Waterkeeper Alliance ensures that the world's Waterkeeper groups are as connected to each other as they are to their local waters, organizing the fight for clean water into a coordinated global movement. The Waterkeeper movement was started by a band of blue-collar fishermen on New York's Hudson River in 1966 because industrial polluters were destroying their way of life. Today, Waterkeeper Alliance unites more than 300 Waterkeeper groups that are on the front lines of the planetary environmental crisis, patrolling and protecting nearly six million square miles of rivers, lakes, and coastal waterways on six continents.