Bronx River Revival

In one of the poorest neighbourhoods of New York, a green revolution has helped transform a river once treated as an open sewer into a flourishing waterway.

In 2001, a band of passionate community leaders such as Majora Carter came together to clean up the Bronx river. Together they removed over 600 tonnes of trash, 30,000 old tyres and 89 dumped cars.

“We had to help people understand that ‘the environment’ wasn’t something that was out there in some other part of the country but it was right here in their backyard,” explains Majora Carter. “We actually had this amazing resource that if we were strategic about could be a beautiful, recreational space for us…”

Although the river has become a valued asset since the clean-up, it is far from being fully restored. Adam Green runs an organisation called ‘Rocking The Boat’ which recruits teenagers from the mostly Black and Latino neighbourhood to clean the river and also deal with the untreated sewage that overflows from the old storm water system.

We join Yasmeen Qureshi as she helps the young recruits build a boat and navigate the river to collect samples monitoring its health.

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