Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings, and the Corporate Squeeze - Hardcover
Describes the efforts of Allen Hershkowitz to build a large, environmentally friendly paper mill in the South Bronx, and the local politics, neighborhood activists, corporate greed, and other obstacles that derailed the project.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Lis Harris originally researched the project for an article she wrote while a staff writer at The New Yorker. The author of the much-admired Holy Days and Rules of Engagement and a professor of writing at Columbia University, Harris has won numerous grants and fellowships.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
Rules of the Game
On a chilly late December day in 1992, Allen Hershkowitz, a senior
scientist
for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the country"s preeminent
environmental advocacy and legal action groups, left his office in lower
Manhattan at around six-thirty in the evening, drove up to the Mott Haven
section of the South Bronx, and inched his green Subaru uncertainly along
Prospect Avenue near 161st Street. He had an eight o"clock appointment
with a community development group named Banana Kelly and, though he
arrived early, it was already dark, the street badly lit, and he was having a
hard time locating its storefront headquarters. Hershkowitz had grown up in
New York, but in Brooklyn, and didn"t know the Bronx that well. He had
been
invited to speak to Banana Kelly"s board of directors by the organization"s
chair and executive director, Yolanda Rivera, about his idea of their joining
forces with NRDC and a paper company to build a paper mill in the South
Bronx, an ambitious, innovative project that he had been thinking about for
nearly a year. It was an idea that some called visionary, others crazy.
An intense, tousle-haired man in his late thirties with thick, black,
upward-tending eyebrows that gave him a permanently quizzical look,
Hershkowitz drove past the address he had been given several times, but
the
shutters were down, so he thought he was at the wrong place. Looking for
help, he drew alongside a parked car, where he saw someone sitting in the
front seat, but, as he would tell one of his colleagues the next day, "when I
pulled up to the car to ask where Banana Kelly was, so help me god, the
guy
in the driver"s seat was shooting up. Now I"m not a naive guy," he went
on, "and growing up in East Flatbush you"re not exactly sheltered, but that
was the first time in my life I ever saw anyone shooting up. He was certainly
the wrong guy to ask for directions. So I parked the car and walked up to a
door that I thought was the right one, but there was no bell. I knocked but
nobody answered, so I stood there for maybe an hour in my suit and tie
with
my briefcase and, quite frankly, I"m the only white guy around." For a while
he watched some young children playing in the street, vainly looking for the
adult he wished were looking after them. "Finally," as he told it, "Yolanda
comes out and sees the scene, and she"s being very solicitous, but she"s
also laughing — because, of course, the board has been sitting there all
that
time waiting for me."
A long and complicated path had brought him to Banana Kelly"s
doorstep. Over the past fifteen years, Hershkowitz, who has a Ph.D. in
political economics from the City University of New York, where he had
specialized in electric utilities technology and the environment, had become
one of the country"s leading experts on recycling — especially on waste
management, municipal waste, medical waste, and sludge. He had trodden
the well-established path of environmental advocacy and, in courtrooms and
legislative committee rooms in Washington and across the country, his was
a familiar face. He had served as an adviser for the Organization of
American
States, the World Bank, and numerous municipalities, legislative bodies,
environmental organizations, and businesses. His publications included
three
technical books with titles only an enviro wonk could love (Garbage:
Practices, Problems and Remedies, Garbage Management in Japan, and
Garbage Burning: Lessons from Europe ), and articles he"d written had
appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsday, City
Limits, and the Nation, among other publications.
Hershkowitz was overjoyed when NRDC, an organization founded
in 1970 by progressive young Yale lawyers and well-connected New
Yorkers
and that had a hand in shaping nearly every major environmental law,
tapped
him in 1989 for a full-time job and made him director of their National Solid
Waste Project. He believed when he took the job that he would be satisfied
spending the rest of his life lobbying for good environmental laws in
Congress
and helping to prevent bad ones from doing further damage. Over the years,
however, his experience as an advocate caused him to question what he
perceived as some inherent limitations in the work he was doing.
