Shutkin, William A. : New Ecology, Inc. / Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Boston College

William A. Shutkin is Founder and President of New Ecology, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, and cofounder and former executive director of the environmental justice organization Alternatives for Community and Environment. He is Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Adjunct Professor of Law at Boston College Law School.

Introduction

In reclaiming and reoccupying lands laid waste by human improvidence or malice . . . the task is to become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the dam-aged fabric. --George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature

How shall we turn the ghetto into a vast school? How shall we make every street corner a forum . . . every houseworker and every laborer a demonstrator, a voter, a canvasser and a student? The dignity their jobs may deny them is waiting for them in political and social action. --Martin Luther King, Jr., "Where Do We Go from Here?"

America was founded on the belief that the health of democracy is inextri-cably bound up with the bounty and extent of the nation's physical envi-ronment. Civic virtue and democratic habits of the heart were believed to be born of the living arrangements found on a small farm or in an agrari-an village. Many believed that American communities, to be at their demo-cratic best, need to be arranged in such a way as to connect individuals to each other and to the land, their earthly place. It was the lack of massive urban centers like those found in the Old World of Europe, where anomie, inequality, and decadence went hand-in-hand, that for America's founders enabled American democracy to thrive. Yet as the twenty-first century begins, there is widespread uncertainty about the social and environmental fate of the American experiment in democracy and about the relevance of inherited belief systems and philoso-phies like agrarianism in the light of the social and environmental challenges we now face. Mindful of the need not to be nostalgic or sentimental about the past, it is safe to say that contemporary American society, for all it has gained in terms of economic prosperity, technological prowess, and social justice, has lost a lot too.

Leading cultural critics and social scientists have observed a growing sense among ordinary Americans that they have lost control over their own lives, that the economic, political, and cultural disruptions of modern life have eroded Americans' civic sensibility and willingness to participate in public affairs. The impersonal power of the marketplace and its megacor-porations, the rapid rise of ever-faster digital technologies, and the global-ization of communication and commerce have had a destabilizing effect on many Americans, who are struggling to keep abreast of the enormous changes these forces have wrought. Meanwhile, the traditional role of government, at least since the New Deal, as the overseer of the general welfare and the provider of last resort has been significantly called into question, if not fundamentally altered. In the current period of devolution and decentralization of government authority spawned during the Republican ascendancy to power under Ronald Reagan in the 180s and later the Republican-dominated Congress in the 10s, most Americans are still trying to figure out just what the new role of government is or ought to be, and where the private realm ends and the public begins. Privatization became the buzzword of the 10s, as fed-eral, state, and local governments looked to individuals and the private sec-tor for solutions to social problems once exclusively reserved for government, from crime and welfare to education and the environment. Some are left to wonder whether there is any public life at all left in America.

At the same time, despite the favorable economic conditions of the 10s, the gap between rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, the knowledge class and the labor class, is greater than ever, and growing at a steady pace. Notwithstanding strong employment rates and increases in earned income, lower- and middle-income Americans have not kept pace with the burgeoning economy, facing stagnating wages and higher costs of living. As a groundbreaking study by the policy think tank Redefining Progress reports, though the gross domestic product might be up, many Americans are feeling down. In addition, racial inequality and segregation persist, mirroring the striking economic disparity among Americans. Although considerable progress has been made in the last half-century in the age-old struggle to secure the civil rights of minorities, people of color in the United States continue to lag behind their white counterparts in their pursuit of the American dream. From education and income to health and environmen-tal quality, people of color still face formidable deficits in trying to improve their quality of life. A central argument of this book is that part and parcel of this diminu-tion of civic spirit and rise in economic and social inequality has been the deterioration of the American environment, both built and undeveloped. As even the most casual observer can attest, the environment of many of America's cities, suburbs, and rural areas has been under assault from an array of environmental harms resulting from overdevelopment, automo-bile emissions, and industrial pollution, among other causes. We live, it seems, in a physical world no longer designed by mother nature, where humans' handiwork is the exception, not the rule, but instead by engineers, industrialists, developers, and planners more concerned about the bottom line than their environmental legacy. Environmental changes brought about by social and economic forces have had a corrosive effect on our sense of place and self, and have divid-ed communities along racial and economic lines as well as cutting them off from access to safe, unspoiled places. It is no accident that with America's economic growth has come environmental harm and the displacement and segregation of human communities. This is, after all, the longest running of American themes, originating with the European settlement of precolo-nial New England, where significant numbers of Native Americans and wildlife species were extinguished and forests denuded almost overnight, and continuing through the centuries, most recently in the form of urban renewal in the 140s and 0s, and suburban sprawl in the 180s and 10s. Despite considerable progress in cleaning up the nation's air, water, and soil over the past three decades, pervasive environmental degradation persists: countless acres of contaminated land, miles upon miles of rivers and streams unsafe for swimming or fishing, toxic haze blanketing entire regions, thousands of native plant species disappearing every year, and mil-lions of children afflicted with lead poisoning and asthma from indoor and outdoor air pollution, among other pollution problems. We have thus arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century at a place far afield from eighteenth-century America's pristine agrarian villages. A largely and increasingly urban society (though in significant num-bers many today are fleeing the cities in pursuit of idyllic pastoral settings), we seem to have lost our traditional moorings and the accompanying sense of confidence about who we are as a people and where we are headed. Once a proud agrarian republic, then a pioneering industrial democracy, we inhabit today what many call, for want of a better descriptor, the postindustrial order, an unstable alloy of old metropolises and new, of edge cities and third-ring suburbs, of factories, malls, and subdivisions, and of working farms and fields. As always, there remains that awesome space, the American wilderness, an endless source of national mythology and pride amid the wrenching changes in the American landscape of the past half-century. An Emerging Model of Environmentalism In response to this apparent physical and social crisis of democracy, I cofounded in 1913 a nonprofit environmental law and education center, Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), dedicated to helping residents of lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color in and around Boston protect and improve their environment as a means of helping to revitalize and reclaim their communities. The moral impulse behind the idea of ACE was developed at an early age. I am a child of the American suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s and of the Jewish upper-middle class. My parents, like many of their peers, fled New York City in the mid-1960s to settle the then-new frontier, at least for ethnic minorities, of south-western Connecticut. I was raised in Stamford, a historically blue-collar, suburban city located in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. An immigrant community, Stamford has always had its share of haves and have-nots. It hosts a mix of blue- and white-collar residents, of elite private and struggling public schools, of urban and semirural settings, of whites and people of color, of Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and Christians. I attend-ed both private and public schools, trekked on urban streets and in nature preserves, played Little League baseball with whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians, sons of plumbers and of lawyers, and attended Catholic mass on more than a few occasions.

