Harper's Magazine December issue - looks worth picking up

cover courtesy of Harper's

The December '09 issue of Harper's Magazine should be on newsstands any day now, if it isn't already there. I plan to buy a copy. The editor is one of my clubmates at Sebago & the last time we paddled, he'd mentioned that the December issue included a well-researched and very sobering look at the status of the Hudson River PCB's.

Subscribers can read it online now. For the rest of us, especially those of us who take a very personal interest in the well-being of the Hudson River, it sounds to be worth the cover price.

ps - Dennis G. Moonstruck has been saying all along that the dredging was a waste of money, if not a downright scam. I won't know where this article goes until I read it but it does sound like it's going to make the dredging look like a horribly insufficient band-aid, at best.


ps latest word is that the on-sale date is next week (Thanksgiving week) but that there's a newsstand at Bleecker & Broadway that might have it already. That is not far from my office & fits right in with my current effort to get myself back into doing some good regular post-work walking (more on that one of these days).

11/20/09 update -The Bleecker & Broadway newsstand had it & I read it last night. I'd call that six dollars well spent. I think that is one of the most incredibly depressing & infuriating articles I've ever read.

I really had no idea of the extent of the problem up there. I'd always pictured the PCB's as being concentrated in the riverbed. I'd pictured there being a lot in the riverbed, enough that you won't find any particular celebration of GE's beginning dredging on my blog - it wasn't that I was opposed to it, it was just that I'd read the arguments on both sides & they both sounded plausible & I try not to take sides when I don't have any idea which one is right.

But if what that article says is true, it's not a matter of dredging being wrong or right as much as dredging being an utterly misdirected response to the problem.

Like treating a deep infection with alcohol wipes.