Fish can’t eat Tylenol

Imagine you walked out of your house one day to find your backyard coated in a thick layer of toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and spilled bottles of medicine. You’d be outraged, demand to know who dumped the sludge there, and would want the mess cleaned up before the day was through. The Hudson River and other upstate waterways are our backyards and our community spaces, but for some reason we don’t pay as much attention and get as enraged when they’re sullied and polluted with deadly chemicals. Sewage plants, which aren’t required to filter out pharmaceutical compounds, are spiking upstate waters with thick concentrations of antibiotics and medicine used to treat epilepsy, ulcers, and other ailments (“Study: Pharmaceutical compounds found in Hudson River” The Saratogian, 02/21/18). Why don’t we demand change?

According to WNYC Radio, these disposed-of pharmaceuticals are more widespread in the Hudson than even PCBs are. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were banned in 1979, but they settled into river sediments and stuck around until today. Fish in the Hudson still have high amounts of PCBs in their bodies, and according to NY.gov’s website, would cause birth defects if consumed by pregnant mothers even today, thirty-nine years after the ban.

It’s not like everyone would start eating fish from the Hudson if it were safe to do so. But we owe it to our community, our river, and its fish to keep our backyard clean. To me, it’s deeply embarrassing and shameful that a local river is known in New York as a symbol of pollution and factory dumping. If our state government passed a law requiring pharmaceuticals to be filtered out, and if our community came together and launched more community efforts and projects to clean up the Hudson, we could have a healthy body of water in our community once again.

The Hudson has been polluted for a long time, but it’s not enough to keep things the way they are just because that’s the way they’ve always been. We can and should bring fish populations and the waters they live in back to health, even if it’s not for the goal of eating them— let’s raise awareness, inspire change, and make our backyard beautiful again. Our community will be stronger and healthier as a result.

Isaac Bardin Saratoga Springs