Moving between and among these different subcultures and social spaces that in many ways define the postmodern, multicultural age, I became a rather introspective young man, heeding Socrates' injunction that "the unexamined life is not worth living." I began to take seriously the call to ser-vice and the moral responsibility my parents, better teachers, and favorite literature described but too few of my role models exemplified. My moral-ity was forged by, on the one hand, my love of the environment, having grown up next door to a 200-acre nature sanctuary and been given by my parents the opportunity to explore many of the country's natural wonders, and, on the other, my experiences in inner-city Stamford, where I spent con-siderable time after school in my teenage years teaching guitar to young stu-dents from one of the city's housing projects. The project abuts Interstate 5, and like most other public housing stock of its era is dangerous and dilapidated, a collection of brick boxes more like a prison facility than a place to call home. The projects were anathema to my moral and aesthetic sensibility. It was not that the rest of the suburban environment was much better, with its sprawl, sanitized corporate headquarters, traffic congestion, and isolated, dead-end streets. But the access I enjoyed to beautiful places in and around the city was missing for these kids, whose brothers and sis-ters were my high school classmates. Some twelve years later ACE was born. The organization appropriates and institutionalizes the agrarian notion (with a decidedly urban, multi-cultural twist) that the physical condition of America's communities is a critical factor in the nation's success as a robust democratic republic. In other words, ACE embodies the idea that healthy, vibrant social and polit-ical life presupposes a bare minimum of environmental quality. Community, democratic community, and environmentalism are one. Because environmental issues tend to defy political, cultural, and geo-graphic borders (consider the pervasive, insidious effects of regional air pol-lution, suburban sprawl, or contaminated drinking water), they are often a unique way to bring people together from all walks of life and back-grounds. They provide an opportunity to realize the ideal of community: diverse individuals and groups coming together around a common concern and giving voice to a vision for the common good. ACE was designed to capitalize on this opportunity. Further, ACE strives to promote the idea that ordinary people, with enough information and technical support at their disposal, can and must participate in the decision making that affects their lives. At bottom, informed, meaningful citizen participation is what democ-racy is all about. In no small way, ACE represents a response to the failure of traditional environmentalism to articulate and act on a democratic social vision. ACE is really nothing more than the kind of community resource most affluent white Americans have enjoyed for decades. Because environmental protec-tion, like all other social issues, is a matter of the distribution of benefits and burdens, those who hold the most power tend to receive the most ben-efits, such as cleaner air, access to parks, and rigorous enforcement of envi-ronmental laws. Those without political or economic power (the two go hand-in-hand) tend to bear the brunt of environmental burdens, like pol-luting facilities (incinerators, auto body shops, trash transfer stations, and the like), contaminated land and buildings, and underenforcement of envi-ronmental laws. Traditionally, environmental protection has been a zero-sum game in which the success of the wealthy in fighting or avoiding environmental problems has resulted in the displacement or persistence of those problems in lower-income and minority communities. The siting of landfills and incinerators (whose solid waste feedstock often comes from sources out-side the host community), abandonment of contaminated land (usually by those who could afford to pick up and leave), and air quality hot spots in urban neighborhoods (caused largely by emissions from pass-through, sub-urban commuter vehicles) are some of the consequences borne by the less affluent resulting from the actions of the more affluent. ACE attempts to level the playing field by working with residents and organizations in hard-hit neighborhoods to advocate for environmental protection and public health. Often this means battling against unwanted development or compelling a private actor or government agency to clean up a polluted piece of land or dilapidated building that has been ignored for decades. In a sense, ACE helps hold the line against further deteriora-tion in environmental quality and human health. In the communities where it works, like the hard-hit Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury and Chinatown, environmental degradation and high morbidity and mortality rates for environmentally related diseases such as asthma are all-too-com-mon indicators of community health.