In 1982, he married Margaret Carey, a tall, spirited, fellow
graduate student (she worked in energy conservation), and between 1987
and
1990 they had three children, two boys and a girl. When he watched his
children playing or asleep in their beds, questions about the healthfulness
of
the world they were growing up in — questions to which he had all too
many
discouraging answers — surfaced often in his mind. And the more he
thought
about it, the more frustrated he felt about how tough it was for him and for
his
colleagues to get crucial environmental protections past their
deep-pocketed
industrial opponents.
Throughout the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, NRDC,
in a coalition with cities, counties, states, and other environmental groups,
tried to get a National Recycling Act passed that would push industries
both
to take more environmental responsibility for their products and stimulate
the
market for recycled material. Hershkowitz had joined NRDC, in fact, to lead
the effort to draft that statute. The struggle to get the bill passed occupied
four years of his life, and he often had to spend long patches of time in
Washington, D.C., marooning Meg and the kids in the rather isolated
upstate
New York house where they then lived.
The federally mandated closing of open landfills and dumps
throughout the country during the 1980s raised waste disposal costs so
alarmingly that some municipalities suddenly found themselves budgeting
more for garbage disposal than they were for schools or police or fire
departments. Not knowing what else to do, many of them began building
incinerators as an alternative to the dumps, but once it became known that
hazardous air emissions were being spewed from the incinerators, huge,
politically divisive community battles erupted about where to site them. In
1987, the well-publicized plight of New York City"s garbage-laden barge,
Mobro, which floated around the southern coast of the United States and
Central America for months (its load finally ended up being incinerated in
Brooklyn, then buried in the Islip, Long Island, municipal landfill), briefly
brought the larger issue of the country"s garbage problems to the forefront of
public environmental consciousness.
For an equally fleeting moment, so did a growing awareness of
medical waste washing up on beaches, along with dioxin-releasing hospital
incinerators, and there was a flurry of public debate about toxic materials in
consumer products and battles about interstate garbage and toxic waste
transport. The need to get a grip on these issues had become important
enough for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, 1990, to be
dedicated largely to promoting recycling, by then the most widely supported
environmental activity in the country. More and more, members of Congress
were hearing from their constituents about these problems and were
increasingly troubled by the political battles they engendered. (At one
meeting he attended that year, when everyone in the room was asked what
they did, a representative of the plastics industry pointed to Hershkowitz
and
said, "My job is to follow him around and respond to him.") The times
seemed
not only right but propitious for the passage of a progressive National
Recycling Act, or so a great many people outside Congress thought.
On June 6, 1992, the culminating moment of NRDC"s four-year
campaign on behalf of the statute, Hershkowitz, who by then was
considered
the chief researcher for people seeking recycling information, mounted the
granite steps of the Rayburn office building at seven-thirty a.m. and headed
toward a House Commerce Committee room for the Recycling Act mark-up
(a meeting to which all the members of a congressional committee are
called
to deliberate on a bill and have an opportunity to amend it before it is voted
on
and, if approved, sent on to the full House for a vote). The vote was
scheduled
to begin at ten o"clock. Outside the committee room a House security
guard
handed him a slip stamped with the number 189, and told him to get in line.
Industry lobbyists routinely pay a per-hour fee to placeholders to
arrive at six a.m. and secure a good spot in line for them when they want to
be sure to get in to congressional meetings. About ten minutes before the
committee room doors are thrown open, the lobbyists show up and claim
their spots. Other lobbyists circumvent the process entirely by being
escorted into the room by congressmen they have good relationships with
—
relationships frequently cemented with handsome financial contributions.
By
nine-thirty that morning there were already about 450 people in the Rayburn
Building corridor, waiting in line to get in to the committee room. Only six of
those in line represented environmental groups (according to one legislative
aide, Coca-Cola alone had forty lobbyists focusing on the bill to make sure
it
contained no provision mandating bottle deposits or recycled container
content).
