Chapter One
Age of the Nimby
Environmental Hazard and Spatial Power on the Suburban Landscape
In his 1991 book, Siting Hazardous Waste Facilities: The Nimby Syndrome, political scientist Kent E. Portney found that, “public opposition to facility siting has now reached the point where it has been given status as a full-scale public malady—the NIMBY, or Not-in-my-backyard, Syndrome.”1 He was not alone in making this observation. The United States was in the midst of what the New York Times called the age of Nimby.2 Activists, journalists, and other critics decried the growing number of homeowners opposed to siting public projects in their suburban neighborhoods.3 This “syndrome” was a strain of suburban disease, a form of “affluenza,” according to detractors, where the assertion of property rights in the face of even remote environmental hazard trumped the public good in preventing construction of a power plant, trash incinerator, or other project proposed as an essential public service.4
In 1988, journalist Bella English described this suburban exercise of power as endorsing the need for a civic project without accepting any risk or responsibility—a strictly parochial view of citizenship. “Invariably, the line goes like this,” English wrote in the Boston Globe: “ ‘We are not opposed to the (homeless, mentally ill, retarded, AIDS patients). We believe they should be cared for, but not here. It is too (urban, rural, populated, unpopulated). Those people would be better off (in your neighborhood, anyplace else, Mars).’ ”5 According to political strategist and Nimby critic David Gergen, the effective use of Nimby meant that “stupidity reigns” in the practice of suburban land use, as local fears stopped or displaced projects designed to benefit a broad constituency.6 But if “not in my backyard” protests were antidemocratic and a manifestation of sheer stupidity in preventing needed projects, why were they so prevalent and powerful in shaping the suburban landscape in the 1980s and ’90s? The answer lies in suburbanites positioning themselves as indispensable constituents and consumers whose legitimate claims of environmental danger in the “industrial garden” could not be ignored by government or corporations.7
The success of the environmental protection movement and the New Right in postwar America made it possible for Nimbyism to be a powerful and practical response to emerging environmental hazards. Though in most senses contradictory, these two movements proved compatible for suburbanites who positioned themselves as nonideologues defending against local, ecological threats. The environmentalist movement established nature as endangered and needing active protection to preserve human health. For postwar homeowners, “nature” included the inheritance of presumably clean suburban natural surroundings even as construction abounded—further highlighting the contradictions of the machine in the garden.8 Concurrently, the New Right, a coalition of conservative groups, successfully pushed for the devolution of power from the national to the local level and from the government to the individual, in particular the individual property owner.9 By effectively positing environmental threats and local action as the best defense against them, these movements empowered suburban homeowners to legitimately and forcefully cry, “Not in my backyard!”
These movements also enabled Nimbys by laying the ideological foundation on which they could fashion themselves as locally focused pragmatists defending their homes and not fanatics pursuing broader, nonprovincial goals. Journalist Walter Truett Anderson captured this stance in 1989: “NIMBY people are not interested in ideology, spirituality or rolling back the clock. They just want to keep their local communities from being destroyed by development and/or pollution.”10 As avowedly ideologically agnostic, Nimbys staked out a “reasonable,” nearly unassailable logic of defense against suburban environmental hazard that media and popular culture suggested was nearly everywhere. Yet, despite their antidogmatic posturing in service of local objectives, suburban Nimbyism significantly aided and was aided by the ideologically driven localism and privatism of the Reagan revolution, which adversely affected those who often relied on the state to protect them. By eschewing labels and declaring “Not in my backyard!” to defend themselves, suburbanites actually maintained the spatial power and privileges of suburban living while often displacing these projects into other, less politically powerful communities.11 As a Cienega, Arizona, city councilor presciently noted in 1988, “There is a danger in the ‘not in my backyard’ philosophy. It clearly discriminates against people with fewer financial resources.”12
The process and impact of Nimbyism are well illustrated in the case of nuclear power. By 1979, the broad view that these plants were needed in the midst of energy crises and environmental activism against dirtier forms of energy production turned apocalyptic, particularly for the suburban communities adjacent to many of them. In March 1979, the accident at the suburban power plant Three Mile Island (TMI) made nuclear power a visible, material threat, not an energy panacea. Media and popular culture echoed and extended that feeling of danger by producing threatening visions that vividly linked the plants with imminent catastrophe on the suburban landscape. News media narratives detailed the problems at TMI leading up to and following the accident, and indicted the industry as incompetent, unprepared, and lacking credibility. In popular culture, the 1979 film The China Syndrome provided a powerful shorthand for understanding nuclear disaster wherein mismanagement and poor regulation, both in the service of corporate greed, lead to a nuclear meltdown that theoretically goes all the way to China. This was an important frame for making sense of the accident at TMI, which occurred just two weeks after the film hit screens. The movie primed the public to see the nuclear power industry as corrupt and dangerous—a vision reinforced by the real accident and its media portrayals. The accident worked with these images and narratives to generate suburbanites’ claims of legitimate endangerment from the nuclear power plants sprouting up on their local landscapes, even as those plants helped meet their increasing demand for electricity.13
In this new world of suburban environmental danger, Nimbys on Long Island leveraged the potential victimization embodied by the nuclear power plant as a disaster-waiting-to-happen in order to stop construction of generators at the proposed site of Shoreham on the island’s North Shore. In the years after the events of spring 1979, thousands of local residents joined a small number of antinuclear activists near the site to oppose the new plant, eventually succeeding in 1989. To highlight their imperilment, they repeatedly invoked the images of nuclear meltdown and regulatory malfeasance widely available in the aftermath of Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome. In doing so, suburban Long Islanders clearly marked themselves as the likely victims of the Long Island Lighting Corporation’s plan, backed by the local, state, and federal governments, to put a nuclear time bomb in their neighborhood. However, while Long Island Nimbys fashioned themselves as victims mistreated by government and corporations, they still needed institutional power to materially enforce their claims. By leveraging their perceived endangerment and power as constituents and consumers, suburbanites forced the closure of the Shoreham plant before it could ever produce a watt of energy. Yet, stopping short of pursuing the broader antinuclear power agenda, these Long Island residents returned victorious to the restored safety of their homes satisfied with the result of their now-productive victimization.