But more than simply holding the line, ACE and its community con-stituents are attempting to change the way environmental protection is conceived. Rather than calling for pollution burdens to be redistributed to some other communities, ACE advocates for pollution-prevention strate-gies so that no one has to face the threat of undue environmental harm. Moreover, ACE promotes the idea that environmental decision making must itself be transparent and open to those who for too long have been left out, believing that those best able to protect their environment are those living in it. As successful as ACE has been in helping to improve the environmental and public health conditions in communities of color in and around Boston, significant challenges remain. For example, for several years beginning in 13, ACE helped a number of community organizations fight a proposed asphalt plant in Boston's South Bay section. A massive filled tideland, the South Bay is the heart of the city's historic industrial corridor and sits at the crossroads of five diverse neighborhoods: Chinatown, Dorchester, Roxbury, South Boston, and the South End. It abuts the Southeast Expressway, the main north-south roadway feeding Boston's notorious elevated highway Central Artery. On an average day, tens of thousands of South Shore com-muters slouching toward work or home contribute to the South Bay's per-sistent air pollution problems. Public health experts call the South Bay the "zone of death" because of the extraordinary mortality rates for upper res-piratory diseases and other health effects associated with poor air quality. The South Bay area and its adjacent neighborhoods are full of vacant, polluted land (over fifty confirmed hazardous waste sites are located in Roxbury's Dudley neighborhood alone) and businesses, such as waste transfer stations and auto body shops, whose operations add to the area's environmental degradation. For decades, these neighborhoods have suf-fered high rates of unemployment and poverty. Even today, despite Boston's economic boom, some South Bay neighborhoods are experiencing unem-ployment rates as high as 20 percent. The area lies within the city's empow-erment zone, the federal program intended to attract much-needed jobs and development to economically distressed communities. The proposed asphalt plant, owned by the Boston-based Todesca Equipment Company, offered only four full-time jobs yet a host of envi-ronmental hazards, from truck traffic and emissions to air quality impacts from the facility itself. More important, the 2.7-acre site presents a poten-tially attractive opportunity for job-generating, "green" redevelopment-- the kind of economic development the neighborhoods have been promoting for years. Known as the Coalition Against the Asphalt Plant (CAAP), the commu-nity groups opposed to the plant, from each of the neighborhoods abutting the South Bay, worked with ACE to stop the project. From lawsuits to administrative appeals to direct action, CAAP organized relentlessly, pulling together an unprecedented campaign based on the frustrations and anger of tens of thousands of inner-city residents tired of being steamrolled by unwanted development. CAAP was not opposed to development per se. In fact, its members explicitly called for jobs and business growth. But they would not settle for a polluting facility that offered almost no economic opportunity for local residents. What finally killed the Todesca proposal, at least until the proponent's lawyers appealed, was a ruling by Boston's Board of Health in the spring of 1916 prohibiting the use because of the area's extraordinary public health conditions. The board took seriously the South Bay's reputation as the "zone of death" and ruled in effect that "enough is enough," heeding the cries of the neighborhood groups. That the Board of Health had to step in is telling. Because of the facility's relatively small emissions levels ("only" approximately 13 tons of air pollution per year, according to the propo-nent's figures), recourse to environmental laws to stop the project was extremely limited. CAAP had to resort to extraordinary claims based on the area's dangerous environmental and public health conditions to get environmental regulators' attention, and even then it was limited to a few technical issues regarding the plant's engineering specifications for its allegedly state-of-the-art pollution control equipment. Moreover, because environmental laws confer no jurisdiction on environmental officials over local land use decisions, the original action granting the plant a permit to be built on the South Bay site was essentially unreviewable, except by the same zoning board that made it in the first place. This gap in the system of environmental laws meant that although South Bay residents faced greater exposure to environmental hazards than most of their Boston neighbors due to the cumulative effects of decades of pol-lution, their claims were essentially meaningless. The Board of Health, however, like most other such boards, has broad authority dating back to the nineteenth century, when the only governmental bodies established to deal with what we now call environmental problems were the local health boards, acting under the state's police power to protect the general welfare. In those days, the problems typically had to do with odors from pig farms, leather tanneries, and other "obnoxious" or "injurious" operations. In an age of sophisticated pollution control technology and a vast complex of environmental regulations, it is thus supremely ironic that but for the nine-teenth- century public health laws, the asphalt plant and all similar facili-ties would face no significant legal hurdles. Despite the victory, the fate of the site and the asphalt plant still hangs in the balance. CAAP won the battle but stands to lose the war. It is this fact that underscores the ultimate challenge facing CAAP and all other com-munities that want to take control of their environmental and economic destiny against the tide of historic injustices, social change, and often sub-versive market forces. Unable to reposition itself from an oppositional force to a catalyst for acceptable economic development, CAAP can only stand on the sidelines while others determine the future of the site. Since the Board of Health decision, several other proposals have been floated, from a large surface parking lot for workers in the nearby Longwood Medical Area, to a tire recycling plant. None has drawn much support. CAAP's campaign, like so many other community-led initiatives, has been essentially power-less to implement its own vision for the South Bay, grounded in a desire to improve economic conditions for area residents while protecting and restor-ing environmental quality. Meanwhile, other opportunities to improve neighborhood conditions beckon. Just across the street from the asphalt plant site on South Bay Avenue sits the South Bay incinerator site, a now-vacant 3.3-acre parcel that for over twenty-five years was home to the city's municipal solid waste incinerator. In 1975, the facility was shut down by court order due to the environmental hazards it created. Only in 1917, after twenty-two years of sitting idle like a mammoth brick sarcophagus, was the facility demolished in response to community pressure supported by ACE. Many of the same groups that organized in opposition to the asphalt plant came together to compel the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the owner of the site, to clean up the incinerator site. At the same time, they successfully advocated against the siting of a proposed "megaplex"--a huge, co-located convention cen-ter- stadium facility--for the incinerator and nearby South Bay sites. Calling themselves Neighborhoods United for the South Bay (NUSB), they, like CAAP, want clean, job-generating development in the South Bay. However, the Suffolk County House of Corrections, located next door to the incin-erator site, has eyed the parcel as a potential site for a new central lockup facility, made necessary by the county's skyrocketing prison population. A Boston Globe editorial supported the prison proposal, claiming that man-ufacturing and industrial uses were not feasible for the area. A stone's throw from the South Bay sites in Roxbury is a massive con-crete box, home to the abandoned Stride Rite manufacturing facility. Built in the fortress style of the 1970s, the empty facility is all that is left of Stride Rite's Massachusetts footwear manufacturing operations, though its cor-porate headquarters is located in the Boston suburb of Lexington. The com-pany left Roxbury in 181, moving its manufacturing facility to Tennessee, where cheap land and cheap labor gave it a competitive advantage in the tight children's shoe market. Stride Rite is just one example of the flight of businesses and residents from the inner city that has taken place across the country since the 1950s. The Stride Rite site is at the center of the Melnea Cass Avenue Corridor, long considered a prime location for job growth and business development. In March 18, the Boston Water and Sewer Commission announced that it would be moving its truck depot and stor-age facility from South Boston to the Stride Rite site, to make way for the new convention center and related development planned for the South Boston waterfront. Meanwhile, an innovative manufacturer of low-cost, energy-efficient housing is looking for a Boston site to build its manufacturing facility and office headquarters. The company wants to be located in the inner city, with-in the empowerment zone, which can provide a large part of its labor force. With over a hundred jobs to offer area residents, as well as apprenticeships, training, and plenty of other community benefits, the company presents a unique economic and environmental opportunity. However, the company is struggling to find a site and some financing. Its patience is waning. Just eighty miles north of Boston in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Stonyfield Farm Yogurt Company is gearing up to develop the region's first ecoindustrial park, a 0-acre experiment in state-of-the-art development designed to avoid waste and pollution while maximizing economic pro-duction and performance. The brainchild of Stonyfield Farm's innovative management team and the town of Londonderry's planner, the ecoindustrial park will be among the most advanced in the world. The unemployment rate for the area is currently below 3 percent. Community groups from Boston's inner city can often do little more than pay lip-service to these environmentally sound development oppor-tunities. While groups like CAAP and NUSB have become experts at stop-ping development, they are at a loss when it comes to helping promote and implement the kind of "green," job-generating development they seek. As a result, a development vacuum is created, easily filled by undesirable pro-jects or nothing at all, leading to the cycle of resistance and decline that characterizes too much of the land use history of America's urban com-munities. What makes this challenge so significant is that environmentalists, urban policy experts, and Americans generally are coming to realize that the key to solving many of today's environmental and social problems lies in res-urrecting the country's urban centers. To the extent that urban communi-ties like Dorchester and Roxbury cannot achieve clean, job-generating economic development, not only will they continue to struggle, but the rest of the nation will suffer as population and development pressure in sub-urbs and rural communities continues to produce adverse environmental effects like traffic congestion, loss of habitat, and air pollution, as well as overcrowded schools and racial and economic balkanization. This is why current environmental policy initiatives are attempting to move us closer to the ideal of democratic, sustainable communities that the landscape planner Frederick Law Olmsted described as "common place civ-ilization" and author Jane Jacobs called an "urban village" by joining envi-ronmental and economic goals. They seek to address the widespread environmental and social degradation resulting, in large part, from short-sighted development and land use practices and urban disinvestment. For example, brownfields redevelopment (promoting the cleanup and redevel-opment of contaminated land in urban centers while sparing undeveloped land in suburban and rural areas), smart growth (directing growth only to areas where the infrastructure and natural carrying capacity can accom-modate it), and industrial ecology (encouraging the design of production methods and facilities that mimic the reuse, recycling, and replenishing functions of natural systems, resulting in the prevention, and not merely the control, of pollution and waste) are environmental policy initiatives, developed in the mid-1910s, aimed at protecting the environment while promoting sustainable economic development and vital communities, espe-cially in urban areas. They seek to restore a sense of place, mixed-use devel-opment, and environmental quality that are at the core of healthy communities and look to social policy solutions that address the connec-tions between environmental problems and economic and social issues such as urban disinvestment, racial segregation, unemployment, and civic dis-engagement. These initiatives comprise an emerging model of environmental protec-tion that moves beyond simply controlling pollution levels from smoke-stacks or outflow pipes and instead focuses on land use decisions and local and regional planning efforts to ensure that development occurs in accor-dance with environmental principles such as pollution prevention and com-munity vision. Collectively these policies signal a revived understanding of the critical link between environmental health and economic and civic health, as well as a more comprehensive approach--a systems approach-- to solving environmental problems. Each tool embraces the notion of vibrant economic activity tempered and channeled by sound environmen-tal principles; each derives from issues of land use and community plan-ning; each promotes a preventive, proactive approach to environmental problem solving rather than a fragmented, pollutant-by-pollutant, media-based approach. Notwithstanding the promise of this model, existing institutions across sectors are not equipped to take advantage of these opportunities. Most community organizations and environmental groups are not used to pro-moting development and planning strategies, having spent much of the past thirty years advocating and litigating to stop development, as they should. The private sector, meanwhile, is still keeping its eye on the traditional bot-tom line, without realizing the competitive advantage afforded by envi-ronmentally responsible development and design. Lacking a strong community and regional planning tradition, government sector players are typically at a loss when it comes to implementing integrated, comprehen-sive planning-oriented policies.

