| THE MIGHTIER HUDSON The Spirited Revival of a Treasured Landscape Roger D. Stone Michael Sloan (Illus.) Guilford, CT: : Lyons Press, May 2012 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7627-6395-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-7627-6395-7 | 256pp. | HC/GSI | $24.95 | |
Roger D. Stone is founder and president of the Sustainable Development Institute and a WWF vice president. He has written five other books including the acclaimed Dreams of Amazonia. Here he chronicles recent battles over development in New York's Hudson River Valley, an area with deep historic importance to the nation and one of the most beautiful rivers on its territory — often compared to the Rhine.1
The archetype of these battles is probably the seventeen-year struggle by Consolidated Edison, the local power company, to construct a pumped-storage facility atop Storm King Mountain.2 This is covered in Chapter 3, with references to more detailed accounts like Power along the Hudson by Allan R. Talbot. Other industrial challenges beaten back by the burgeoning coalition of local citizens and environmental organizations include the construction of a mammoth cement plant at ?, GE's attempt to avoid cleaning up the PCBs it had dumped into the river, and the preservation of numerous parks and forest preserves. In addition, local groups have been instrumental in reconnecting cities with their abandoned shorelines and fostering the return of prosperity to those areas.
In places the book reads like a congratulatory roster of local enviro-heroes (and heroines). It also sometimes veers off into irrelevancies, devoting page after page to descriptions of nineteenth-century estates owned by local bigwigs.3 But looking past this, it is an excellent overview of the recent resurgence of what I think can fairly be termed "small is beautiful" economics along the Hudson: a strong preference for locally grown food (which has halted the conversion of working farms into housing); enhanced opportunities for tourism (like the Walkway over the Hudson featured in Chapter 1), hunting and fishing; and arts and crafts and small manufacturing businesses instead of huge installations like the cement plant. It is especially relevant in view of recent books like James Howard Kunstler's Too Much Magic with its warning that we in America will not be able to establish regional small-scale, reasonably self-sufficient economies like those developing in the Hudson Valley and elsewhere in New England.
All of the book is worth reading, but its last three chapters are the best. They cover the resurgence of local small farms, politics in Albany, and the hoped-for transition to new forms of consumption and economics.
"In view of these and many other complaints, it would be difficult to award Albany an "A" for recent decades of environmental policy affecting the Hudson Valley. But a "B" seems in order, with a special plaudit for Governor Mario Cuomo (1983-94), a gold star for three-term (1995-2006) governor (sic) George Pataki, and a provisional accolade for Andrew Cuomo (Mario's son), who was off to a solid start after his first year in office in economically troubled 2011." – Page 191 |
The bottom line has to be that Stone provides here solid documentation of the emergence in the Hudson Valley of a burgeoning trend toward the sort of locally self-sufficient and environmentally responsible communities that other authors (e.g. Bill McKibben) recommend as part of the answer to climate change. Stone closes on an optimistic note:
"A persuasive spokesman for these emerging new preferences is the urbanologist Richard Florida of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. 'We can literally feel the demise of the old suburban way of life all around us,' Florida reports. He finds the US economy not writhing in the grip of the Great Recession but undergoing radical transformation for the better. His most recent book The Great Reset describes the shift away from dominant post-World War II aspirations—home ownership, suburban lifestyles, proliferating possessions—and toward a 'new economic landscape' where industrial brawn is giving way to a surge of 'knowledge, creativity and ideas' that will 'do for our times what suburbanization did for the postwar era.' The new values will 'ultimately power new kinds of demand and undergird a new round of economic growth,' with creativity becoming 'the single most important source of energy' to power the new economy." – Pages 208-9 |
The book has a good set of chapter notes, and its index lists book titles mentioned as well as persons and organizations. I mark this book down one notch, to 4.5, because of its occasional irrelevancies. But it is well worth reading for its descriptions of New York state's environmental revival, a counter to the gloomy notions promulgated by Kunstler and others. The roster of Albany politicians with good environmental policies includes three governors: Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew (both Democrats) and George Pataki (Republican). Nelson Rockefeller, not so much.
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