Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 64
The three groups - Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper, and Clearwater - helped kickstart a
burgeoning environmental movement in the United States that led to the first Earth Day in
1970, the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency that same year, and the Clean
Water Act in 1972. Factories and sewage plants could no longer indiscriminately dump into
the Hudson; the new law aimed to make the nation’s waterways fishable, drinkable, and
swimmable.
Throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, the battle over Storm King raged on. Those fighting to protect
it won a few early key decisions which ended up forming the basis of environmental law, as
courts declared that a potential construction site’s aesthetic and cultural value would have
to be considered during the planning process. These decisions helped block other plants
from being built along the Hudson, including a proposed nuclear plant that would have been
near Olana, the historic home of the Hudson River School artist Frederic Church.
Conservationists had swayed the public by displaying Church’s famous paintings of the
sweeping view from his hilltop home, and then showed what it would look like with enormous
nuclear cooling towers in the middle of it.
Then, in 1980, Consolidated Edison not only gave up the plan to build a power plant inside of
Storm King, they donated the land they had acquired there to the state and established a $12
million endowment to fund future research on the river’s ecology. The people had won. They
were just getting started.
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