It is for this reason that in late 1918 I founded a new kind of nonprofit environmental organization, New Ecology, Inc. (NEI), which picks up where groups like ACE leave off. It is a next-generation environmental organization aimed at helping to implement sustainable development pro-jects in environmentally and economically hard-hit areas. NEI promotes local and regional initiatives in New England that enable a diverse set of stakeholders--from community organizations and environmental groups to municipalities and businesses--to plan, organize, and execute strategies aimed at protecting the environment while facilitating sustainable economic development and building civic capacity. With the know-how and public spirit of the third sector, and a strong connection to community-based orga-nizations, NEI leverages its access to government and private sector resources to spearhead environmental projects that embody the core con-cepts of brownfields, smart growth, and industrial ecology, as well as civic environmentalism--the notion at the heart of this book that holds that social capital and environmental quality are mutually reinforcing. NEI emphasizes environmentally sound development ecodevelopment strategies that promote the conservation of natural resources ("conserva-tion- based development"), a sense of place ("place-based development"), and mass transit ("transit-based development"). It focuses on projects and policies that define new goals and indicators of sustainability, and link urban, suburban, and rural constituencies in the shared pursuit of livable communities. NEI takes advantage of market forces by identifying and act-ing on opportunities for sustainable development and planning in eco-nomically and environmentally distressed areas across New England. By serving as a catalyst for these efforts, NEI helps to establish a template of successful sustainable development models that can be replicated across the region and country, ensuring a positive feedback loop to policymakers and the private market. Civic Environmentalism After several years in the trenches of environmentalism, I have learned a number of lessons about the nature and extent of some of the environmen-tal and social problems facing American society and what we can do to try to remedy them. Over time, I have come to understand that environmental action that begins at the community level (and not in corporate office tow-ers or high-powered national public interest organizations), where ordinary people can work hand in hand with their neighbors and professionals, is, to borrow loosely from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, "the force that through the green fuse drives" democracy. This book is an attempt to share my ideas and experiences in helping to build American democracy--"the land that never has been yet," in the words of Langston Hughes--from the ground up. It is an attempt to encourage action on the part of laypeople and professionals, rich and poor, whites and people of color, in communities across America to come togeth-er to reclaim democracy from the vicissitudes of history and unbridled eco-nomic growth, and, in the process, to restore environmental quality to the greatest extent possible. One of the many ironies of American life at the end of the twentieth century is that the disaffection so many Americans feel is increasingly being matched by an aroused longing for community and a strengthened value of place, for attachment to people and the environment that can restore a sense of purpose and meaning to their lives. At the core of the book is the concept of civic environmentalism--the idea that members (stakeholders) of a particular geographic and political community--residents, businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits-- should engage in planning and organizing activities to ensure a future that is environmentally healthy and economically and socially vibrant at the local and regional levels. It is based on the notion that environmental qual-ity and economic and social health are mutually constitutive and that the protection of the environment where one lives and works is directly con-nected to and as important as the protection of wilderness areas or wet-lands. Civic environmentalism confronts the irony that most Americans seem to care more about protecting remote natural areas than the very places they inhabit and posits the notion that we would have to spend less time worrying about protecting remote areas if we ensured that the places where people actually live are environmentally and socially healthy. In addition, civic environmentalism denotes the admixture of a com-mitment to community organizing and a healthy skepticism about the promise of science and expertise to solve social ills by themselves. Civic environmentalism is about empowering a diverse set of stakeholders to work to improve and protect our natural resources (the uses and services provided by nonhuman nature) while building social capital (the capacity of communities to plan and execute socially beneficial programs) and pro-moting sustainable economic development (development that, to the great-est extent possible, does not occur at the expense of future generations or natural resources and promotes economic activities, at the firm and macro-economic levels, that work as natural systems do: reusing, recycling, and replenishing and ensuring the protection of not only natural resources but the services those resources provide). Civic environmentalism is a unique-ly powerful idea and practice that citizens from all walks of life can engage in their struggle to build better communities for themselves and future gen-erations. I did not coin the term civic environmentalism. Others in the environ-mental policy field, including DeWitt John in his 1914 book, Civic Environmentalism: Alternatives to Regulation in States and Communities, have used the term. John's approach focuses mainly on the role of states and municipalities in moving beyond the traditional top-down, command-and- control style of environmental regulation to a more decentralized, responsive administrative system. He argues convincingly, for instance, that states are well equipped to experiment with nonregulatory tools like edu-cation, technical assistance, and grants to address problems such as endan-gered ecosystems and pollution prevention. He looks at the ways in which states and municipalities can assist the private sector in implementing strate-gies for energy efficiency and pollution prevention. He points to informa-tion generation and sharing as a key to civic environmental initiatives like designing a restoration plan for the Florida Everglades and to targeted fed-eral regulation that complements bottom-up strategies. John's concept of civic environmentalism is more technical than mine, stemming from his perspective as a scholar interested in public administra-tion and models of governance beyond the traditional regulatory model. The notion of civic environmentalism embraced by The Land That Could Be has more to do with the civic capacity of communities to engage in effec-tive environmental problem solving, and the relationship between the civic life of communities and environmental conditions. Although John's and my approach are similar and emphasize some common themes (though I put more stock in the overall efficacy of and need for certain traditional regu-latory schemes than he does), my conception of civic environmentalism moves beyond the confines of environmental policy and administration to the arena of civic life in the broad sense.

