ongressman Maurice Hinchey is a national leader in protecting the environment. He has been an outspoken and effective opponent of efforts by the Republicans in Congress to roll back decades of environmental progress. Hinchey has fought to maintain and improve the environmental protection laws that keep our air and water clean. Hinchey has been selected by the Sierra Club as an environmental "hero" in each of his terms of Congress. He has also earned a 100 percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Three times, the LCV chose Hinchey as one of only eight members of the House and Senate on its Earth List. These eight legislators are considered the "very best" of the candidates LCV endorses.
Before coming to Congress, Hinchey was an environmental leader in the New York State Legislature, where he chaired the Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee for 14 years. As chairman, he helped write New York’s strong laws on clean air, clean water and hazardous waste disposal. Hinchey led efforts to increase protection for New York’s Catskill and Adirondack forest preserves, and headed the state investigation into Love Canal that first drew attention to the national problem of toxic waste dumping. He also is the author of the legislation that created the Hudson River Valley Greenway and the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area.
Hinchey has defended the Clean Water Act against efforts to drastically weaken current clean water standards. He has repeatedly fought for tougher smog and soot standards to keep the air cleaner.
Hinchey and several of his colleagues in the House introduced the "Children’s Protection and Community Cleanup Act" to reform Superfund by implementing stronger cleanup standards that would better protect our children’s health and would strengthen existing requirements to make corporate polluters pay for cleaning up their toxic sites.
Hinchey is a member of the Congressional "Green Scissors" Coalition which opposes direct and indirect subsidies for companies that exploit publicly-owned natural resources. With the Coalition, Hinchey has led efforts to cut federal subsidies to logging companies and mining corporations that abuse our public lands.
Hinchey has led numerous successful efforts in Congress to protect and improve our national parks and to preserve publicly owned wilderness. He is the sponsor of the America’s Red Rocks Wilderness Act, which would protect 9.1 million acres of Utah’s publicly owned red rock canyonlands from degradation. In 1999, 168 of his congressional colleagues joined his successful effort to convince the Clinton Administration to protect the remaining roadless areas of our national forests, including the pristine Tongass National Forest in Alaska. As a member of the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Hinchey has been a leader in blocking the passage of damaging riders to appropriations legislation that would allow oil drilling and mining in environmentally sensitive areas.
Hinchey has been active in efforts to continue and improve the Endangered Species Act, the single most important law protecting wildlife. He opposed proposals to relax protections in national wildlife refuges, and has worked to support stronger protections for marine wildlife.
For two decades, Congressman Hinchey has been the leading advocate for PCB clean-up in the Hudson River, for which Albany Times-Union columnist Fred LeBrun said, "I’m convinced Maurice Hinchey had a lot to do with turning the momentum around with a letter...to EPA Administrator Carol Browner blasting the federal agency’s cowering ineptness in this matter." Hinchey wrote the law establishing the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, which enlists the National Park Service in protecting our historic and scenic sites. He played a critical role in the successful bipartisan effort to win the designation of American Heritage River for the Hudson. Hinchey played the leading role in the House in winning federal funding for acquisition of 15,000 acres of Sterling Forest, the largest remaining privately owned open space in the New York Metropolitan region. He also worked to obtain federal funding to expand the Finger Lakes National Forest to include lands important for recreation.