Knowing that there were only about 150 seats in the House
Commerce Committee room, Hershkowitz walked quickly over to the office
of
Representative Al Swift, a Democrat from Washington State, the chairman
of
the committee. Swift had worked closely with Hershkowitz on the bill and
had
also gone along on one of two fact-finding trips — to Europe and to Japan
—
that NRDC had sponsored. The purpose of the trips had been to observe
sophisticated recycling technologies in countries more advanced in waste
management than the United States. Swift had gone on the European tour.
Hershkowitz found Swift, cigar in hand, just as he was about to leave for the
committee room, and asked him if he would walk him in through a back
door
so he could secure a seat. Swift was happy to accommodate him.
When they got to the room a few minutes before the doors
opened, it was already half filled with industry lobbyists, who, like
Hershkowitz, had been walked in by their own congressional allies. Only
two
other enviros managed to squeeze into the room after the doors were
officially
opened. As the day went on, the reason for the heavy industry presence
became clear: many retrograde industry-sponsored amendments were to be
jimmied into the bill. The plastics industry managed to get their waste
incineration defined as recycling; there was a provision couched in language
that made it seem as if the well-being of the nation depended on allowing
the
federal government to override local zoning ordinances forbidding the siting
of
incinerators; and the paper industry had succeeded in getting amendments
into the bill that allowed virgin timber byproducts to be labeled as waste
recycling. At day"s end, but before the legislation was voted on, the enviros
felt compelled to kill the bill they"d worked fl at out on for so long.
Threatening
to release them to the national media, they issued to committee members
and their staff press releases that attacked the legislators for drafting what
had now essentially become an antirecycling bill, one that would, if passed,
set the progress already made in recycling back twenty years.
In response to the press releases and the fear of committee
members that they would be pilloried by their constituents for being
antirecycling, the bill was never even reported out of mark-up and never
voted
on. By two o"clock in the afternoon, it was dead. The industry lobbyists
were
ecstatic. No directives about recycling municipal waste would become
federal
law. And none has been issued since then with the exception of
Presidential
Order 12873, signed by President Clinton in 1993 — despite a pitched
battle
mounted in Congress by the paper industry trying to prevent it — requiring
all
federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, to buy recycled
paper.
It was in January 1992, six months before the National Recycling Act was
killed and when hope for its passage was still high, that Hershkowitz had
led
the fact-finding mission for members of the House and Senate to Europe
and
spoken with environmental regulators and people who ran profitable,
environmentally sound, large-scale industries.
In Belgium, the group discussed with European Union ministers
tentative plans to adopt Germany"s broad-ranging recycling ordinances
(Germany was recycling three times as much as the United States)
throughout the EU — plans that were subsequently adopted. With the EU"s
population of roughly 320 million collaboratively attempting to change long
entrenched habits, the standard U.S. industry argument against adopting
more progressive standards — that what worked in tiny European countries
could never work in a country with as large a population as the United
States — fell to shambles. But for Hershkowitz, the most revelatory
moment
of the trip came when the group visited a paper mill located in a small town
near Stuttgart. The mill drew on recycled office paper to make pulp and
used
neither chlorine bleach nor any other pollutant that would have made its
presence a burden on the town, and it employed local people to run it.
Wherever they went, the CEOs, government officials, and
regulators they met were unanimous in their view — anathema to most U.S.
industries — that those who made a product had a direct responsibility for
its
disposal in such a way that it could be reused or recycled.
During the German leg of the trip, after looking at the mill near
Stuttgart, Hershkowitz began to think seriously about the possibility of
initiating a large-scale project in New York — perhaps even a paper mill —
based on the European model. He had seen with his own eyes efficient
urban
recycling programs that were meeting the ever-growing demand for recycled
pulp, and new technologies were also supposedly coming along that used
low-grade wastepaper to produce a higher grade of finished product. This
was
an exciting discovery for him, because the pulp and paper industry, which
had relied on wood since the 1850s, was the third biggest industrial
greenhouse gas emitter (after the chemical and steel industries) in the
world
and probably contributed more to global and local environmental problems
than any other industry. In the United States, it was also one of the most
heavily subsidized industries; there were more than 369,000 miles of
subsidized roads in the nation"s forests, two times the mileage of the
nation"s
interstate highway system. And even though the world is fast running out of
fresh water and the demand for it is expected to be greater than the supply
by the end of the first quarter of this century, the paper industry"s need for it
keeps growing. Paper companies are the largest industrial users of water in
th...