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has also espoused the idea of civic environmentalism. In a 1999 report by political scientist Marc Landy, Civic Environmentalism in Action: A Field Guide to Regional and Local Initiatives, the PPI has championed civic environmentalism as a "founda-tion for innovative, dynamic collaborations among governments, citizens, and private companies . . . better suited than command-and-control regu-lations to deal with certain issues, such as polluted runoff, habitat protec-tion, and reuse of contaminated land." Through a series of case studies, the PPI demonstrates how civic envi-ronmentalism builds on the tradition of federal and state environmental regulation to create place-based solutions to environmental problems. Civic environmentalism, the report asserts, is part of the PPI's "third way phi-losophy," which defines a middle ground between public governance and privatization in the arena of social policy. The third way, embraced by "New Democrats" like Bill Clinton and Al Gore, seeks to blend tradition-al democratic concerns for the interests of lower- and middle-income Americans and public goods like environmental protection and education with market-oriented policies that stress competition and private sector leadership. The third way promotes active governmental involvement in social life, not in the form of top-down, bureaucratic authority but as an enabling mechanism, empowering citizens and local communities to take the lead in controlling their destinies. My conception of civic environmentalism shares a lot with the PPI's but expands on and enriches this and other notions of civic environmentalism by viewing the issue primarily through the lens of civic engagement and democracy rather than environmental regulation per se. In other words, unlike prior writings on the subject, my object is to give greater weight to the civic dimension of civic environmentalism, to flesh it out and emphasize its importance, if not its priority, to the environmental dimension.

