"She was a voice for nature and a voice for the river," said Rita Kampalath, L.A. County's chief sustainability officer and a longtime friend of Winter's. "She had such strength of her convictions, and she was so clear-eyed in the vision that she wanted to push forward. And I think that inspired a lot of people."
"It's incredibly transformed," says Emily Mueller De Celis, a landscape architect at the firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which won a competition to "renaturalize" the area in 2007. "Rather than walking around in and amongst oil refineries and other industry, now you are immersed in nature, walking along the banks of a river with spectacular views back to the city."
The Bronx River was once heavily altered by industrial activity and has been the subject of significant restoration efforts to improve its ecological health and connectivity. One major project is the construction of a fish passage at the East 182nd Street Dam, which aims to improve aquatic species migration and enhance the ecological functioning of the river. By facilitating the movement of fish that had previously been blocked by the dam, this project would promote a healthier aquatic ecosystem.
Poet Robert Macfarlane savored the resilience of nature in a time when many think it cannot be restored. He pointed out that salmon appeared on the Klamath River only days after the removal of several dams were completed, writing in The New York Times: "Rivers are easily wounded, but given a chance, they revive with remarkable speed. Lazarus-like, their life pours back."