 So I'm swimming along, I'm passing floating trash, gas and oil, used condoms, visible chunks of poop. If people knew how bad it was, I think they'd say that's enough. They call me the toxic Avenger as a joke. You see me in my big canary yellow search and rescue puncture resistant dry suit swimming these really toxic waterways like the Gowanus Canal and like Newtown Creek. I end up being the first person in history to swim those, but it's because nobody else would go near those waterways. They're so dirty. Part of what I was also doing is trying to change the way people looked at these waterways. I knew if I got in there and swam that it would put the pollution, the size of the challenge of the cleanup, the scope of the mess in perspective, but it would do it at a human scale. The idea of me swimming in one of the most polluted waterways in America was so freaky and scary to people that I had newspaper reporters calling me saying people are making bets on whether you're going to die. To some extent, what's going on in America in our rivers and our lakes and our streams and in the ocean is really a reflection of who we are and the choices we have made as a people. So you can see the industrial revolution and all the chemicals that went with that and every different kind of energy we generated and all the different things that we refined and produced and threw away. The Clean Water Act of 1972 says I have the right to swim in clean water. They just haven't cleaned it. What's crazy is that that clean water that we have a right to was sort of stolen from us and nobody realized it. And what I'm here to say is it's time to steal it back.