NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- British endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh, who's served as the U.N.'s Patron of the Oceans since 2013, will begin his 315-mile odyssey across the Hudson River on Saturday.
The swim, which will begin at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and is expected to conclude at Battery Park a month later, is intended to raise awareness for the preservation of Earth's waters.
"This is one of the greatest rivers on this Earth," Pugh, 53, said of the Hudson in a CNN interview Friday morning.
"There is no other river on this Earth where the source, you have black bears, you have vultures, you have beavers, and at the end, when you swim underneath the George Washington Bridge...you see all these skyscrapers, and there, the Statue of Liberty bringing you to the end."
Five years ago, Pugh swam across the English Channel as part of a campaign for at least 30% of the world's oceans to be protected by 2030. This time, he chose the Hudson not just for its proximity to the U.N. headquarters (where, a week after Pugh's journey is supposed to end, they'll sign the High Seas Treaty to codify the cause for which Pugh had swum in 2018), but also the Hudson's story of rebounding from pollution.
The Hudson had long been polluted by the runoff from New York's statewide industrial boom, to the point where it was considered a health hazard. But since the passing of the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Hudson has become more and more habitable to both human and animal swimmers.
Pugh believes that the Hudson River is a symbolic beacon of hope, amid the seismic shifts in this planet's environments, and the loss of biodiversity.
"I've been swimming for 36 years, and I've seen some of the enormous changes around the world," Pugh told CNN. "Be it high up in the Arctic every year, with less and less sea ice; down in Antarctica, with lakes appearing now on the surface of the ice sheet; in the coral reefs or the Red Sea, everywhere, I'm seeing what's happening to the planet."
Pugh is doing his best to change that, one stroke at a time.
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