Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Not in My Backyard : How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs, EPUB eBook

Not in My Backyard : How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs EPUB

EPUB

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

How a woman-led citizens' group beat a Southern political machine by enlisting federal bureaucrats and judges to protect their neighborhood from unchecked economic development

This social history of local political activism tells the story of the decades-long fight to save Green Springs, Virginia, illuminating the economic tradeoffs of protecting the environment, the origins of NIMBYism, the changing nature of local control, and the surprising power of history to advance public policy.

Rae Ely faced long odds when she launched a campaign in 1970 to stop a prison, then a strip mine, in Green Springs. The local political machine supported both projects, promising jobs for impoverished Louisa County, Virginia. But Ely and her allies prevailed by repurposing the same tactics used by the Civil Rights movement-the appeal to federal agencies and courts to circumvent local control-and by using new historical interpretations to create the first rural National Historic Landmark District.

The Green Springs protesters fought to preserve the historic character of their neighborhood and the surrounding environment in a quest that epitomized the conflict in late twentieth-century America between unbridled economic development for all and protecting the quality of life for an economically privileged few. Ely's tactics are now used by neighborhood groups across the nation, even if they have been applied in ways she never intended: to resist any form of development.

Information

Information