Eric Hertz worked as a playwright and raft guide before turning his full attention to running Earth River Expeditions in 1990. As a playwright he won a number of awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. His play, Between Rails, was produced Off Broadway in 1984 and ran for 2 months.

(The following article about Eric appeared in his local newspaper.)

Fighting to preserve the age of innocence

Times Herald-Record, January, 1997, by Jeremiah Horrigan

Eric Hertz visits places that aren't supposed to exist anymore.

Rivers in the East where people have never looked into Western eyes. Rivers in South America that still rage after carving their way through 16,000 feet of granite. Rivers in the North where the world's largest herds of caribou and Beluga whales congregate.

What's more - and more important - Hertz isn't just soaking up the pristine scenery when he's riding these rivers. Instead, he's taking an active part in making sure these unbelievable sanctuaries survive the taming and destructive onslaught of what's sometimes blithely referred to as "civilization."

Hertz is the president of Earth River Expeditions, an international adventure travel company dedicated to rivers and their preservation. His company guides people down some of the most spectacular and wildest rivers in the world. He's 42 and has lived nearly half his life in Accord, on land abutting the Sanderskill on the edge of Mohonk Mountain.

"I love streams, always have. There's something about moving water. I'm not sure I can explain it, it's like an obsession with me," Hertz says over lunch at a diner near his home.

That love has taken him white-water rafting down some of the wildest rivers in the world, including Chile's Futaleufu River and the Great Whale River in Quebec and China's Schuiluo River. (For a look at what his last trip to China looked like, check out the November 1996 issue of National Geographic.)

He grew up in landlocked Hartsdale, in Westchester County. He spent a couple of teen-age summers white-water rafting in Oregon and Idaho. That set him on his present course.

While white-water rafting is about as thrilling an occupation as there is, Hertz isn't a thrill junkie, feeding off the adrenaline rush that comes of flashing across thundering rapids in a puny-looking manmade craft. There's something else that provides more of a kick for him than any water rush. He first experienced it rolling down Idaho's Salmon River back in the 60's.

What he experienced was innocence, his own and other people's.

"It was a different time then," he recalls. "Where ever we went (along the river) people would be there, they'd bring us into their homes."

It's not like that anymore in America now. Whatever welcome we might once have offered to wayfaring strangers was lost years and years ago. The rivers and mountains themselves have become increasingly lost to us as well, victims of rampant commercial development.

But when Hertz first visited the Futaleufu River in Patagonia, Chile, seven years ago, he discovered a place where that sense of innocence still prevails.

"The people down there are unbelievably friendly. The country itself is huge. There's only 16 million people in all this space and most of them live in Santiago."

In other words, Hertz has found paradise. There aren't even any biting insects in its jungles.

Having found Shangri-La, Hertz hasn't been content to sit on shore and watch as what remains of the 20th Century swallows paradise whole. He's buying up chunks of riverside real estate, making his favorite Chilean river as indigestible as possible to the Endesa Power Company, the private power company that wants to kill it by damming it.

Hertz and a group of investors have bought up roughly 2,000 acres along the Futaleufu. He uses part of that land as a camp for his expedition tours; the rest of it has been put into a land trust and sold to some of his clients on condition that they never subdivide or sell the land to the power company. The land trust allows the people who have lived along the river for hundreds of years to continue to live and work there.

The proposed dam on the "Fu" would turn the raging river into a vast reservoir, killing off its world-class salmon fishing, flooding villages and forests for more than 100 square miles.

Hertz has made similar efforts on behalf of the Cree Indians, whose tribal homelands are threatened with annihilation from the huge James Bay hydroelectric project in Quebec, Canada.

The environmental buzz phrase of the decade is to "Think globally and act locally." Hertz has taken that idea further still. He recognizes that in a world where innocence is under perpetual threat everywhere, depredations against the Futaleufu are the same as any that may happen along the Sanderskill.

"Civilization" is a hungry beast; people like Hertz know better than most of us that when it comes to threats like those against the Fu, the difference between acting globally or locally is merely a question of semantics, not reality.