(water rushing) (lively music) - [Narrator] Connecticut's Mill River is just 13 miles long, yet it tells the whole story of humanity's complicated relationship with rivers.

These amazing bodies are our sources of water for drinking and farming, our playgrounds and our fishing holes.

We write songs and poems about them.

We love our rivers, but we also abuse them.

We use them as dumping grounds for human and industrial waste.

Our road salt, lawn fertilizer, dog poop, and pesticides pollute them.

And when we poison our rivers, we harm ourselves.

(birds chirping) Arising in the woods in the suburbs, a trickle grows into a stream.

(birds chirping) (traffic rumbling) (water burbling) - The Mill River is a really special river.

It starts in Cheshire, in a swamp, and flows through a residential area until it meets Lake Whitney, which is a drinking water supply, and it flows over the dam through East Rock Park, which is a significant park in New Haven and Hamden and an important bird area, and then out through an industrial area in Fair Haven.

And that's really what makes this river special, is that combination of recreation and aesthetics mixed with a working waterfront.

It really showcases the history and the people of the river.

- Well, I love all kinds of waters, oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers, but I do live just a couple of blocks from the Mill River, and so it's my local example.

I row on it, and I walk along its banks with my dog, and there's a quote, "If there's magic on earth, it's contained in water," and I think that applies to the Mill River.

- Honestly, the most important thing we can do to save the Mill River and protect the Mill River is be conscious of what we're doing on land and remembering that we're connected to the river.

You know, when you're doing yard work, remembering that where the waste goes matters, that fertilizers and pesticides all end up washing into the river.

(birds chirping) (water rushing) (bird calling) (birds chirping) (water rushing) - We're studying road salt because it's a kind of contaminant that's ubiquitous.

We find it every place that there's roads.

And it causes harm to aquatic organisms.

It can be a problem for people because, as you probably know, salt is sodium chloride, and sodium causes a risk of hypertension in a lot of individuals.

What you see on the tree there is a camera trap, and it's a device that takes a picture whenever it detects motion, and we're using it to capture whenever a salt truck goes by so that we know how much salt has been applied at this site.

It does get into the water supply.

The Mill River flows into Lake Whitney, which is indeed a drinking water supply reservoir.

So people drink this water.

(birds chirping) (water rushing) - The Farmington Canal was a commercial waterway that came in through New Haven.

It basically was the supply of water to fight the fires in buildings and so forth.

Eventually that waterway was drained and turned into a railroad.

If there was going to be a public water system, drinking water was kind of like an afterthought.

At that time, there was no water treatment.

The water that came out of the source is the water that would use in the household, and for drinking purposes.

The source of water for the New Haven Water Company system originally was the Mill River.

- [Narrator] In the early days of European settlement, the Mill became a workhorse for industry.

Eli Whitney, famous for the cotton gin, manufacturing muskets, and using interchangeable parts, dammed the Mill and powered his machines with it.

- It's in this moment, at the beginning of the 19th century, the end of the 18th century, that water becomes the great laboratory out of which the future is crafted, and it's powering machinery all around the world.

What Whitney did was connect to that flow of invention that was already well established in Europe.

We get out and play in water at the museum because water is a fundamental force whose work you can actually touch and connect with with all of your senses.

Water is a very visible force of invention, and it's as direct and articulate a teacher now as it was in the 19th century, when water was beginning to be the power that would change the world.

(water rushing) (bird calling) - [Narrator] Once the Mill enters New Haven, it is transformed again, this time into a graceful ribbon of water ambling through an urban park.

(birds chirping) - So the park and the river are a bird magnet because of potentially the mountain that's here, because the birds, while they're migrating at night, will be able to see the the mountain landmark on it and fly to this natural northern corridor that we have here called the Mill River.

This river will provide abundant food resources for them as they make landfall in Connecticut.

What's wonderful about warblers are they, they're butterflies of the avian world.

There's up to 24 species that come through East Rock Park, and the males are all colorful, but the warblers are special.

Each one of 'em are quite beautiful and unique as far as their color patterns.

Oh, the best day ever probably of warblers is in East Rock Park when you get a fog that comes in while the birds are migrating.

This causes the birds to get very low, they can't migrate out of the area, and what occurs is something called a fallout.

And at that time you'll see any number of the same species, along with potentially multiple different species.

It's fantastic, and it's what every birder around here lives for.

(ducks quacking) (people chattering) - Wow, the river.

It's beautiful.

Beautiful day.

- Have fun!

(birds chirping) (machinery rumbling) (birds chirping) - Striped bass, large mouth, carp.

Yeah, it's quite a few, quite a few different species in there.

- [Interviewer] Do you take 'em home and and eat 'em?

- Uh, no, just for the sport.

Yeah.

(birds chirping) (traffic rumbling) (water rushing) (traffic rumbling) (train whistle blowing) - The Mill River Trail Project is about getting people in New Haven out to experience the nature that we have along the Mill River.

It runs from Criscuolo Park all the way up to the Eli Whitney Museum, and we're putting together piece by piece, so it's continuous.

The Mill River Trail will be a success if people continue to come out and discover nature, if they continue to interact with each other, if people can move more easily using bike or foot between the various places they need to go day to day.

