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Efforts to uncage the Petitcodiac River will give new life to fish, birds and tons of muddy silt, but Robert Kennedy Jr. says the changes will affect people here just as dramatically.
The co-founder of the Riverkeeper movement believes the restoration project, which took a leap forward this week when the causeway gates were opened for good, will reconnect New Brunswickers with a stolen heritage.
“Moncton was a seaport community, and this is going to restore its historical and cultural roots,” said Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and activist who has visited the beleaguered river on several occasions.
“Culturally it’s important for the Acadian people, for whom the Petitcodiac is the River Jordan. The damming of it had a political and cultural symbolism as well as really a critical environmental importance.”
In addition to benefits for the region’s ecology, Kennedy said the region’s economy will grow stronger once the river is restored.
“If you look at any of the great cities that have experienced a revival, whether it’s Baltimore or Boston, San Francisco or San Antonio, in every case it began with the restoration of the waterfront,” said the son of Robert Kennedy, the former U.S. attorney general and presidential hopeful who was assassinated in 1968, and a nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
“It reconnects people to their culture, to their history, to the rivers and waterways that give context to their communities. That has been taken away from the people of Moncton and the people of New Brunswick.”
Kennedy helped establish the Petitcodiac Riverkeeper in 1999. He said he looks forward to seeing the river run with wild Atlantic salmon and shad, which historically spawned in the Petitcodiac.
He is also looking forward to making the trip here himself, but he says he isn’t the only one with a trip to Moncton on his mind.
“I am going to come as soon as I can. I want to watch what happens to the tidal bore,” said Kennedy, who is the chairman of the board of the international Waterkeeper Alliance.
“My friend Laird Hamilton, who is the greatest surfer in the world, has asked to come up with me, to ride the tidal bore.”
Those who attended the opening of the gates on Wednesday may find it hard to believe that anyone will be able to surf the river. But that is only the first step in a process that Kennedy believes will have a massively healing effect on one of the most endangered rivers in the country.
Kennedy, a director of the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic in New York City, has a long history with the Petitcodiac River.
During one of his visits in 1995, he urged local residents to get “confrontational” in their fight to restore the river.
At the time, he complimented Canadians’ genteel attitude, but said there is no room to play nice when the health of a natural resource as vital as the Petitcodiac River had been unrightfully snatched away.
Yesterday he said New Brunswickers shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of the fight for the river’s life, which he called “the biggest fish restoration project in history, arguably.”
“It is very exciting, it is tremendously exciting for us, and I think all river-lovers around the world. It is a huge accomplishment,” said Kennedy.
“It is a symbolic act, any time you take down a dam it’s important, they did it on the Penobscot, they did it on the Kennebec (rivers in Maine), and to see this taken down, it’s a source of huge excitement and exhilaration to the entire environmental movement across the globe.”
Beyond the environmental movement, Kennedy said the restoration will have reverberations across North America fish populations.
For example, he said the Hudson River’s Atlantic shad population will be impacted by the restoration.
The Atlantic shad gather each year in huge schools off the coast of Florida and head north up the coast following a gradient temperature of 59 degrees Fahrenheit as water temperatures change. They enter a vast system of rivers at the Carolinas and eventually travel through the Hudson River on their way to the Bay of Fundy.
“Finally the whole school arrives in the Bay of Fundy, and that’s their home. Traditionally they have gone up the Petitcodiac, and that was the end of their long journey up the coast. Now for years that has been closed to them,” said Kennedy.
“It’s the culmination of this historic shad run that was truncated by the construction of the dam.”
Kennedy is very optimistic despite some major challenges that continue to face the restoration project.