The defeat of this suburban nuclear power plant was symbolic of the broader power of suburban homeowners. In the age of the Nimby, emboldened suburbanites across the country took aggressive stances against a number of other threats broadly posed as environmental. Through the 1990s, they opposed just about any project that might endanger their local environment or undermine the privileges of suburban living, viewing such defiance as reasonable and any resulting obstruction as necessary. From health clinics to helicopter pads to trash dumps, Nimbys resisted the siting of projects in their neighborhoods and very often succeeded. When built, many of these projects, particularly the most toxic, ended up in communities unable to oppose them and safeguard themselves in the ways that suburbanites did.14
Nimbyism was essentially an expression of privilege and spatial power clothed in the seemingly legitimate fears of environmental imperilment widely visible on the physical and media landscapes. And it proved powerful because of the ascendant postwar politics of both liberals concerned with environmental dangers and conservatives looking to devolve power to local government and the individual, even when it came to “protecting” the environment.15
Environmental Consciousness and Suburban Expectations in the 1970s
Postwar suburbanites promoted and sought to preserve a nineteenth-century vision of the natural environment. In that earlier era, homeowners both dominated and were in harmony with their natural surroundings, allowing them to control nature’s wilder elements while still enjoying clean air and unspoiled waterways. Once it was established, boosters and planners sold this lifestyle as an antidote to the glaring environmental dangers of the nation’s burgeoning metropolises.16 Planners such as Frederick Law Olmstead designed suburbs to be like urban parks, not only a respite but also an amelioration of the social ills associated with teeming masses of immigrants and rampant disease found in late-nineteenth-century urban centers.17 However, unlike parks designed for the public, suburbs provided a cure for urban ills designed specifically to be owned and accessed by the privileged classes, as middle- and upper-class white people had the wealth and social standing necessary to leave the city for a country home and all that it entailed.18 This idea of a sequestered refuge from environmental threats shaped the understanding and expectations of postwar homeowners. Following the Great Depression and World War II, and in the midst of a housing crisis, these emigrants from the urban core came to find a peaceful, clean, and antiurban habitat that linked environmental purity and power over their natural environs with the privileges of suburban living.
Prior to the 1970s, as massive and often haphazard suburban development occurred, suburbanites seeking to preserve their environmental ideal were essential to the emergence of a nationwide environmentalist movement.19 Their claims of endangerment from chemicals and pesticides were early articulations of broader ecological values and often gave substance to subsequent environmentalist arguments and helped the movement gain traction into the late 1960s. In that era, suburban homeowners filed lawsuits, banded together in the marketplace, and lobbied government to protect a natural environment they understood to be pristine. In doing so, they fought to maintain the nineteenth century environmental ideal of the bucolic suburb through traditional organizing and legal tactics that largely supported the goals and values of the environmental movement.
By the mid-1970s, that broader movement succeeded in making dangers to the natural environment appear pervasive and ecological disaster plausible. Environmentalists raised public consciousness about a wide spectrum of hazards and their connections to human well-being, as reflected in environmentalist milestones from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962 and the first Earth Day in 1970, to the Keep America Beautiful organization’s public service announcement featuring a “Native American” man tearing up at the sight of litter. This cultural shift was accompanied by passage of a battery of federal environmental protections, including the Clean Water Act (1963), Clean Air Act (1972), and Endangered Species Act (1973), that were continually updated and improved, as well as the later creation of the Superfund program to clean up abandoned waste sites.20 These political and cultural achievements prompted the New York Times to dub the 1970s the “environmental decade,” an era in which widespread public concern arose that the natural environment was in danger and needed protection.21 Yet, for most of the 1970s, through the energy crises and economic “stagflation”—the once-unthinkable combination of rampant inflation and stagnant economic growth—suburbanites saw the costs of development largely in economic rather environmental terms, leaving racial integration and taxes, not environmental issues, as the central sources of suburban conflict in the late 1960s and early ’70s.22
As more and more homeowners moved into the suburbs in the 1970s, they believed they were accessing a residential alternative that was healthier and safer than the modernist concrete and steel landscapes of postwar cities, riven with their own array of environmental hazards. From pollution and smog to crime and disease, the city did not represent a viable alternative for those who could leave and were being incentivized to do so by government and industry.23 Even the urban parks, designed as a respite from hectic, dirty, and dangerous city life, fell into disrepair during the economic downturn of the 1970s, making the suburban environment even more attractive by comparison.24 As environmental historian Andrew Hurley has written of Gary, Indiana’s suburbs, “The appeal of suburbia lay in the fact that it brought together all those qualities that middle-class families found lacking in the inner-city.”25
Whereas some environmental dangers lay dormant through the early postwar years until “discovered” on the suburban landscape, others suddenly became understood as threatening only in the 1970s. These new threats, such as toxic waste and nuclear power plants, were of a different magnitude than the 1960s concerns over soapy water or failed septic tanks in that they portended and sometimes led to catastrophic results. In doing so, they undermined the suburbs’ Arcadian legacy and suburbanites’ expectations of environmental safety, and called forth an active, local defense that reflected and reproduced the ascendant politics of privatism.
The Nuclear Issue Becomes Suburban
Before 1979, nuclear power was a suburban issue to the extent that it provided cheaper energy to homeowners who were using more and more electricity in an era of energy crises.26 The danger of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear plant seemed remote, while the economic benefits directly impacted a suburban household’s bottom line.27 Indeed, public opinion polls before 1979 showed a majority of Americans supported nuclear power, and six state referendums in the 1970s endorsed its use.28 To meet that demand, energy companies built or planned to build hundreds of plants in the 1960s and ’70s. In that original wave of construction, companies sited plants in suburban places; for example, the Dresden power plant was built outside Chicago, and the Oyster Creek reactor in Lacey, New Jersey. In other cases, plants originally sited in “remote” locations ended up being adjacent to suburban towns because of the sprawling expansion of housing developments that took place during the same period of nuclear power plant construction.29 Whether built originally in suburban areas or encroached upon by sprawl, nuclear power plants were becoming part of the politics of suburban land use—a politics that significantly shifted in the spring of 1979.
Two intertwined events of spring 1979 created an overwhelming public sense of nuclear power as risky and dangerous: the release of the film The China Syndrome on March 16 and the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in central Pennsylvania on March 28. Accidents had taken place at domestic nuclear power plants before 1979, chief among them a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi plant in 1966 and Karen Silkwood’s contamination from exposure to plutonium in 1974. The New York Times reported the Fermi accident could “set back the breeder program by more than 20 years.”30 Yet, in an era of nuclear power expansion and governmental and popular support for the industry, the public was unwilling or unable to think about nuclear power in catastrophic terms. The nuclear-friendly cultural climate soon shifted to widespread antinuclear power sentiment after the combination of the popular culture portrayal in The China Syndrome and the wall-to-wall news coverage of the accident at TMI.31 As a result, the American cultural imagination could no longer hold a place for a “minor” accident at a nuclear power plant. However, it was not just that nuclear power shifted from being understood as an energy panacea in a time of need to a disaster waiting to happen. The events of spring 1979 showed nuclear power plants to be always already disastrous and primarily located in suburban communities, spurring action in places that at one time welcomed new plants and thereby ushering in the age of the Nimby. As a May 20, 1979, New York Times headline declared, “The Nuclear Issue Becomes Suburban.”32
Disaster Movie Come True
The China Syndrome, a thriller about an accident at a California nuclear power plant, was released on March 16, 1979, twelve days before the accident at Three Mile Island. In depicting power plant owners and regulators as exaggeratedly corrupt, it created the notion of “nuclear plant as bogeyman in a doomsday thriller.”33 Profits, not safety, were of paramount importance for the nuclear power industry and media corporations as portrayed in the film. The plant owners falsify safety documents to build the Ventana plant, where the accident occurs, and to secure government approval for another, called Point Conception. The film strongly argues that the federal regulatory process was fatally flawed as corporate cost-cutting measures and safety lapses were missed or ignored. In addition to its depiction of a corrupt nuclear power industry, the film also introduced the concept of the “China syndrome” into the vernacular as shorthand for nuclear disaster. As explained by a nuclear physicist in the film, the “China syndrome” occurs when a nuclear reactor overheats and melts through its housing into the ground below, theoretically boring all the way to China.
