The news that President Donald Trump is moving to gut protections for wetlands, and that the Hudson River might be among his victims, sent me back through a time machine to the days when I was a kid sloshing around in its murky waters nearly every day during the summer, in the years before the environmental movement found its footing.

The river was an ugly duckling back then, in the 1960s, when towns up and down its banks spewed raw sewage into the waters, when a General Motors factory in my hometown dumped lead and mercury into the mix and a General Electric factory north of Albany added more than a million pounds of cancer-causing PCBs.

In 1965, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller described the upper Hudson as “one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swi

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