Rules of the Game
On a chilly late December day in 1992, Allen Hershkowitz, a senior
scientist
for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the country"s preeminent
environmental advocacy and legal action groups, left his office in lower
Manhattan at around six-thirty in the evening, drove up to the Mott Haven
section of the South Bronx, and inched his green Subaru uncertainly along
Prospect Avenue near 161st Street. He had an eight o"clock appointment
with a community development group named Banana Kelly and, though he
arrived early, it was already dark, the street badly lit, and he was having a
hard time locating its storefront headquarters. Hershkowitz had grown up in
New York, but in Brooklyn, and didn"t know the Bronx that well. He had
been
invited to speak to Banana Kelly"s board of directors by the organization"s
chair and executive director, Yolanda Rivera, about his idea of their joining
forces with NRDC and a paper company to build a paper mill in the South
Bronx, an ambitious, innovative project that he had been thinking about for
nearly a year. It was an idea that some called visionary, others crazy.
An intense, tousle-haired man in his late thirties with thick, black,
upward-tending eyebrows that gave him a permanently quizzical look,
Hershkowitz drove past the address he had been given several times, but
the
shutters were down, so he thought he was at the wrong place. Looking for
help, he drew alongside a parked car, where he saw someone sitting in the
front seat, but, as he would tell one of his colleagues the next day, "when I
pulled up to the car to ask where Banana Kelly was, so help me god, the
guy
in the driver"s seat was shooting up. Now I"m not a naive guy," he went
on, "and growing up in East Flatbush you"re not exactly sheltered, but that
was the first time in my life I ever saw anyone shooting up. He was certainly
the wrong guy to ask for directions. So I parked the car and walked up to a
door that I thought was the right one, but there was no bell. I knocked but
nobody answered, so I stood there for maybe an hour in my suit and tie
with
my briefcase and, quite frankly, I"m the only white guy around." For a while
he watched some young children playing in the street, vainly looking for the
adult he wished were looking after them. "Finally," as he told it, "Yolanda
comes out and sees the scene, and she"s being very solicitous, but she"s
also laughing — because, of course, the board has been sitting there all
that
time waiting for me."
A long and complicated path had brought him to Banana Kelly"s
doorstep. Over the past fifteen years, Hershkowitz, who has a Ph.D. in
political economics from the City University of New York, where he had
specialized in electric utilities technology and the environment, had become
one of the country"s leading experts on recycling — especially on waste
management, municipal waste, medical waste, and sludge. He had trodden
the well-established path of environmental advocacy and, in courtrooms and
legislative committee rooms in Washington and across the country, his was
a familiar face. He had served as an adviser for the Organization of
American
States, the World Bank, and numerous municipalities, legislative bodies,
environmental organizations, and businesses. His publications included
three
technical books with titles only an enviro wonk could love (Garbage:
Practices, Problems and Remedies, Garbage Management in Japan, and
Garbage Burning: Lessons from Europe ), and articles he"d written had
appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsday, City
Limits, and the Nation, among other publications.
Hershkowitz was overjoyed when NRDC, an organization founded
in 1970 by progressive young Yale lawyers and well-connected New
Yorkers
and that had a hand in shaping nearly every major environmental law,
tapped
him in 1989 for a full-time job and made him director of their National Solid
Waste Project. He believed when he took the job that he would be satisfied
spending the rest of his life lobbying for good environmental laws in
Congress
and helping to prevent bad ones from doing further damage. Over the years,
however, his experience as an advocate caused him to question what he
perceived as some inherent limitations in the work he was doing.
In 1982, he married Margaret Carey, a tall, spirited, fellow
graduate student (she worked in energy conservation), and between 1987
and
1990 they had three children, two boys and a girl. When he watched his
children playing or asleep in their beds, questions about the healthfulness
of
the world they were growing up in — questions to which he had all too
many
discouraging answers — surfaced often in his mind. And the more he
thought
about it, the more frustrated he felt about how tough it was for him and for
his
colleagues to get crucial environmental protections past their
deep-pocketed
industrial opponents.
