For half a decade, General Electric has been paying for a massive dredging operation on the upper Hudson River in New York.

The billion-dollar cleanup, designed to remove toxic PCBs, sparked fierce controversy when it was proposed. But as the project enters its final summer, it’s been so successful that even some of the cleanup’s most vocal critics want it expanded.

A Symbol For Sick Rivers

Just offshore in Mechanicville, three hours north of New York City, barges shuttle back and forth across the Champlain Canal, a waterway linked to the Hudson River. A backhoe is digging up great gobs of PCB-contaminated muck.

“The good news is we’re finishing the dredging and then we anticipate [that] over a decade or decades, that the fish advisories will begin to be reduced,” says Gary Klawinski, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Hudson River field office.

PCBs were once a key ingredient in GE’s manufacturing of electrical components, but the substance has been linked to cancer in animals and studies have shown severe impacts on wildlife. PCBs were banned in the 1970s, but not before GE poured tons of it into these waterways from two plants along the river.

As a result, people were warned against swimming and eating the fish. The Hudson became a symbol for sick and polluted rivers nationwide.

Still, when the cleanup was first proposed, it was surprisingly controversial. With advertising, GE convinced a lot of locals in places like Mechanicville that dredging would do more harm than good.

“These wonderful moments on one of the richest rivers on Earth could be interrupted for the next 20 years, if the EPA orders the Hudson dredged,” read one ad.

Those ads scared a lot of people. Ernest Martin, then mayor of the nearby town of Stillwater, N.Y., captured the mood when he spoke at a public hearing in 2001.

“I am definitely against dredging in the Hudson River,” Martin said. “It will take too many years to clean it under the dredging proposal by EPA. Our future for tourism, employment, new business will be lost forever.”

A National Model For Dredging

But the EPA pushed forward, requiring that GE remove roughly two-thirds of the PCBs. It was described as the largest, most complex Superfund site in U.S. history.

With active dredging now its sixth year, even the project’s early critics say it’s been a huge success.

“We did have reservations about this project, as did many others,” says Mark Behan, a spokesman for GE. “Because at the time that it was conceived, no project of this size or complexity had ever been attempted before.”

Behan says the company is now proud of its work here, developing new techniques to remove toxic silt from a vast river that changes from season to season.

“We assembled a world-class team of dredging, environmental and engineering experts, we adapted technology to the task and we’ve produced a project that EPA now calls a national model,” Behan says.

Now towns along New York’s upper Hudson have begun revitalizing these old industrial waterfronts, thinking about a future where kids can swim and play along the shore without fear of contamination.

“I remember when this all started the predictions were it was going to have a major impact on all communities,” says Mark Sever, who works for the city of Mechanicville. “So I guess, we’re pleasantly surprised.”

Calls For An Expansion

The dredging has gone so well that a lot of local leaders here have pivoted completely. More than 50 towns and counties are now calling on GE to keep working until all of the PCBs are scooped up.

EPA officials haven’t endorsed that idea. They say they’re satisfied that enough PCBs have been removed that the Hudson can begin healing. GE’s Behan says the company has done enough.

“For years, there have been voices who have said they wanted a different project, a larger project, a smaller project, but EPA is the decision-maker,” he says. “EPA ordered the dredging project, and GE executed that project, and I think did so exceptionally well.”

But a separate coalition of state and federal agencies — not including the EPA — has been studying the impact of PCBs on Hudson River wildlife. They’ve signaled that they may push GE to dredge contaminated sites not included on the EPA’s list.

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For some people, too much salt is bad for health. Too much salt is also bad for growing most crops.

Salty soil is a common problem for farmers in the arid West and it’s gotten worse because of the ongoing drought. Water is necessary to flush salts out; without it, salt builds up over time.

In New Mexico, one crop that’s suffering is the state’s beloved chile pepper.

Chile is not just a crop in New Mexico — it’s an identity. Whether red or green, the long leathery pepper with its unmistakable aroma is the reigning ingredient in local cuisine. It’s posted on road signs, arranged in vertical wreaths for decoration and protected by state law from impostors. But lately the state’s chile crop has been declining.

Joe Paul Lack is a farmer who married into New Mexico’s chile dynasty. His wife’s family is credited with commercializing a mild green pepper known as Big Jim.

“This is the third year that I have not had one acre of chile,” he says. “I’ve been farming since the ’70s, so yeah, that hurts.”

Lack farms in southern New Mexico, near Hatch, the state’s chile capital. Foreign competition and labor shortages are partly to blame for the shrinking chile acreage. But so is drought.

Dry weather forces farmers to pump from underground aquifers. The water spills into irrigation canals that flow onto fields, making up for a short supply in the neighboring Rio Grande. But while groundwater can be a blessing, it’s also a curse.

“The aquifers tend to be salty,” said Stephanie Walker, a vegetable specialist at New Mexico State University.

Salt is part of a geologic legacy beneath the desert, leftover from ancient oceans that once covered the West. The shallow aquifer under New Mexico’s chile fields concentrates the salt. Experts estimate salt content there has quadrupled in the last four years.

“The longer growers have to pump water … the more detriment to the vegetables that they are trying to grow,” Walker says.

The detriment comes in the form of root damage, which weakens certain crops, like chile. In New Mexico, production is down 40 percent from record highs a decade ago. That’s despite better farming techniques that allow farmers to grow seven times more chile per acre than they did back in the 1990s.

“What we need is a couple of monster snow seasons,” says Phil King, a civil engineer and consultant for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District.

Like the Colorado River, the Rio Grande depends on snowmelt. The more water in the river, the more water to flush away the salts. But as global temperatures rise, scientists predict there will be less snow to feed rivers. One federal study says the Rio Grande could lose a third of its flow by the end of the century.

“Our whole system is predicated on having a supply of fresh river water from the north, and if we don’t we are simply not sustainable,” says King.

The battle against salt is happening across the West. It’s fallowed more than 100,000 acres in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Salty runoff from farms in the Colorado River basin was what prompted the federal government to build a desalination plant in Yuma, Ariz., after years of complaints from Mexican farmers downstream.

“We have a tendency to utilize our resources to their fullest capacity and then go through painful downsizing when necessary,” King says.

The Elephant Butte Irrigation District, which covers 90,640 acres in southern New Mexico, is making an effort to combat its salt problem in an era of little water. Farmers are installing drip irrigation, which uses less water and pushes salt away from a crop’s root zone. The district is also looking into creating systems that capture storm water.

No matter the challenges, farmers pledge to not let their state’s beloved chile pepper die. Those who have stuck it out say they’ll continue until nature forces them out.

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