Brown said: “I hope that even if federal support decreases, the local community, which puts the shoulder support to support will rise. People, I think, realize that we are more alone and we cannot leave it to the government to do the basics.”

“There was historically of excessive dependence at the hands of God’s awareness, and people think,” Well, people swimming, beaches should be clean. “The perception of the government’s already exaggerated government was in the minds of people and this is an invitation to wake up.”

She said that her organization would have to spend more time searching, publishing data and doing the supervision body.

To become more aware and active in local environmental responsibilities, it can reduce at least a sense of disability in division -impact national policy and the government’s ability to control the climate crisis when it is imprisoned while Brown called “the battle of death zero every four years.”

“On a large scale, the bullish trend of the climate disaster is that we all return to the right relationship with the Earth. We believe that we have dominance of everything, and it is clear that we do not do that, and this illusion is one of the reasons for the problem we face.” “When we have disasters that led to bad judgment, it brings us back to a local excessive place.”

If any environmental organization shows the promise of self -regulation, it will be Riverkeper, an organization founded by commercial fishermen and a large membership of conservative weapons. Nearly 60 years of its foundation, the Hudson River is one of the most healthy health on the Atlantic coast.

Zilden, Environmental Protection Agency official, The name The exceptional chain of decline “the greatest day of the standard cancellation of our nation.” Brown said that the description of the Republicans as all the environment is also wrong. “It is the treatment of companies – a wrong option between jobs and a clean environment, and it tears us.”

But actions Trump administration Speaking. Brown said: “I was hoped for hope in Zealin, who lives on an island, to admit his assertion sessions that climate change is real and mention his sponsorship of water.”

But now these hopes are faint.