Throughout the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, NRDC,
in a coalition with cities, counties, states, and other environmental groups,
tried to get a National Recycling Act passed that would push industries
both
to take more environmental responsibility for their products and stimulate
the
market for recycled material. Hershkowitz had joined NRDC, in fact, to lead
the effort to draft that statute. The struggle to get the bill passed occupied
four years of his life, and he often had to spend long patches of time in
Washington, D.C., marooning Meg and the kids in the rather isolated
upstate
New York house where they then lived.
The federally mandated closing of open landfills and dumps
throughout the country during the 1980s raised waste disposal costs so
alarmingly that some municipalities suddenly found themselves budgeting
more for garbage disposal than they were for schools or police or fire
departments. Not knowing what else to do, many of them began building
incinerators as an alternative to the dumps, but once it became known that
hazardous air emissions were being spewed from the incinerators, huge,
politically divisive community battles erupted about where to site them. In
1987, the well-publicized plight of New York City"s garbage-laden barge,
Mobro, which floated around the southern coast of the United States and
Central America for months (its load finally ended up being incinerated in
Brooklyn, then buried in the Islip, Long Island, municipal landfill), briefly
brought the larger issue of the country"s garbage problems to the forefront of
public environmental consciousness.
For an equally fleeting moment, so did a growing awareness of
medical waste washing up on beaches, along with dioxin-releasing hospital
incinerators, and there was a flurry of public debate about toxic materials in
consumer products and battles about interstate garbage and toxic waste
transport. The need to get a grip on these issues had become important
enough for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, 1990, to be
dedicated largely to promoting recycling, by then the most widely supported
environmental activity in the country. More and more, members of Congress
were hearing from their constituents about these problems and were
increasingly troubled by the political battles they engendered. (At one
meeting he attended that year, when everyone in the room was asked what
they did, a representative of the plastics industry pointed to Hershkowitz
and
said, "My job is to follow him around and respond to him.") The times
seemed
not only right but propitious for the passage of a progressive National
Recycling Act, or so a great many people outside Congress thought.
On June 6, 1992, the culminating moment of NRDC"s four-year
campaign on behalf of the statute, Hershkowitz, who by then was
considered
the chief researcher for people seeking recycling information, mounted the
granite steps of the Rayburn office building at seven-thirty a.m. and headed
toward a House Commerce Committee room for the Recycling Act mark-up
(a meeting to which all the members of a congressional committee are
called
to deliberate on a bill and have an opportunity to amend it before it is voted
on
and, if approved, sent on to the full House for a vote). The vote was
scheduled
to begin at ten o"clock. Outside the committee room a House security
guard
handed him a slip stamped with the number 189, and told him to get in line.
Industry lobbyists routinely pay a per-hour fee to placeholders to
arrive at six a.m. and secure a good spot in line for them when they want to
be sure to get in to congressional meetings. About ten minutes before the
committee room doors are thrown open, the lobbyists show up and claim
their spots. Other lobbyists circumvent the process entirely by being
escorted into the room by congressmen they have good relationships with
—
relationships frequently cemented with handsome financial contributions.
By
nine-thirty that morning there were already about 450 people in the Rayburn
Building corridor, waiting in line to get in to the committee room. Only six of
those in line represented environmental groups (according to one legislative
aide, Coca-Cola alone had forty lobbyists focusing on the bill to make sure
it
contained no provision mandating bottle deposits or recycled container
content).
Knowing that there were only about 150 seats in the House
Commerce Committee room, Hershkowitz walked quickly over to the office
of
Representative Al Swift, a Democrat from Washington State, the chairman
of
the committee. Swift had worked closely with Hershkowitz on the bill and
had
also gone along on one of two fact-finding trips — to Europe and to Japan
—
that NRDC had sponsored. The purpose of the trips had been to observe
sophisticated recycling technologies in countries more advanced in waste
management than the United States. Swift had gone on the European tour.