Chapter 1 describes the decline in civic participation and disaffection that are truisms of life in America at the end of the twentieth century and discusses the growing gap between the professional class and the worker and underclass, between the haves and have-nots, and between racial groups. This chapter establishes the bigger picture in terms of the existing economic and social conditions of American democracy. I discuss what democracy means (based on the ideas of people like de Tocqueville, Jefferson, John Dewey, Benjamin Barber, and Cornel West) and the dis-turbing picture of American democracy painted by scholars and others observers, each of whom has documented a significant amount of disaffec-tion, loss of a sense of community, and growing economic and education-al inequality among Americans. In chapter 2, I describe how environmental or physical conditions direct-ly reflect and are a function of social and economic conditions, borrowing from the theories of environmental historians William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant, and urban historian Dolores Hayden, among others. I set forth some of the telltale features that mark the urban, suburban, and rural envi-ronment today. The chapter demonstrates how civic decline and economic and racial disparity result in pervasive negative environmental effects, such as contaminated urban land ("brownfields"), air pollution from the endless stream of cars on America's roadways, and the development of pristine rural areas. These effects corrode the fabric of American democracy across the borders of race, ethnicity, and class. Environmental harm also endangers humans. Many environmentalists and others believe that the reckless and pervasive destruction of ecosystems will doom our own species to extinction. Whether this should come to pass, most natural scientists believe that the continued exploitation and degra-dation of the environment, in the United States and around the globe, will at the very least rob human societies of the many physical and biochemical functions that derive as benefits from diverse, robust ecosystems: functions such as cleaning and recirculating air and water, mitigating droughts and floods, decomposing wastes, controlling erosion, replenishing soils, polli-nating crops, capturing and transporting nutrients, moderating climate fluc-tuations, restraining outbreaks of pestiferous species, and shielding the earth's surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation. According to noted pale-ontologist David Jablonski, without these beneficial natural services, "[a] lot of things are going to happen that will make this a crummier place to live--a more stressful place to live, a more difficult place to live, a less resilient place to live--before the human species is at any risk at all."

My principal argument in chapter 2 is that the environment is a mirror reflecting social, political, and economic conditions. I explain that our desire for a sense of place and community and for an experiential connec-tion to nature has been denied by these conditions, and our physical and social health undermined, and that even as we struggle to identify new sym-bols by which to guide our lives in the postindustrial age, we are still drawn ineluctably back to nature, however constructed or imagined. The flight to undeveloped rural areas, and the emergence of virtual communities on the Internet, are a testament to the irrepressible desire to connect ("Only con-nect," the author E. M. Forster enjoined), to both nature and our fellow citizens, that undergirds the practice of civic environmentalism.

In chapter 3, I describe the unique place of environmentalism and the envi-ronmental movement in American history and their relation, symbolic and lit-eral, to American democracy. I describe the two strands of traditional environmentalism--romantic-progressive and mainstream-professional-- and explain how traditional environmentalism has not been up to the task of improving American democracy because it is not itself thoroughly demo-cratic in form or substance. Despite its noble goals and rhetoric, and its many extraordinary successes, traditional environmentalism has been nar-row in its membership and agenda, comprising a homogeneous elite steeped in a romantic-progressive environmental tradition and focused on monu-mental natural resources to the exclusion of other issues. Traditional envi-ronmentalism has been hypocritical in its economic stance, as the wealthy elite who make up the core of traditional environmentalism have tended to disparage economic growth without proposing legitimate alternatives, thus decoupling economic challenges from environmental problem solving.

Traditional environmentalism has relied overwhelmingly on legal and policy tools to address environmental problems, dismissing the need for and rich history of grass-roots organizing and constituency building. Simply put, traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful and practical democratic vision, which has rendered it largely irrelevant to the day-to-day lives of most ordinary Americans.

Next, I define the fundamentals of civic environmentalism. I suggest that civic environmentalism holds great promise for restoring the health of democracy and redeeming the environment as America's great political and cultural symbol. Civic environmentalism historicizes and borrows from the best ideas in the American environmental and political tradition, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, and applies them to today's realities. It celebrates our unique environmental heritage, forged by an agrarian past, and makes that heritage relevant to an America that is now mainly urban in character.