While the accident may have made the filmmakers seem “right” about nuclear power, the movie more importantly provided a frame for understanding the accident in Pennsylvania as something other than routine, minor, or aberrant for a 1970s public already skeptical of institutions like the government or corporations to work in their interest. The China Syndrome’s vision of nuclear power centered on a severe crisis of credibility throughout the industry from builders and managers to owners and regulators. This crisis in public trust was symbolized and consolidated by a familiar moniker denoting a succinct narrative of nuclear meltdown that helped make sense of the events at TMI as the result of mismanagement, poor regulation, and greed.34 As the accident happened, news media, for example, framed it as a “disaster movie come true” and nearly a real life version of The China Syndrome.35 The film proved so powerful a way for understanding nuclear power that a Metropolitan-Edison spokesperson invoked the film on the first day of the accident, saying, “We are not in a China Syndrome type situation,” even as Time described the incident as an “inescapable parody of The China Syndrome.”36 Despite this assurance, Newsweek noted, “The greatest risk of all was a catastrophic ‘meltdown’ of the sort fictionalized in a popular new film called ‘The China Syndrome.’ ”37 This cinematic vision of nuclear power was, another Newsweek article asserted, “a piece of popular entertainment that immediately foreshadows a major news event and then helps explain it [the accident at TMI].”38 In this new formulation introduced by the film, made material by the accident at TMI, and further disseminated by news coverage of the Pennsylvania plant disaster and the film itself, the looming cooling tower came to embody danger for the suburban residents who lived in its shadow. In turn, that visible, material threat enabled protests against nuclear power and a wider “Not in my backyard!” resistance to other “dangerous” public projects throughout the 1980s.
The film begins by establishing the suburban locale of nuclear power as the camera soars over rolling hills connected by power lines to reveal Ventana Nuclear Power Plant. A television crew led by reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) arrives there to do a story explaining the “magical process” by which matter is turned into energy, and how nuclear generation will make America less reliant on foreign oil, a benefit affirming the economic valence of nuclear power for most of her audience. Yet the film still centrally suggests that the public’s opinion of nuclear power should shift from safe and cost-effective to catastrophically dangerous.
As the crew tours the plant, they look down on the control room as an alarm sounds. Cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) surreptitiously records the intense action taking place in the plant’s nerve center. Amid the confusing array of gauges, buttons, valves, and indicator lights, plant manager Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) and crew attempt to diagnose the problem. A second and third alarm sound and are shut off as Godell and his assistants make increasingly panicked attempts to slow the steady rise of pressure in the reactor. “We’re almost at steam level!” someone hisses, suggesting something disastrous is imminent. The operators press buttons and flip switches chaotically, but nothing seems to be working, underlining the notion of a nuclear power plant as unmanageably complex. Godell takes another look at the gauge that shows high pressure in the reactor. He taps it lightly, and it begins to descend. Panic ensues as the men realize that they have been dumping water out of the reactor and are about to uncover the core, to deadly effect. Once Godell has identified the problem, he directs the men with the proper fix, and after two minutes of silence, the indicators return to normal. Despite the scare, Godell asserts that the system worked—a sentiment echoed by a Metropolitan-Edison spokesperson in reassuring the public of Three Mile Island’s fail-safes. Despite these assurances, and informed by the broader cynicism about politicians and corporations, both the public in Pennsylvania and the reporters in the film received this idea skeptically.39
In depicting the nuclear power industry as corrupt or incompetent at nearly every level and even some technical failures such as broken gauges as unavoidable, The China Syndrome forcefully contended that disasters at nuclear power plants were not questions of if but when. The crew, though not legally allowed to film the control room, has captured the frantic scene, and Kimberly Wells returns to the station with “the top story.” Network executives, fearful of their liability for broadcasting contraband video, shelve the piece. When Wells and her crew pursue the story anyway, they find failure at every level of the industry. The safety contractor forged documents, allowing the construction of faulty reactors. Shortcuts taken by plant executives prevented full investigations into the possibly flawed plant because they would cost too much in both money and reputation. Plant manager Godell also learns that federal regulators suppressed public airing of these failings and the likely deleterious effects of the cover-up. As a whole, the film presents nuclear power as dangerous because of mismanagement, corporate and federal undermining of safety guidelines, and a deliberate lack of transparency about the risks of nuclear power.
