"Bottled or tap?" is a matter of personal preference, about as existential a crisis as Coke or Pepsi, Polo or Lacoste, boxers or briefs. But for Alex Matthiessen, head of Riverkeeper — the Hudson River's biggest eco watchdog — the question takes a much deeper dimension. "We should probably order tap," he says over lunch in the West Village, "since it's my job to protect it." It's true: Matthiessen's official title at the 42-year-old nonprofit is President and Hudson Riverkeeper, which entails everything from safeguarding New Yorkers' drinking water to catching muckety-muck polluters to lobbying for the closing of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. "Our founder Bob Boyle borrowed the idea of a keeper from 18th-century England," Matthiessen explains. "In those days it was a warden hired by an estate owner to watch privately owned streams."
But if that conjures up images of a barley-breathing graybeard in wellies, Matthiessen, 44, couldn't be more different. With his linen shirt, pinstriped blazer, and boyish rumple of brown hair, he looks more like a Cornell lacrosse player gone good. Sure, he'll go on boat patrol with Riverkeeper's staff investigators to chase down tips about toxic waste dumpers and collect evidence, but usually he sticks to the terra firma part of the job: wrangling celebrities to Riverkeeper's fund-raisers, testifying before Congress, schmoozing with government greenies, and helping file lawsuits against negligent Big Business. "There are small polluters, like a gas station owner who's dumping his oil," he says, "and then you've got polluters like ExxonMobil, an irresponsible, sinister company." Under Matthiessen's watch — and with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as chief prosecuting attorney — Riverkeeper has brought dozens of environmental scofflaws to justice, forcing them to pay millions in damages to rehab the Hudson and its tributaries. Still, it's an upstream battle. Even though the river's come a long way since it was declared an "open sewer" by a presidential council in the 1960s, roughly 70 percent of the fish studied recently, including shad, alewife, and white catfish, are in decline.
As the son of Paris Review cofounder and naturalist (and, briefly, CIA spy) Peter Matthiessen, Alex was born into the ritual of planet worship — though he didn't start to take it seriously until well after he left home in the Hamptons for boarding school at Middlesex. "My mother died when I was eight years old and my dad was traveling to research for books, so I was left on my own a lot," Matthiessen recalls. "To be honest, I spent a lot of my youth partying and wasn't interested in much other than having fun and being popular and getting laid." After graduating from UC Santa Cruz (mascot: the banana slug), he got in the activist fast lane, going in just a few years from the grassroots Rainforest Action Network to a political appointee post at the Department of the Interior under Bill Clinton. Matthiessen's been with Riverkeeper since 2000, commuting by public transportation (he rarely drives) between his small apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and its headquarters in Tarrytown. Like a doctor or cop, he's "basically on call 24/7" — not just on the Hudson's behalf but also as a general custodian for Mother Earth. And while he's grateful that the environment has conveniently become a cause célèbre, he's wary of right-wing whiplash. "The most important thing is that celebrities practice what they preach," he says. "If they're talking about the tragedy of climate change and then head out to Teterboro and jet-set to Cannes, all of our enemies — Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh — they jump all over that stuff."
To get away from it all, Matthiessen inevitably ends up in a different sort of waterworld: surfing in Mexico or taking an annual bone-fishing mancation in the Bahamas with his dad (now 81 years young), uncle, and a couple of pals. This year, Alex tried in vain to add some estrogen to the equation. "I proposed to my father that I bring a friend of mine who's a terrific fly-fisher and angler. He said, 'Have you ever been involved with her?' I said, 'Yeah, we had a little thing.' He was like, 'No.'"
