On a gray summer weekday morning, Captain Bill Sheehan began a boat trip that he declared had no direct purpose.

"There is no real agenda to today’s trip," said Sheehan, who founded the Hackensack Riverkeeper environmental advocacy group in 1997. "But in the Meadowlands, we are kind of unique. If you would have taken the same boat ride with me 10 or 12 years ago, you would have heard a completely different story."

Sheehan’s story now is that of a classic comeback. The Hackensack River has experienced a significant ecological rebound in recent years, in large part due to the work of the Riverkeeper organization. A day out on the river with Sheehan revealed the positive effects of a purposed-filled life focused on Hackensack’s namesake river. It also included a look toward what having a cleaner river combined with environmental changes could mean for the county seat.

Over a decade of advocacy

A Secaucus resident who grew up in the Meadowlands area, Sheehan decided to get involved in helping to clean up the river he has loved since childhood. He made the move in 1997 after witnessing the aftermath of decades of pollution and neglect during fishing trips on the river. Piloting his boat along the glassy surface of the Hackensack, Sheehan’s comments mirrored the change in attitude about the river from open sewer to vital resource.

"In 2001, Acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco changed state policy from the podium when he gave a speech in which he said we are no longer going to be using our wetlands for warehousing, office space and residential communities," Sheehan remembered. "Instead, he said that the state would get developers to refocus their efforts on upland, redevelopment sites."

That same year, the state agency charged with shaping the course of Meadowlands development was renamed the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission from the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission. For Sheehan, the name is everything.

"This was more than just a symbolic change, because it really changed the mindset of the upper management at the commission," said Sheehan. "They became more interested in preserving the ecology of the Hackensack River and becoming a partner with Hackensack Riverkeeper in our quest to return this river to the people in a better condition than which we found it."

Birds don’t lie

A journey down the Hackensack reveals how life has changed along the river due to one simple observation: it is now teeming with life. The river and the surrounding area are now home to more than 265 species of birds and over 65 varieties of marine life. Great egrets, white with wide wingspans, soar overhead marshes that are home to thousands of turtles and muskrats. Near Laurel Hill, the Meadowlands’ own Rock of Gibraltar, ospreys are nesting for the first time in 75 years. Sandpipers dot the tops of navigation poles, part of their annual north-south migration.

The river’s revival has also spawned a burgeoning ecotourism business along the river, with canoe enthusiasts, kayakers and jet-skiers plying the river. And if the water lovers fall in, they don’t need to unnecessarily worry. While you still shouldn’t eat fish from the Hackensack, according to Sheehan, the river is clean enough to swim in.

However, not all is clear sailing on the Hackensack.

"In the process of trying to redirect developers’ attention away from the wetlands, we wound up with some interesting tradeoffs, one of which is the EnCap project," said Sheehan, referring to the failed $1 billion Meadowlands landfill development project that remains mired in legal and political controversy. "The 800 or so acres of landfill that were scheduled to be capped by EnCap are bleeding leachate into the river on a daily basis. (Leachate is a combination of rainwater mixed with contaminated materials that drains from landfills into local bodies of water.) EnCap was supposed to be an environmental land remediation project first and a recreational land project second. Some strange things happened to that plan along the way…I feel that it’s my obligation as the Riverkeeper to know what they are up to."

Undergoing development, or development underwater?

At a Secaucus dock located across the Hackensack from another controversial project, the Xanadu retail and entertainment complex, Sheehan looked upstream at what development along the cleaner banks of its river may mean for Hackensack in the years ahead.

"Slowly but surely, the Hackensack waterfront is becoming recovered like the rest of the river," he said. "Thirty years ago, the entire coastline of Hackensack had nothing but tank farms and other polluting industries along it. Now most of that land is open. Little by little, the City of Hackensack is becoming more of a potential site for development. Developers are starting to see that the road of success for them is going back to older, established places such as Hackensack and redevelop them. If it’s done right, with environmental impacts correctly mitigated, it could help with the economy of the city and it could help with the recovery of the river."

The ultimate question about the chances of Hackensack’s future waterfront redevelopment may not lie in the environmental quality of the river and its waterfront. It may be a question of where the banks of the river will be in several decades.

"The thing that Hackensack has to take into consideration is the fact that the tide is expected to rise significantly over the next 10 to 15 years due to global warming," Sheehan said. "And even if we could engineer the tide and try to hold it back, we can’t change coastal storms. The trend has been that more and more of these storms are coming through, and they are very unpredictable. I’ve been trying to quietly warn the decision makers that they would really be putting people at risk if they overdeveloped the waterfront."

"There will reportedly be at least a six-inch increase in the daily tides by 2015," Sheehan continued. "For each inch that the tide rises, there is a potential for the water to spread 1,000 feet horizontally. If you get six inches, that’s one mile inland. That could take out all of downtown Hackensack."

While the future impact of global warning is unpredictable at best, Sheehan made a confident assessment about the effect of his work with the Hackensack Riverkeeper.

"Of the 8,400 acres of wetlands that were preserved by the 2004 regional master plan that rezoned them for conservation, all but about 200 of those acres now belong to the state," he said. "We’ve gotten the wolf away from the door of the wetlands."