This portrayal of a wide-ranging conspiracy fell into line with other film narratives that appeared in the 1970s about the misuse of corporate and government power.40 Emblematic of a decade of cynicism about institutions, and part of a 1970s genre defined by portrayals of collusion, secrecy, and paranoia, The China Syndrome emphasized that neither the power industry nor television news were immune from treachery and complicity that endangered the public. In doing so, the film presented the previously marginalized fears of nuclear disaster voiced by environmentalists, liberal activists, and Luddites as mainstream and part of a broader skepticism of American institutions. As a Time magazine writer theorized, The China Syndrome’s “basic premise will no longer seem so farfetched to those moviegoers until now unattuned to the nation’s debate over nuclear power.”41 With its audiences already prepared for institutional failure, the film raised the new suburban fear of meltdown while creating an accessible and simple way to talk and think about nuclear disaster that became crucial as, two weeks later, the public struggled to understand a real nuclear disaster unfolding in the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Credibility Meltdown
Narratives of the accident at Three Mile Island reinforced those of failure and neglect in The China Syndrome and provided the essential understanding of how and why public projects should be seen as risky, particularly when slated for construction in your backyard. From the federal government’s investigation, to newspaper and television news reports, to oral history interviews conducted in the aftermath of the accident, these varied accounts of the accident confirmed the crisis of credibility for the nuclear power industry that had already affected so many other institutions in 1970s America and that would buttress the emerging Nimby movement and its attendant politics of privatism and localism.42
In the early morning of March 28, 1979, twelve days after the release of The China Syndrome, an alarm sounded in the control room for reactor two of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, approximately ten miles outside Harrisburg, the state capital. Setting off a scene staggeringly reminiscent of the chaos of the control room in The China Syndrome, the alarm signaled that cooling water had stopped running to the reactor core and pressure inside the reactor was building.43 Engineers opened an emergency valve to decrease the pressure but, once sufficient reduction was achieved, were unable to shut it. The open valve allowed cooling water to be released and the core to continue to overheat. None of the indicators in the control room told the managers on duty that the valve remained open, so no one knew about the dangerous loss of coolant. Thinking the core was being properly cooled, plant operators slowed the flow of water. By intervening, they eventually exposed the core and partially melted it, thereby escalating a fixable problem into a potentially calamitous reactor meltdown.44
In the days following the accident, state and federal officials worked with Metropolitan Edison (Met Ed), the owner and operator of the Three Mile Island plant, to stabilize the reactor and limit the release of radioactive gas. This was no easy task as experts differed as to the correct methods for avoiding a larger disaster. This confusion among the scientists on the nature of the problems (including the size of a possibly flammable hydrogen bubble in the reactor) caused disagreement among government officials responsible for disseminating accurate information and instructions to inhabitants of surrounding areas. What should they say? Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh had to balance the risk of meltdown and radiation exposure with the risk of pandemonium if a full evacuation was ordered unnecessarily; he chose to recommend the evacuation of pregnant women and children under five, prompting many others to become fearful and leave as well. On Sunday, April 1, three days after the initial accident, it was determined that the hydrogen bubble inside the damaged reactor could not burn or explode. With the help of Nuclear Regulatory Commission physicists, Met Ed and the Pennsylvania government managed to avoid a total meltdown of the core and catastrophic damage to surrounding areas and populations. However, the failures and missteps on the parts of Met Ed and the state and federal government in regulating nuclear power and handling the emergency had far-reaching effects. Their actions weakened the nuclear power industry for years to come, called into question the siting and regulation of similar projects, and enabled Nimby protests.
The confusion about what was happening and could happen was manifest in the daily media coverage of the accident at TMI. Local and national news organizations published contradictory reports that reflected the failure of scientists, public relations personnel employed by the power company, and the government to agree on an accurate assessment of the situation and a strategy for properly informing the public.45 Declaring a “credibility meltdown,” headlines reduced the narrative of the accident to one simple idea repeated daily in the news coverage: confusion.46 An Associated Press report in Harrisburg’s Patriot News published the day after the accident, chronicled the various bits of conflicting information about a radiation release, the topic of greatest concern to the public. “The answers about radiation after Wednesday’s accident … were slow to come and confusing. They were still confusing on Thursday.”47 After recounting the multiple bungled television news conferences on the first day of the accident, the story gave an hour-by-hour account wherein the characterization of the accident by various officials moved from minor to significant to severe to minor once again.48 This article and other news coverage conveyed the profound sense of bewilderment that fueled an escalating sense of terror. The public living near the plant were left in limbo with no definite sense of what danger the odorless, colorless threat posed or what to do if a meltdown occurred. This uncertainty included the mayors of Goldsboro and Middletown, towns surrounding the plant site, who were not immediately notified about the accident or were given specific instructions about what to do.49 For the American public, the fact that the accident had occurred and no one seemed to know what to do when faced with it became the accident’s lasting legacy as government officials, academics, and journalists gathered and disseminated more information about what had gone wrong.
The President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, issued a comprehensive analysis exposing the failures at TMI in particular and of the nuclear power industry in general. The panel’s report also reinforced what had been apparent in the media coverage of the accident—the plants did actually endanger local communities across the country. The report found there were human failures at every stage—construction, management, oversight, and emergency administration. “As the evidence accumulated,” the president’s commission asserted, “it became clear that the fundamental problems are people-related problems and not equipment problems.”50 Emphasizing this point, the committee continued: “We mean more generally that our investigation has revealed problems with the ‘system’ that manufactures, operates, and regulates nuclear power plants.”51 In an era when Americans already viewed the federal government and corporations with growing suspicion, the report did nothing to dissuade them that both entities had failed again to protect average people.52 A Middletown resident signaled the shifting cultural ground when asked about the accident by ABC News correspondent John Martin. As he picked up his child early from school because of the accident, he said in a defeated tone, “It’s worse than what they’re telling us. Typical lies. They oughta close all those nuclear power plants down.”53 His resigned, cynical attitude toward the power company in that moment reflected and reproduced an increasingly common view of government in the era of American “malaise.” In that cultural climate and spurred by the TMI accident, homeowners could justifiably be scared of nuclear power plants, built by corrupt corporations and regulated by an ineffective government.
Figure 1.1. Three Mile Island nuclear reactors during the first day of the accident, March 30, 1979. This photograph captures the new sense of terror that was caused by the image of the cooling tower. AP Photo / Barry Thumma
The President’s Commission also reinforced the widespread dissatisfaction with the straight story presented in the mainstream press.54 Rather than a deliberate “cover-up” a la Watergate, the commission found that representatives of the plant and the government had disseminated incorrect information believing that it was correct, but had done so in a manner that was not reassuring to the public. Press briefers were often not sufficiently knowledgeable, but, more crucially, both Met Ed and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission experts also gave out significant misinformation to the government and the public.55 This led to the commission’s damning assessment of the communications at TMI: “We therefore conclude that, while the extent of the coverage was justified, a combination of confusion and weakness in the sources of information and lack of understanding on the part of the media resulted in the public being poorly served.”56 In the wake of Watergate the lack of a cover-up was reassuring, but incompetence in its place had much the same effect, as the credibility meltdown further undermined trust in those institutions tasked with protecting the public. As a resident yelled at a Met Ed spokesman during a press briefing at the plant, it came down to one simple question for homeowners, “What are you going to be doing to protect my family?” As the 1970s came to a close, it appeared to suburbanites that the answer was “nothing,” so they must do something for themselves.57
Interviews conducted by Dickinson College students in the aftermath of the accident confirmed the crisis of institutional credibility locally and nationally, a crisis that facilitated and fueled Nimbyism. One college employee who worked in the area of Three Mile Island at the time of the accident was asked whether it had caused her to doubt the government’s policies. She responded, “It didn’t help. It really didn’t help. But it’s something I’ve been thinking for quite a while.”58 Editorial letter writers echoed this sentiment as well. Gilbert D. Thompson wrote one of a series of letters by disgruntled citizens published in the Washington Post in the aftermath of TMI. “There is one clear lesson to be learned from the nuclear power plant disaster,” he declared: “that we can’t trust the nuclear power industry or their apologists at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”59 These skeptics clearly saw the failures at TMI as part of a broader pattern of wrongdoing and incompetence that fueled a larger attack on government, which in turn facilitated and was facilitated by homeowners’ claims of danger posed by these projects.
