Urban Kayaking by Graeme Birchall
East River, New York City
Introduction
This website is a bit of brain dump on the subject of urban and suburban kayaking, and in particular free public kayaking, as it is practiced in New York City and Northern New Jersey. All comments expressed are my own.
About Myself
I am originally from New Zealand, but I have lived in New Jersey for more than three decades. I am now retired, but for several decades I was active in various local conservation and outdoor recreation organizations. I have concluded that enabling safe and affordable access to the local outdoors (at scale) for urban and suburban residents is necessary if we are to save the Earth.
Local Outdoors Movement
The local outdoors movement is about acknowledging that urban residents do not do the Earth any favors when they travel to a remote rain forest for a holiday. The emphasis should be on bringing the outdoors to the people, rather than having the people travel to the outdoors. In many cities and suburbs, the nearest available outdoors is the local harbor, lake, or river.
Unfortunately, we live in world where many of the government agencies that are tasked with managing and protecting the outdoors are also tasked with encouraging travel to the remote outdoors. They do not have a mandate to minimize the door-to-door carbon footprint of urban or suburban residents who wish to experience the outdoors.
A related issue is that access to the local outdoors for urban and suburban residents is about much more than just recreation. When safe, healthy, affordable, and family-friendly outdoor recreation is enabled at scale, it can deliver significant public health benefits.
Access to the Outdoors
In a democratic society, public access to the outdoors should be defined in quantifiable terms. To illustrate, consider New York Harbor: Approximately eighty thousand people to go kayaking on the harbor every summer. This sounds like a lot, but it is not. It means that if all eight million residents of New York City wanted to go kayaking on the harbor just once in their lifetime, they would have to wait more than one hundred years for the opportunity. But this assumes that there are no births, no immigrants, no tourists, nor any repeat kayakers. In practice, the wait will be more than a thousand years.
The situation on the rivers of Northern New Jersey is much worse. There is a similar number of nearby residents, but vastly fewer opportunities to go boating. There are none of the popular free public kayaking programs that exist in New York City. In practice, there is no public access to any of these rivers, and none is planned. This has consequences: People will not care about protecting an outdoors environment if they are unnecessarily excluded from that environment.
There is always going to be a tension between protecting a fragile ecosystem, and getting public support to enable the protection. Only allowing token access is not a solution - especially if more access is feasible. It antagonizes people. It also causes them associate environmental protection with an elitist and exclusionary agenda. This is bad politics, and thus bad for the environment.
Comments are welcome.
Graeme Birchall
Mar/2025