In my own experience growing up, interactions with nature made me who I am, and I have a deep sense of connection to the whole world because of that early connection to nature.

And it's really important that we bring that to the urban environment, so that people of all ages, but particularly young people, can have those formative experiences contacting nature.

(birds chirping) (wind rushing) (traffic rumbling) - [Narrator] In New Haven, the Mill traces the path of industrial history, from Whitney's 18th century factory to the heavy industry of the mid 20th century.

Industrial waste was dumped into it, and its banks were tortured into unnatural shapes.

- Heavy industry in the late 19th century formed around the Mill River for a fairly specific reason.

One, the river, and two, so this area was cheap, land, water power, wide open, and quickly filled with tons of cheap labor, and the railroad cut right through.

So it was literally a gateway to New England.

In these days, there were next to zero regulations in the early 20th century, and by the 1950s and '60s it was discovered that the Mill River was so polluted that there was discussion at the time just to pave it over.

- There's been a power plant here on the banks of the Mill River since at least 1890.

In 1929, they built this really architecturally magnificent industrial monolith, English Station.

I think you see the land use pattern in New Haven is you have industry next to our waterways, the rivers and the harbor, because that was the primary method of transportation.

The fate of the Mill River and the fate of English Station are entwined in so many ways, and partly that is because of the legacy of pollution.

I mean, this power plant has been spewing and spilling and leaking soot and ash and smoke and particulate matter into the river for more than 100 years, and if you look at the sediments in the river, you'll see layer upon layer of contamination.

(train rumbling) (machinery rumbling) - My main concern about air and water pollution in the Fair Haven area is the lack of residents being informed.

Most of them are immigrant or Spanish-speaking background, therefore there are cultural language differences that can create a disconnect.

Also, another irony is that we have a school right next to us.

When I moved back to New Haven after college, where I started joining coalitions, committees, advisory groups, where I started seeing how my individual voice can weigh into the major decisions that are made on a bureaucratic level.

- [Narrator] New Haven's Fair Haven neighborhood is sandwiched between the Mill and the Quinnipiac Rivers, so it's nearly surrounded by water.

It is a working class neighborhood that is among the most vibrant in the city, bursting with recent immigrant energy.

(lively music) - Lots of Fish is an organization that uses art to teach environmental education, and focusing on water.

So, the more fish, the better.

Lots of Fish.

I work with kids on a regular basis in schools, and I use art to educate and work with large groups of people to collectively come together to make our world a little better.

The drain art program came out of a summer youth employment program where we used art to kind of engage the public in understanding the cycle of our water and the cycle of pollutants that get into our water.

The stormwater is sometimes combined in the sewer and stormwater, and it creates overflows.

The idea of having art as an appealing way to bring an environmental message and teach people is really the basis for it.

(traffic rumbling) (birds chirping) (birds calling) - [Narrator] There are layers of history here.

The Mill River merges with the Quinnipiac at Grape Vine Point, where a city park now borders an industrial zone.

(machinery rumbling) Black volunteers for the US Army trained here for the Civil War, and Frederick Douglass addressed them.

During the 1940s, unions organized workers in the factories.

Today, it's a beloved park, where a community enjoys baseball, dominoes, and fishing from the pier.

(people speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] In the 19th century, New Haven was one of the oystering capitals of the country.

Workers shucked oysters in the basements of riverside homes.

Storms and pollution caused a collapse.

Today, New Haven's rivers and harbor are incubators for a rebounding oyster industry.

- New Haven is really where the oysters start for us.

We start 'em up in the rivers, and that's where we plant our shell, and that's the start of the nursery.

The environment's big, we're big in water quality, paying attention to our rivers that dump into the harbor.

What we do is we test five rivers, five or six rivers.

We monitor like all summer, we got a record of what the water quality is, so the minute that jumps up, we notify the state.

You know, we'll notify the town, and they go and find the problems and fix 'em, and, you know, so we wanna really make sure these inner harbors stay real healthy.

- [Narrator] Finally, the Mill enters the harbor, and mingles with the water of the Long Island Sound.

(machinery rumbling) (truck beeping) (machinery rumbling) - The Native Americans in this region lived in harmony with the nature, so they respected all aspects of nature, both animate and inanimate objects were seen as sacred to them.

And so when it came to places like a river such as here, that had a spirit of its own, which had to be respected and had to be thanked in gratitude for what it would offer them in terms of sustenance.

When the English first came to this region, they looked to the Quinnipiac for assistance in terms of how to deal with fishing, and collecting clams, and oysters, and shellfish.

(water lapping) - The Mill River really shows us how we, for a while, moved away from natural resources and our rivers and really saw them as tools to move things and to remove waste, and as civilization has come around to appreciate them as natural things and our need to protect them, it really brings community and people together.

You know, linking work that's being done in the headwaters to work that's being done downstream, and the people, and bringing them together to protect this precious resource that wasn't always viewed as something to protect, just something to use.

(lively music) - [Narrator] Explore your own river.

Learn about its history.

Meet people on its banks, and talk to them.

By learning more about our rivers, we can learn more about our place in nature, and hopefully, we can do a better job of protecting it.

(lively music continues)