Asked about her background, she says she kicked around various careers, and then went to graduate school "later than most" and got a degree in marine biology. After her oceanographic accident, she was living in TriBeCa near Pier 26 and began to "do a few things there" around 1986, when it was still a parking garage with no electricity, run by the Department of Transportation. She asked the DOT if she could use one shed, then another. Nobody put up a fuss because the buildings were empty and standing idle. Since then, the River Project has grown into an ambitious, wellused facility, overseeing scientific experiments about water quality, plant and fish life (so far, it has caught fortysix species) in the harbor, training interns to do research projects, conducting school tours of the Estuarium's exhibits, and acting as an advocacy group to improve the riparian environment. At the core of Cathy's enthusiasm is the fact that New York Harbor is an estuary, where fresh water and ocean water commingle to bring about, in her words, "the highest diversity of plants, fish, and birds in a region which also happens to have the highest diversity of people." While she will speak mystically about "what it, Nature, wants to be," she also seems very much an urbanite. She relishes the irony that the harbor has been designated a "marine sanctuary," along with several other spots along the Hudson, and that the others are all pristine, though this place is "maximally stressed, the opposite of pure." Protecting and restoring the natural environment in this most populous, artificial, and stressed habitat appeals to her character as a New Yorker. There are three things you need for a healthy estuary," she tells me. One, a mixture of two kinds of water; two, a wetland edge; three, a nutrient track. We no longer have a wetland edge. There used to be a wetland Wlth rocky shoals, grass-all the right stuff for a spawning and feeding ground. Now you've got these competing uses: commerce, waste disposal, transportation, recreation, and fishing. You can recreate freshwater wetlands easily-like ponds. They do it all the time. But trying to bring back saltwater wetlands is very costly and usually doesn't take, in the long run Even when it starts to take, the other problem is that protecting the wetlands won't keep the developers from building right behind the wetlands so that when the water rises, the fish are driven back to the part that's built, and they die in great numbers." One of her trainees interrupts to ask her advice. Cathy Drew strikes me as an inspired teacher rather than a polished administrator. Her approach is casual, as in: Let's just do the experiment rather than wait for the fancy equipment to come in. This trainee is trying to determine the movement of fecal matter in the harbor between two piers, by tracking some oranges as they bob around in the water. You can't get any more lowtech than that.