I describe how civic environmentalism takes us from the top-down, pro-fessional problem solving of the past to the multi-stakeholder, pluralistic solution making of tomorrow. It signals a substantial shift from ex post remedies for past environmental harms to forward-looking, prevention-based strategies, and from a deficit-oriented approach--looking at what does not work--to an asset-oriented one--looking at what does. Civic envi-ronmentalism takes a systems approach to environmental problems, view-ing them in the larger economic, political, and social context of which they are a part, making the connection, for instance, between civic engagement and the problem of urban brownfields. I explain the importance of local and regional governance to civic environmentalism in an age of decentral-ized regulatory power and diminished, though by no means extinguished, state and federal resources. Civic environmentalism endeavors to bridge the gap between a nostal-gic, idealized environmentalism grounded in a preindustrial order and a new environmentalism based in the realities of a pluralistic, multicultural, largely urban society. It is a response to the journalist Mark Dowie's asser-tion that, in the light of the failure of the American environmental move-ment to galvanize significant grass-roots support, the "real environmental movement has barely begun."Civic environmentalism, this book declares, is the "fourth wave" of environmentalism Dowie envisions.

In chapters 4 through 7 I set forth a series of four case studies that illus-trate how civic environmentalism is helping to improve the physical, social, and economic conditions in America's communities. Each case study is a profile in participation, planning, and action. For example, I describe the efforts of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), one of the country's most innovative and effective community organizations, in estab-lishing an urban agricultural vision--a modern-day, ironical, and powerful experiment in agrarianism--for the community and an action plan for achieving it. DSNI has created a model community-building process in the face of tremendous odds. I promote this and other successful efforts from Oakland, California, Routt County, Colorado, and suburban New Jersey, which, as part of a civic environmental model, establish a blueprint for other communities to adopt. These chapters explain the ways in which each of the case studies reflects civic environmental strategies and documents the challenges and failures that are part of any experience in civic environ-mentalism.

Each case study is a work in progress, an incomplete project. Civic envi-ronmental strategies are, in many ways, new strategies, though they bor-row from a long tradition of civic action and environmental organizing. Although in some cases these projects have been underway for close to a decade, they are by nature long-term efforts, and thus their outcomes have yet to be fully achieved. As the book's title is meant to suggest, their full potential, and, in turn, the nation's, hangs in the balance. Nevertheless, they are important examples of ongoing civic environmental efforts. Accordingly, their stories deserve to be told.

By encouraging planning and organizing at the community level, civic environmentalism seeks to do nothing less than create a public discourse and dynamic social vision grounded in environmental action. It strives to inspire the kind of ethical and civic engagement that, according to political scientist Michael Sandel, self-government, civic democracy, requires. In the face of environmental harm, social disaffection, and what the writer Richard Ford calls the "strenuous [market] forces outside ourselves . . . [that] need us to want" the material goods that will never fully satisfy, civic environmentalism is attempting to restore environmental quality and a sense of place, and, in the process, rejuvenate the democratic project.

"The Land That Could Be is a shining work that grasps with clarity and conviction the mutually reinforcing relationship between environmental and social deterioration. Shutkin's work reveals how two hitherto distinct movements, social justice and environmental reform, are merging in our inner cities and deracinated rural communities to reforge an America we have lost and long for."

-- Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and coauthor of Natural Capitalism

"An important and powerful statement."

-- Mark Dowie, author of Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century

"William Shutkin offers a solid critique of the established environmental movement and suggests a positive way to integrate environmental and social issues. It is a powerfully important contribution to the debate about the future of environmentalism."

-- Carl Anthony, Urban Habitat Program, San Francisco, and University of California, Berkeley

"The Land That Could Be offers a road map--make that a trail guide--for the next journey environmentalism needs to make. These stories are powerful; they get under your skin, and make you wonder what you could be doing in your town."

-- Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

M.I.T. Press Web Site, October, 2001

Preface

We have given up the understanding . . . that we and our country create one anoth-er, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors have, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.

--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Without the oxygenating breath of the forest, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic of river rapids, we have no distance from technologies, no way of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning into them. . . . Only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to ori-ent and navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.

--David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

The dawning of a new century provides a unique opportunity for Americans to take stock. It is the perfect occasion for reckoning and reju-venation, making serious pledges and promises for the new age, measuring progress toward goals, both personal and public, and collectively asserting a broad vision in the face of withered or unfulfilled social aspirations. This book is offered up in this millennial spirit, at once an accounting of and prophecy about American environmentalism and the promise of democra-tic communities.

Perhaps it is no accident that just as the twenty-first century begins, envi-ronmentalism in the United States finds itself at a watershed, a crossroads. After all, the new millennium is as much a cause as it is a symbol of chang-ing attitudes and practices, not only concerning environmentalism but across the spectrum of social issues. For the first time, environmentalists are addressing issues formerly dismissed or ignored, like the urban envi-ronment and working landscapes, and a diverse group of stakeholders-- from inner-city activists to suburban municipal officials to rural ranchers--are engaging in environmental protection efforts.

Environmentalism is evolving from an essentially elitist movement accompanied by a complex system of laws and policies fixated on preserv-ing undeveloped land and resources and controlling pollution from major sources to a more democratic call for healthy, sustainable communities across geographic, economic, and cultural lines. Instead of merely reacting to environmental changes and decrying the pollution and waste generated by our liberal capitalist economy, an expanding environmental constituen-cy is devising alternatives to traditional approaches to economic develop-ment and environmental protection. One need only look at the host of environmental initiatives launched in the 1990s, and the emergence of a new field of design and engineering called industrial ecology to see the trans-formation. In their best light, these and other initiatives are aimed at not only cleaning up the nation's air, water, and soil, but making American com-munities more livable and the economy more sustainable.

