William W. Buzbee
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451904
- eISBN:
- 9780801470301
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451904.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Environmental and Energy Law
From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into the Hudson River, ...
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From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into the Hudson River, including massive new landfill extending several miles along Manhattan's Lower West Side. The most expensive highway project ever proposed, Westway also provoked one of the highest stakes legal battles of its day. This book reveals how environmentalists, citizens, their lawyers, and a growing opposition coalition, despite enormous resource disparities, were able to defeat this project supported by presidents, senators, governors, and mayors, much of the business community, and most unions. Although Westway's defeat has been derided as lacking justification, Westway's critics raised substantial and ultimately decisive objections. They questioned claimed project benefits and advocated trading federal Westway dollars for mass transit improvements. They also exposed illegally disregarded environmental risks, especially to increasingly scarce East Coast young striped bass often found in extraordinarily high numbers right where Westway was to be built. This book goes beyond the veneer of government actions and court rulings to illuminate the stakes, political pressures, and strategic moves and countermoves that shaped the Westway war, a fight involving all levels and branches of government, scientific conflict, strategic citizen action, and hearings, trials, and appeals in federal court. This Westway history illuminates how high-stakes regulatory battles are fought, the strategies and power of America's environmental laws, ways urban priorities are contested, the clout of savvy citizen activists and effective lawyers, and how separation of powers and federalism frameworks structure legal and political conflict.Less
From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into the Hudson River, including massive new landfill extending several miles along Manhattan's Lower West Side. The most expensive highway project ever proposed, Westway also provoked one of the highest stakes legal battles of its day. This book reveals how environmentalists, citizens, their lawyers, and a growing opposition coalition, despite enormous resource disparities, were able to defeat this project supported by presidents, senators, governors, and mayors, much of the business community, and most unions. Although Westway's defeat has been derided as lacking justification, Westway's critics raised substantial and ultimately decisive objections. They questioned claimed project benefits and advocated trading federal Westway dollars for mass transit improvements. They also exposed illegally disregarded environmental risks, especially to increasingly scarce East Coast young striped bass often found in extraordinarily high numbers right where Westway was to be built. This book goes beyond the veneer of government actions and court rulings to illuminate the stakes, political pressures, and strategic moves and countermoves that shaped the Westway war, a fight involving all levels and branches of government, scientific conflict, strategic citizen action, and hearings, trials, and appeals in federal court. This Westway history illuminates how high-stakes regulatory battles are fought, the strategies and power of America's environmental laws, ways urban priorities are contested, the clout of savvy citizen activists and effective lawyers, and how separation of powers and federalism frameworks structure legal and political conflict.
Duncan Green
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198785392
- eISBN:
- 9780191833236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198785392.003.0012
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Development, Growth, and Environmental, Public and Welfare
This chapter contains a more in-depth discussion of who citizen activists are, how they pursue change, and what outsiders can do to help. Citizen activism is considered as any individual action with ...
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This chapter contains a more in-depth discussion of who citizen activists are, how they pursue change, and what outsiders can do to help. Citizen activism is considered as any individual action with social consequences, and much of it involves collective activity. This type of activity has grown exponentially across the developing world, and is driven by several factors: rapid increases in literacy and access to education (particularly for women), a greater openness to political activity, and the spread of new norms regarding rights and justice. Urbanization too has played a role, for cities are vividly political places, dense with social movements demanding housing, schools, clinics, or decent water and sanitation. Technology is also a factor, most recently through the spread of social media and mobile telephones, which greatly expand the possibilities of networking among large groups.Less
This chapter contains a more in-depth discussion of who citizen activists are, how they pursue change, and what outsiders can do to help. Citizen activism is considered as any individual action with social consequences, and much of it involves collective activity. This type of activity has grown exponentially across the developing world, and is driven by several factors: rapid increases in literacy and access to education (particularly for women), a greater openness to political activity, and the spread of new norms regarding rights and justice. Urbanization too has played a role, for cities are vividly political places, dense with social movements demanding housing, schools, clinics, or decent water and sanitation. Technology is also a factor, most recently through the spread of social media and mobile telephones, which greatly expand the possibilities of networking among large groups.
Bryan T. McNeil
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036439
- eISBN:
- 9780252093463
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036439.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This introductory chapter sheds light on mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and ...
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This introductory chapter sheds light on mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and landscape. From a different perspective, it looks at the social processes that help create and continue to justify a monster like mountaintop removal, and about the social resources communities assemble to combat those processes. Conflicts of this sort are often associated with globalization. The chapter reveals how people experience in their daily lives the local effects of global processes. In their opposition to mountaintop removal and other coal industry practices, citizen activists narrate a revised version of local and regional history, in order to situate themselves and their position in relation to the black rock and its industry that had fed them for generations.Less
This introductory chapter sheds light on mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and landscape. From a different perspective, it looks at the social processes that help create and continue to justify a monster like mountaintop removal, and about the social resources communities assemble to combat those processes. Conflicts of this sort are often associated with globalization. The chapter reveals how people experience in their daily lives the local effects of global processes. In their opposition to mountaintop removal and other coal industry practices, citizen activists narrate a revised version of local and regional history, in order to situate themselves and their position in relation to the black rock and its industry that had fed them for generations.