These sentiments reflected the complementary but seemingly incongruous politics of suburban Nimbys: they needed the government and corporations to ensure their safety but did not trust them to carry out that responsibility on their own. Writing for the Nation a year after the accident, McKinley C. Olson observed that residents near Three Mile Island continued to distrust their government and the owners of the plant despite an inclination before the incident to believe in them.60 He wrote that the citizens of Middletown “have an inordinate respect for authority. Most of them were willing to put their blind trust in nuclear power simply because the government and the business told them that nuclear power was safe, cheap, efficient, and reliable. Today they know better. That faith has been shattered. They have been frightened.”61 In articles published in the Washington Post between April 8 and 11, 1979, multiple authors rehearsed and extended both the sense of shattered faith in nuclear power plants and the shifting mood of the nation at large. The authors summed up the state of affairs after the accident: “For the time being, however—and perhaps for a long time to come—the very concept of ‘normal life’ would be a relative term for people unlucky enough to live near the nation’s first serious nuclear mishap.”62 As these and other articles demonstrated, in the wake of TMI, the public lost confidence in the ability of industry and government to manage something that was suddenly understood as dangerous. They symbolized the shifting notions of normalcy for suburbanites who still expected cheap power and a safe natural environment but who now lived with a sense of impending terror and an unexpected crisis of lost privilege.
Given that distrust, catastrophe seemed more likely to accompany or even be endemic to nuclear power than it had as late as 1977. According to a New York Times poll from July of that year, 69 percent of Americans approved of building more nuclear power plants, and 55 percent approved of having a plant constructed in their community—the highest recorded support for nuclear power in American history.63 After the events of spring 1979, however, public views shifted: “Now, the nation knows all too well about the China syndrome, reactor meltdowns and life’s chilling ability to imitate art even in the nuclear age,” and nuclear power companies were “facing their biggest credibility crisis in their 30 year history.”64 Citizens across the country asked: How can we feel safe about living near a nuclear power plant if we don’t trust the people who regulate and run it? In the wake of the accident at TMI, governor of California Jerry Brown put it another way, “Fear is going to change the fabric of our political process.”65 And, it did.
In the events of spring 1979, reality and fiction collided to alter Americans’ understanding of nuclear power from safe to inherently dangerous—“a nuclear nightmare.”66 That fear caused thousands of people to join No Nukes protests in 1979 and led suburbanites who had stayed on the sidelines before to join or support activists, gadflies, and true believers whom they had previously ignored.67 Yet, by defending against the possibility of environmental disaster and the loss of privilege, Nimbys focused on shaping their local landscapes and did not take up the broader antinuclear cause, making clear how, for whom, and to what ends localism and privatism worked in Reagan’s America.
Nimbys and Nuclear Power on Long Island
Pursuing a plan announced in 1965, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) began construction on the Shoreham plant on the North Shore of Long Island in 1973. While other nuclear power plants were proposed around the country and built without incident, Shoreham suffered numerous delays and setbacks in the years between its announcement and the events of 1979. Despite the sense of nuclear power as safe, the federal government over that period increasingly toughened the regulatory process in response to lobbying by environmental activists. With a lengthier and more invasive licensing procedure designed to ensure protection of people and the environment, the process began stretching over years rather months.68 Those delays directly affected the bottom lines of power companies as costs increased and the opportunity to recoup those costs was postponed even longer, while the information gathered for approval provided ammunition for critics of nuclear power.
Along with this more stringent process, a small, committed, and tenacious coalition of local groups opposed to nuclear power, known as the Sound and Hudson against Atom Development (SHAD) Alliance, along with gadfly attorney Irving Like, fought against the Shoreham plant, among several targets of their protest actions.69 Armed with mounds of data on the environmental dangers of nuclear power plants gleaned from mandatory environmental impact statements, the SHAD Alliance slowed Shoreham’s licensing through expert testimony and detailed questioning at public hearings.70 At the same time, it used direct action protests such as picketing, rallies, and even blocking access to the construction site.71 Nuclear power advocates countered by sowing division, attempting to turn LILCO clients against these nuclear power critics by pointing out that the price of electricity was rising due to the delays caused by activists. The power company essentially said that antinuclear activists did not represent suburban Long Island values, which in that moment was true.72 Most Long Island suburbanites stayed on the sidelines of the Shoreham debate, hoping that a new reactor would lower their bills as the economy sputtered.73
In this and other ways, the pre-1979 protesters and activists were different from the suburbanites who became Nimbys. These objectors were true believers in the antinuclear cause and other liberal social justice movements, as evidenced by their publicity materials and meeting minutes. They repeated a commitment to stopping nuclear power because it was a threat to all humanity, not simply a local issue for them as Long Islanders. In a 1978 introductory leaflet, “What is SHAD?” the group wrote, “Members of the SHAD Alliance recognize the threat to the Earth and all its inhabitants that is posed by nuclear power,” making clear that since reactors were dangerous, the group must focus on stopping nuclear power everywhere.74 SHAD’s antinuclear agenda, unlike suburban Nimbys, was part of an explicit and broad ideological commitment and plan for political action. SHAD supported the “Manhattan Project,” for example, and planned a “Take It to Wall Street” campaign in fall 1979 to protest banks that were underwriting nuclear power and other unacceptable practices, such as redlining in real estate and apartheid in South Africa.75 SHAD also sought to persuade workers at the Shoreham plant to make exposure to radioactive materials a labor issue.76 In short, the alliance’s scope went beyond Long Island and the Shoreham plant. SHAD activists traveled to Washington, DC, and Seabrook, New Hampshire, to protest nuclear power and drew a number of causes together to critique global capitalism. All of these efforts demonstrated an ideologically driven, multifront attack that included fighting the spread of nuclear power and eradicating it for the sake of environmental protection as a goal in and of itself.
This activism and ideological commitment stood in stark contrast to Nimbys’ focus on nuclear power as a local threat endangering suburban health and privilege. These new antinuclear dissenters were not “hardy critics” who fought nuclear power or protected the environment on principle.77 Following the accident at Three Mile Island and the release of The China Syndrome, the prospect of living in the shadows of these towers of terror motivated previously uninterested Long Island residents to declare, in one way or another, “Not in my backyard!” Attendance at direct action protests, usually consisting of hardcore activists, grew wildly from forty people on August 20, 1978, to fifteen thousand on June 3, 1979, after the accident at TMI.78 Nimby opposition made bigger and more powerful a movement against Shoreham that had subsisted as a small, ideologically motivated crusade.79 As Nimbys came to see cooling towers as reminders of dread, particularly the “mysterious and unseen radiation that will maim generations to come, or may somehow explode,” those on Long Island became invested in opposing not nuclear power but the Shoreham plant.80
Writing in the Long Island section of the New York Times editorial page in January 1982, Island resident Francis Brady vented frustration with the ongoing conflict over the Shoreham nuclear power plant, which was supposed to serve the suburban communities of Suffolk County. “If my speculations are not responsible or funny,” Brady wrote, “neither is the construction of a nuclear power plant on the shore of a dead-end island inhabited by some three million people. Partisans in the nuclear debate, take note: I (and perhaps others) don’t care who is right. Just argue about it somewhere else, will you please?”81 Brady’s statement showed not only dismay over the shortsighted construction of a plant on a narrow island with limited escape routes, but also a fundamental suburban impulse in the age of the Nimby. Opposition to the plant was expression of local fear and not ideological opposition to nuclear power.
