Yale University Press, 2024. $35.00 hardcover. 385 pages.
This interesting book details 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. It is also one story of the beginning of NIMBYism and local political activism in a decades-long fight to save Green Springs, Virginia. It illuminates the economic tradeoffs of protecting the environment, the changing nature of local control, and the surprising power of history to advance public policy.
Political neophyte Rae Ely began a campaign in 1970 to stop a prison and later a strip mine, in Green Springs. The local political machine supported the proposed projects, promising jobs for impoverished Louisa County, Virginia. But Ely and her allies prevailed by applying some of the tactics of 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. When these middle-class white women spoke out in defense of their community, they expanded the space for political participation in ways that would have lasting consequences.
The Green Springs protesters fought to preserve the historic character of their neighborhood and the surrounding environment characterized the conflict in late twentieth-century America between unbridled economic development for all and protecting the quality of life for an economically privileged few.
NIMBY 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. Green Springs, in fact, reflects an atypical approach to NIMBYism. Ely could only turn to the federal government because the projects she sought to stop received federal funds. In most cases, the political power that NIMBY groups wield is overwhelmingly dependent on the turn toward local control - which was a change in urban policy that developed in reaction to urban renewal (often federally funded).
A good source for detailing the start of NIMBYism is Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer’s Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Read the February 4, 2024 article in the Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy.