Hershkowitz found Swift, cigar in hand, just as he was about to leave for the
committee room, and asked him if he would walk him in through a back
door
so he could secure a seat. Swift was happy to accommodate him.
When they got to the room a few minutes before the doors
opened, it was already half filled with industry lobbyists, who, like
Hershkowitz, had been walked in by their own congressional allies. Only
two
other enviros managed to squeeze into the room after the doors were
officially
opened. As the day went on, the reason for the heavy industry presence
became clear: many retrograde industry-sponsored amendments were to be
jimmied into the bill. The plastics industry managed to get their waste
incineration defined as recycling; there was a provision couched in language
that made it seem as if the well-being of the nation depended on allowing
the
federal government to override local zoning ordinances forbidding the siting
of
incinerators; and the paper industry had succeeded in getting amendments
into the bill that allowed virgin timber byproducts to be labeled as waste
recycling. At day"s end, but before the legislation was voted on, the enviros
felt compelled to kill the bill they"d worked fl at out on for so long.
Threatening
to release them to the national media, they issued to committee members
and their staff press releases that attacked the legislators for drafting what
had now essentially become an antirecycling bill, one that would, if passed,
set the progress already made in recycling back twenty years.
In response to the press releases and the fear of committee
members that they would be pilloried by their constituents for being
antirecycling, the bill was never even reported out of mark-up and never
voted
on. By two o"clock in the afternoon, it was dead. The industry lobbyists
were
ecstatic. No directives about recycling municipal waste would become
federal
law. And none has been issued since then with the exception of
Presidential
Order 12873, signed by President Clinton in 1993 — despite a pitched
battle
mounted in Congress by the paper industry trying to prevent it — requiring
all
federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, to buy recycled
paper.
It was in January 1992, six months before the National Recycling Act was
killed and when hope for its passage was still high, that Hershkowitz had
led
the fact-finding mission for members of the House and Senate to Europe
and
spoken with environmental regulators and people who ran profitable,
environmentally sound, large-scale industries.
In Belgium, the group discussed with European Union ministers
tentative plans to adopt Germany"s broad-ranging recycling ordinances
(Germany was recycling three times as much as the United States)
throughout the EU — plans that were subsequently adopted. With the EU"s
population of roughly 320 million collaboratively attempting to change long
entrenched habits, the standard U.S. industry argument against adopting
more progressive standards — that what worked in tiny European countries
could never work in a country with as large a population as the United
States — fell to shambles. But for Hershkowitz, the most revelatory
moment
of the trip came when the group visited a paper mill located in a small town
near Stuttgart. The mill drew on recycled office paper to make pulp and
used
neither chlorine bleach nor any other pollutant that would have made its
presence a burden on the town, and it employed local people to run it.
Wherever they went, the CEOs, government officials, and
regulators they met were unanimous in their view — anathema to most U.S.
industries — that those who made a product had a direct responsibility for
its
disposal in such a way that it could be reused or recycled.
During the German leg of the trip, after looking at the mill near
Stuttgart, Hershkowitz began to think seriously about the possibility of
initiating a large-scale project in New York — perhaps even a paper mill —
based on the European model. He had seen with his own eyes efficient
urban
recycling programs that were meeting the ever-growing demand for recycled
pulp, and new technologies were also supposedly coming along that used
low-grade wastepaper to produce a higher grade of finished product. This
was
an exciting discovery for him, because the pulp and paper industry, which
had relied on wood since the 1850s, was the third biggest industrial
greenhouse gas emitter (after the chemical and steel industries) in the
world
and probably contributed more to global and local environmental problems
than any other industry. In the United States, it was also one of the most
heavily subsidized industries; there were more than 369,000 miles of
subsidized roads in the nation"s forests, two times the mileage of the
nation"s
interstate highway system. And even though the world is fast running out of
fresh water and the demand for it is expected to be greater than the supply
by the end of the first quarter of this century, the paper industry"s need for it
keeps growing. Paper companies are the largest industrial users of water in
th...
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