-
3. Scenic Hudson Finds Ecology and the Zeitgeist
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
66 Scenic Hudson Finds Ecology and the Zeitgeist With Scenic Hudson having been steamrolled in the hearings over Con Ed’s plan to build the power plant at Storm King Mountain, the company finally had an FPC license to build it. The group had been ill prepared, it was arguing its case in a venue predisposed to license the plant, and it was reliant on the subjective argument of aesthetics. In the months and years after the hearings, all three of these factors would change. Having faced defeat in the hearings, Scenic Hudson worked to become more effective. It found and cultivated more receptive venues in which to air its opposition . Scenic Hudson changed its argument to one that focused on the damage the plant would do to the Hudson River’s fish, and as a result there was a significant shift in the nature of the opposition to the plant. This shift grounded Scenic Hudson’s opposition to the plant as essentially ecological. This approach would make the group’s arguments more quantifiable and persuasive when presented before the regulatory bodies and courts that actually possessed the power to kill the plant. It also more effectively fed into a larger critique that called into question the nation’s destructive relationship with the environment. 3 SCENIC HUDSON FINDS ECOLOGY AND THE ZEITGEIST ■ 67 BOB BOYLE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF STRIPED BASS In the 1960s, an awareness of the changes being made to the physical landscape of the country began to grow. That awareness had already begun to grow with particular fervor in the journalist Robert Boyle, who began to recognize “the carnage that was going on.” Boyle, born and raised in New York City, took a master’s degree from Yale in 1950, and, after two years in the Marine Corps, he was writing for Sports Illustrated and Time and traveling around the country as a correspondent. “I noticed huge dam construction, water projects in California, pollution, Eisenhower’s highway program that was just being rammed through areas,” he recalled. He saw pesticide use on farms and read Rachel Carson’s work, “and I fished so I was very interested in the effects that pesticides might have on fish,” he said.1 As the sixties began, Boyle was living in New York again but increasingly restless and frustrated. The environmental carnage he had seen “just built up like Chinese water torture in my mind until finally I’d said ‘hey, what the hell are you doing writing about baseball and football and American sports and its role in American culture[?] You should be looking at the destruction going on around you.’“2 Boyle found an outlet for his concern in his work. “I started doing a series of articles . . . for the magazine [Sports Illustrated],” he noted. “We had a very large franchise at the time, and the reason we did it is that half the magazine was devoted to hunting and fishing or outdoor sports—sailing and skiing, whatever—people went outside and they ran into smog or they went into the water and it was polluted and they should know.”3 The Hudson River fishery came to the attention of Boyle and others when Consolidated Edison began generating power from the new Indian Point nuclear power plant in the winter of 1962. Con Ed was the first private company in the United States to build a nuclear power plant. In 1955, the company announced plans for a 275-megawatt plant in Buchanan, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River twenty-four miles north of New York City at a place called Indian Point. The plant became operational in the fall of 1962. Indian Point was designed to be an experimental nuclear reactor. Con Ed had always taken great pride in its leadership in technological innovation within the industry. Indian Point, though originally budgeted at $55 million, was plagued with engineering difficulties, and the plant finally cost $127 million after four years of construction. Although a conventional plant of the same capacity would have cost $190 per kilowatt of capacity, Indian Point cost $450 to $500 per kilowatt . To add to Indian Point’s troubles, the Public Service Commission refused to include the plant in the company’s rate base.4 [3.83.32.226] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:39 GMT) 68 ■ SCENIC HUDSON FINDS ECOLOGY AND THE ZEITGEIST In 1974, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ordered Indian Point shut down when a defect in...