I call this new approach civic environmentalism because it marries a con-cern for the physical health of communities with an understanding that part and parcel of environmental quality is overall civic health. Civic environ-mentalism holds that the physical environment--the places people inhabit or otherwise affect through their actions--influences our behavior and our sense of place, community, and well-being. The environment does much more than simply provide for our material needs, thus sustaining human life. As the urban historian Dolores Hayden explains, all landscapes, and especially urban landscapes, �are storehouses for . . . social memories, because natural features such as hills or harbors, as well as streets, build-ings and patterns of settlements, frame the lives of many people and often outlast many lifetimes.�

Moreover, our environment, whether in urban centers or remote wilder-ness areas, is not merely perceived by our five senses, the �shaping percep-tion,� as the historian Simon Schama suggests, �that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape,� but is constructed by society to meet its dual needs of economic production (reflected in barns, piers, highways, and factories) and social reproduction (expressed in housing, churches, and schools).

In short, the environment is the sum of all those places in cities, suburbs, and rural areas that play an essential part in constituting our sense of our-selves as individuals and members of a community and that demand our care and attention if they are to enhance, rather than diminish, that sense. To ensure the production and protection of a healthy environment requires the participation of those whose quality of life ultimately depends on it: ordinary citizens.

Such participation need not be heroic. Rather, as Daniel Kemmis, direc-tor of the Institute for the Rocky Mountain West, explains, it is the �simple, homely practices which are the last best hope for revival of genuine public life� and, I would add, for the protection of the environment.

Similarly, the late Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan argued, �Democracy cannot be saved by supermen, but only by the unswerving devotion of millions of middle men.� The same powerful logic, this book suggests, applies to the environment. A place worth living in and leaving to future generations requires the investment of time and money, as well as an understanding of the funda-mental relation between the quality of the physical environment and soci-ety's overall quality of life. Getting there often requires solutions that go beyond the traditional legal or adversarial approach. It requires a shared sense of commitment to a particular place and to the life of a particular community arrived at by rigorous dialogue and the practice of genuine cit-izenship.

This book asserts that environmentalism is as much about protecting ordinary places as it is about preserving wilderness areas; as much about promoting civic engagement as it is about pursuing environmental litiga-tion; and as much about implementing sound economic development strate-gies as it is about negotiating global climate change treaties. Ultimately, I believe, environmentalism is nothing less than about our conception of our-selves as a social and political community--what the bald eagle, our nation-al symbol, really means.

The title of this book is meant to suggest the inextricable bond between nature and nation. The �land� referred to in it denotes at once a physical, objective thing comprising plants, animals (human and nonhuman), rivers and mountains, and the abstract ideal of a state, of a people, wedded to a set of noble social and political principles like freedom, equality, and justice. A major premise of this book is that nature and culture--the ideas and prac-tices by which human societies are constructed and maintained--are not mutually exclusive and that, in America at least, the two are fundamental-ly linked, through ideology and history, if not through the arts, in a unique-ly powerful and promising way. It is no accident that the United States was the first country to establish national parks, or that the celebrated and revered public figure, Thomas Jefferson, based his political ideology on the notion of land stewardship. America's history and identity are shot through with environmental themes; our hopes and aspirations are bound up with environmental symbols.

The book's title derives from Langston Hughes's poem, �Let America Be America Again.� That poem, parts of which are woven throughout The Land That Could Be, captures the fullness and spirit of the relation between the environment and the ideal of American democracy. Like no other American voice before or after him, Hughes sings of the indelibly inter-twined fate of the land and its people. The achievement of democratic com-munities of free and equal citizens and environmental quality are, on Hughes's account, the same project. For Hughes, the land is the preeminent metaphor of freedom, hope, and redemption; it is also literally the place where the American dream resides.

Thus, the book's title speaks to the essential link between the idea of democracy and environmental protection. As linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain, �The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.� Metaphors, they argue, structure our concepts, activities, and language. This book interprets the idea of community and solidarity, of civic life itself, by way of the envi-ronment and asserts the primacy of the physical places we inhabit to the ways in which we live as democratic citizens. The metaphor of the land points to the fundamental bond between civic engagement and environ-mental health. To the extent that we live by this metaphor, we achieve not only a strong democracy, to borrow political scientist Benjamin Barber's phrase, but one worth living in, where access to a quality environment is implicit in our democratic ideas and practices, in our praxis.

Thus, this book is about the unique power of environmentalism as a tool to realize the as-yet-unfulfilled potential of this land--in Hughes's words, �the land that never has been yet/and yet must be�--to build from the ground up democratic communities, communities whose physical condi-tions may finally come to match the quality of the social ideals on which they are based.

In this book environmentalist and lawyer William Shutkin describes a new kind of environmental and social activism spreading across the nation, one that joins the pursuit of environmental quality with that of civic health and sustainable local economies. In the face of challenges posed by often corrosive market forces and widespread social disaffection, this civic environmentalism is creating nothing less than a new public discourse and dynamic social vision grounded in environmental action.

Shutkin points the way to vibrant, sustainable communities through four inspiring examples of civic environmentalism in action: the redevelopment of contaminated urban land for agriculture in inner-city Boston, mass-transit-based development and waterfront restoration in Oakland, protection of open space and conservation-based development in rural Colorado, and smart-growth and sustainability strategies in suburban New Jersey. The book's underlying message is that the nation's environmental health is a critical factor in its success as a vital democracy. Social health, democratic community, and environmentalism, Shutkin shows, are one.