Lewis J. Yevoli, Democratic state assemblyman from Long Island, highlighted local concerns about the planning and construction of Shoreham, if not necessarily other plants: “I don’t think closing Shoreham can be a blanket indictment of all nuclear-power plants throughout the country, but it will serve as an example that, when you plan these things, you’d better make sure you’ve covered all your bases in terms of evacuation, community sentiment and such.”82 Another critic, Kathleen Boylan, a Mineola, New York, resident and wife of a LILCO executive, voiced concerns even though the company building the plant employed her husband. She declared she would boycott LILCO and demand a halt in the Shoreham plant’s construction no matter what it cost her family economically. So invested in their homes and families, residents like Boylan showed a willingness to sacrifice economically (a sacrifice they could more easily make) in order to reshape local land use and protect their neighborhoods. After 1979, suburbanites like Brady, Yevoli, and Boylan did not care about the merits of nuclear power as a technology, its associated cost, or the public need for a cheaper domestic power source. They cared only that a nuclear reactor was being constructed in their community that could at best force them to move and, at worst, maim or kill their families.
The events of March and April 1979 echoed through the news media and Long Island residents’ discussions of Shoreham, demonstrating their impact on suburbanites’ understanding of nuclear power. Under the headline “Nuclear Power at Shoreham: Who Makes the Decisions?” the New York Times juxtaposed a photo of the newly constructed control room at the Shoreham plant with a corresponding image from The China Syndrome showing Jack Lemmon’s character in the Ventana control room.83 Published just a week after the accident at TMI, the article and accompanying image framed the nuclear power debate in terms of the film’s narrative. By drawing a clear parallel between the new plant and the faulty one in the film, the article figured Shoreham as essentially dysfunctional, the product of a flawed process. The accident at TMI also continued to loom large. Three years after TMI, Suzanne Greco of Wading River, Long Island, still used it to frame her opposition to Shoreham: “We cannot afford an accident similar to Three Mile Island on Long Island.… I warn my children about talking to strangers and cavities and that plant.”84 In expressing her fears of the Shoreham plant, Greco fused the fear of nuclear power with the overriding culture of dread and anxiety permeating suburban life in the neighborhood of fear.
Other local residents shared these same fears on the op-ed pages of the Times. On May 20, 1979, Edward Werth of Freeport, Long Island, wrote, “I cannot believe the continuing naiveté of the public and elected officials when it comes to the ability of companies like Lilco and a bureaucratic sham like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which does more promoting than regulating of nuclear power) to pull the wool over our eyes about the dangers connected with nuclear power.”85 Werth wove together the various strands of thought that motivated Nimbys to write letters, attend meetings, and support political candidates, activities centered on their one issue—stopping nuclear power in their backyard. He decried the ignorance of others as to the clear danger made evident just a few weeks earlier in Pennsylvania and on movie screens. Further, he articulated a continuing critique of government and corporations as conspiring to exploit the average citizen for their own benefit. At the end of his letter, Werth brought the reader to the seemingly logical conclusion for an American suburbanite in that moment: the only way to avoid a full-scale nuclear accident on Long Island, he argued, was not to have a plant there at all.
Demonstrating their local focus and political pragmatism rather than ideological or party fealty, Long Islanders supported political candidates across party lines as long as they opposed Shoreham. In 1982, Suffolk county executive Peter Cohalan, hoping to court potential voters, articulated what he thought to be the conventional wisdom about a plant that would lower electricity rates: “I don’t think the county is in any way qualified to say whether that plant is safe or not.… I think it’s an issue that has been completely swung out of proportion.”86 A year later, however, the contest between economic and environmental values was no contest at all. Long Island’s suburban voters made closing the plant at Shoreham the electoral issue of the 1980s. After declaring his hope that the new plant would lower rates, Cohalan based his 1983 reelection bid on his opposition to opening Shoreham, an explicit acknowledgement of his constituency’s laser-like focus on stopping the plant.87
To demonstrate his change of heart to voters during the campaign, Cohalan debated LILCO chairman Charles R. Pierce about Shoreham’s future.88 LILCO and Pierce had tried to rally utility customers around economic concerns by arguing that out-of-touch gadflies were costing consumers money with every delay.89 Cohalan retorted: “We feel that those who tell us that we should put the plant on line because of the economics are asking the government officials of Suffolk County to spin the wheel of fortune and take a gamble on the plant never having an accident, purely because of the economic necessity involved.”90 That exchange encapsulated the shifting perception of nuclear power on the part of suburban residents as Nimbys and not antinuclear crusaders.91 Local residents considered their natural environment, especially Long Island Sound, despite years of postwar development, as part of the privilege of living there. The price of energy could never be low enough to assuage the fear of nuclear meltdown and destruction of what made suburban life on Long Island worth living. Cohalan summed up his position, “The question we’re addressing here from the standpoint of Suffolk County is public safety and public safety only.”92 In reversing his earlier position, Cohalan appealed directly to the Nimbys, causing an uproar in the news media and at campaign stops about their one abiding concern—stopping Shoreham.
As a position based on local issues and fear of losing personal property, Nimbyism demanded to be reckoned with by elected representatives not so much as protesters or activists than as “concerned citizens” whose demands were reasonable and whose power was at the voting booth. Both Peter Cohalan and Governor Mario Cuomo became anti-Shoreham to appease this large block of suburban voters. Those politicians who did not fall in line with this position on Shoreham saw their power base evaporate. US representative John Wydler’s defense of nuclear power and Shoreham in the pages of the New York Times brought rebukes from his constituents. They wrote in direct response to him that nuclear power is not cheap or safe and his understanding of the issues demonstrated “an appalling ignorance of the energy and environmental issues we face.”93 Since he was retiring that year, Wydler could take an unpopular stand and not have to face the wrath of the voters.94 Louis T. Howard, on the other hand, lost his post as presiding officer of the state legislature because of his pro-Shoreham stance.95 US representative William Carney chose not to run for a fifth term under heavy pressure from his party because he continued to support opening Shoreham.96 As anti-Shoreham candidates from both parties won in every contest of the 1980s, they demonstrated both the dominance of nuclear power politics and the Shoreham plant issue in Long Island elections, and the visibility and power of Nimbys.97
Despite a last-minute bid by the George H. W. Bush administration to save the plant, LILCO sold the Shoreham plant to the state of New York for one dollar in 1989. The state, then, made it the first nuclear power plant to be fully decommissioned and the first to be shut down without ever running at full power.98 Shoreham’s closure marked a triumph for local environmental activists who had effectively intervened throughout the 1970s to delay the building and opening of the plant. More important, Nimbys on Long Island demonstrated the power of potential environmental victimization. By articulating a pervasive public dissatisfaction with the prospect of a nuclear power plant, Nimbys and environmentalists were strange but victorious allies.99 While other nuclear power plants did go online during the 1980s, Nimbys transformed a small, niche movement into an effective mainstream effort and, in so doing, changed both the literal and political landscapes of suburban Long Island before returning safely home.100
Nimbys and the Politics of Backyard Protection
Although the impulse, if not the term, for segregating dangerous or undesirable projects away from one’s property has been present throughout modern American history, the “Not in my backyard!” expression and its accompanying political concerns were specific to the suburban homeowner starting in the 1970s. The established privileges of postwar suburban living and their particular cultural and political values facilitated this version of local, politically pragmatic protest and demonstration of spatial power.101 No fan of Nimbyism, Perry L. Norton, professor emeritus of urban planning, explained in 1987 how the parochial focus and lack of ideological coherence of late-twentieth-century Nimbys facilitated their power: “It does not no good to label one another Commie liberal or ignorant bigot. The needs we have portrayed are metropolitan in scope.”102 In an increasingly polarized political world, posing a Nimby protest as a pragmatic and reasonable response to real threats, rather than as an explicit articulation of an established ideology, demonstrated its power to persuade both other homeowners and the politicians seeking to represent them. This “common sense” stance was enabled by environmentalists who argued that ecological threats were both legitimate and ubiquitous, and by the New Right, which emphasized local, private solutions as most effective. In that cultural and political climate, homeowners claimed legitimate danger and the need for local action against it without embracing either movement beyond its efficacy for maintaining suburban privilege.
When faced with a threat such as the siting of a nuclear power plant at Shoreham, Long Island, suburbanites exploited the environmental hazards that would likely result from a nuclear meltdown in order to serve their own local interests whether or not it supported the broader environmentalist agenda.103 Their “metropolitan scope,” as Norton characterized it, ushered Nimbys into the public sphere as reasonable homeowners, not activists. Rather than “fiery-eyed environmentalists,” Nimbys “force close scrutiny of what is proposed, and as the residents of Love Canal, Bhopal and Three Mile Island know all too well, the experts are not always right or the sponsors sufficiently responsible.”104 The dangers posed by nuclear power plants undermined the essential understanding of the suburban environment as clean and healthy and forced a new urgency for residents to “hang on to what they have” by making good on the Reagan era’s clarion call for local control.
Concurrent with the rise of a sustained environmental movement, a “gathering storm” of conservative political thought and grassroots organizing emerged and went mainstream in postwar America, becoming known as the New Right.105 The New Right’s antigovernment, antitax, and pro–property rights agenda valorized the sanctity of the suburban home by emphasizing privileged localism and privatism that movement leaders touted as the rightful benefits of home ownership.106 Conditioned by this politics to see themselves and their local environment as a sacrosanct material benefit of home ownership, suburbanites, when confronted with a nuclear reactor in their town, saw it as not a just a threat to their wellbeing but an attack on their privilege.107 And yet, because of this privilege, suburbanites were not simply the victims of failing bureaucracies or greedy corporations that ignored the rights of homeowners.108 They had the power to protect themselves and their surroundings even if that power was based partly on their perceived victimization. The focus on local life and institutions emerged as the preferred route to the self-determination and expression of property rights rather than reliance on extralocal governmental forces, which seemed so often to fail. For suburban homeowners, this view of individual liberty and property rights made Nimbyism possible and powerful. It allowed them to ignore the broader benefits of public projects and pursue their hyperlocal interests with the express goal of protecting their home and family as a civic duty, for “if we each defend our backyards, we will cumulatively protect our communities, Westchester County, the state, and even the nation.”109
Although Nimbys fashioned themselves as nonideological actors invested solely in the protection of their backyards against greedy corporations and incompetent regulators, they still needed local and state government as foil and facilitator in order to shape their local landscapes. The “mounting community resistance” that gained significant steam in the aftermath of the events of spring 1979 relied on the perception of the state as incompetent while simultaneously counting on its responsiveness to keep dangerous projects out of suburban backyards. It was not simply that local or state government should listen to its constituency but that the municipalities regulate the landscape according to the prerogatives of this vocal constituency. Working with and for suburbanites to address environmental threats endangered other communities and further institutionalized suburban interests as part and parcel of municipal authority.
In casting the state as a foil, Nimbys figured it as part of the incompetent regulation of inherently dangerous nuclear technology that justified their fears and protests. In reference to the licensing process for the Shoreham plant, the chair of the Wading River Board of Fire Commissioners lamented how little the government had done to protect citizens: “Now, in effect, we are looking after ourselves.”110 Nimbys could easily point to the failures of the NRC and government in general to protect them at Three Mile Island and in licensing a plant in their own backyard. Ultimately, as panelists at a 1989 University of Massachusetts seminar on siting controversial facilities noted, “the problem is distrust in the people or institutions who dispense decisions without local input.”111 The legacy of regulatory failures and deceit by the federal government in the 1970s combined with the antigovernment sentiment of the ascendant New Right politics to portray the government as unable or unwilling to help unless forced to do so.
If the cry of “Not in my backyard!” was to do more than express fear or displeasure, however, Nimbys needed decision makers who wielded instrumental parochial power to bring their desires to fruition. In 1988, the New York Times’ William Glaberson described the Nimby relationship to institutional power: “They twist the arms of politicians and they learn how to influence regulators. They fight fiercely and then, win or lose, they vanish.”112 The invisible aspect of privilege apparent in Glaberson’s formulation was access to local governments and the assumed relevance of suburban issues. Suburban residents did not need to fight for visibility or acceptance but rather to simply highlight their concerns and the twisted logic of privatism as civic duty.
As an outcome of decades of suburbanization, the political consolidation and insulation of suburban privilege in the postwar era made suburbanites essential as constituents and consumers, an importance that yielded them great influence. By the 1980s, Nimby’s made good on that influence by casting their desires as commonsense responses to new, existential threats rather than making a systemic critique of entrenched political power. Exploiting their centrality to the consumer’s republic and avoiding explicit ideological attachment, they were successful, as seen on Long Island. By crying “Not in my backyard!” loudly and persistently, suburban Long Islanders forced LILCO to close Shoreham without producing a single watt of energy. They then “vanished,” returning to the presumed safety of their homes and neighborhoods, only to reemerge in response to other threatening projects planned for their neighborhoods.
Nimbys Are Everywhere
As real disasters established environmental threats and popular culture and the news media reproduced them, Nimbys all over the United States laid what seemed to be a rightful (political) claim to feeling endangered by a public project such as a landfill, jail, or power plant. In 1988, the New York Times put it more succinctly, “Nimbys are noisy. Nimbys are powerful. Nimbys are everywhere.”113 Given the seemingly unassailable logic of home defense in the face of real and immediate threats, Nimbys rejected other projects broadly understood as socially necessary but environmentally undesirable, at least in their backyards. Byrl N. Boyce, the director of the Real Estate Center at the University of Connecticut, characterized this perspective: “People think things like prisons are a good thing, but the attitude is ‘Don’t put it next to me.’ ”114 Nimbys rarely expressed an ongoing extralocal ideological opposition to a garbage dump, jail, or an AIDS clinic.115 Part of their politics of persuasion was embracing the need for that project, just located somewhere else. In essence, they had limited, local objectives that centered on preserving the most appealing aspects of suburban life and tried to avoid any visible ideological stakes while nonetheless promoting privatism and homeowner rights. As one editorial described Nimbys’ approach, “They yell, they scream, they oppose, and then they go back to whatever they were doing before.”116 These were intensely parochial movements expressing the essential privilege of suburban living: to pick and choose one’s opportunities for involvement in civic life and articulate that choice through the prism of private interest.117
In the Nimby age of selective citizenship, nuclear power reappeared in the debates over land use because of the controversies surrounding the siting of the power plants’ waste repositories.118 Nimbys frustrated the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1980s by advocating for safe disposal of nuclear waste—in someone else’s backyard. “All of these people have essentially the same message, ‘Not in my back yard,’ ” said an exasperated NRC official.119 In 1987, the vice president of the Edison Electrical Institute said, “There are no foreseeable technical roadblocks” to siting waste repositories, but there was another, nontechnical problem—Nimbys.120
This nontechnical problem sprang up all over the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Nimby protests, from Massachusetts and New Jersey to Florida and California, expanded the notion of what constituted an environmental threat to suburban privilege. From the clear implications of a nuclear meltdown, such protests moved to highlighting the social and cultural dangers of numerous kinds of public projects. In Gloucester and Quincy, Massachusetts, suburban residents blocked the siting of a home for the mentally ill in their neighborhoods because “this is simply not the proper place for such a home. We are in the vicinity of three schools here.”121 In this case, the remote chance of a resident of the home simply encountering a child was unacceptable because it undermined the notion of suburban living as safe and “normal.” Similarly, in 1987, a trash barge left New York City but could not come into port because suburbanite protesters throughout the mid-Atlantic region prevented the waste from being deposited in their communities. No town wanted to be known for its garbage dump, let alone be subject to its rancorous odor. Residents Against Dumping of Noxious Soils in New Jersey (RADON) and Residents Against Garbage Expansion (RAGE) on Staten Island, among other groups, led New Jersey governor Tom Kean to describe in frustration “an irrational attitude that cares not for the health of the planet as a whole, but only for the part of the planet that is located in our backyards.”122 Buying not just a home but a way of life meant that suburban homeowners could and should stop dangerous projects near their small patches of the planet despite the desires of corporations or government or the needs of the public at large. Nimby critic Henry D. Royal, associate director of the Division of Nuclear Medicine at Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis, summarized the power and logic of Nimbyism in a 1989 op-ed: “With nuclear waste, they (politicians) are powerfully aided by the ‘Not In My Back Yard’ (NIMBY) mentality. No one wants prisons, homes for the needy, garbage dumps or nuclear waste facilities in their backyard.”123 Although Royal believed that Nimbyism symbolized an illogical, antiscience view, he knew it was powerful and persuasive for suburbanites as it fused cultural concerns with legitimate fears of toxic contamination into a single protest.
Still, suburban residents did not exclaim “Not in my backyard!” without a reason. As with nuclear power, they often mobilized around real doubts about contamination and environmental danger that continued to emerge. Sterling, New York, residents did so twice in five years. They first stopped the siting of a toxic-waste landfill in 1983 and then successfully opposed a dump for radioactive waste because it posed a danger to drinking water.124 Suburban protesters in other places, like Hillsborough, Florida, and Bellevue, Washington, blocked the building of new power stations and power lines in their communities despite the need to update the infrastructure in those regions.125 In these instances, suburban Nimbys based their apprehensions about power lines and electromagnetic fields on an emerging literature written by doctors, activists, and conspiracy theorists suggesting that living near power plants and lines could lead to illness and death.126 Nimby protests such as these power line cases and the protests against nuclear power demonstrated that private interests often dovetailed with legitimate environmental and health concerns. Indeed, if the protests were to be taken seriously, the sense of legitimate, lethal hazard must be apparent. Yet, despite such authentic fears, local interest still trumped civic duty. The displacement of the dangers that often resulted from the local, rather than global, opposition to these technologies posed a problem for other communities. As the environmental justice movement continually pointed out, Nimbyism was an exercise of power that made clear the fault lines of privilege between suburbanites and their urban counterparts.127
Other Nimbys linked more broadly defined environmental dangers with economic concerns. Some communities in the southeastern United States were able to destroy or move trailer parks in a southern expression of slum clearance cum Nimbyism. The Kings Mountain, North Carolina, city council closed three trailer parks, and Pearl, Mississippi, aldermen banned additional lots for mobile homes.128 Such expressions of local power marked a broader use of Nimby. These suburban residents and governments called trailer parks eyesores and homes to “trailer trash” who would undermine their way of life. Through Nimbyism these suburbanites sought to preserve the property values of permanent homeowners and prevent cultural change that undermined a fundamental reason to live in the suburbs. On the wealthier end of the class spectrum, residents of upper-class suburb Basking Ridge, New Jersey, opposed location of a helicopter pad for AT&T executives in their neighborhood. The main critic of the helipad articulated classic Nimbyism as a commonsense, middle-of-the-road approach. “We’re not against A.T.&T., and we’re not fiery-eyed environmentalists, but if there isn’t some kind of control on noise and traffic patterns of helicopters, a condition with very serious environmental impact will result.”129 That result, of course, was the sounds of helicopters flying overhead, landing, and taking off, annoyances that would make both living in the neighborhood and selling a home more difficult.
As these Nimby interventions showed, suburbanites believed they were entitled to protect a wide range of interests, because their happiness and environmental safety trumped the perceived public good to be achieved by a municipal or corporate project. With Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and hundreds of other, as-yet-unknown toxic time bombs ticking around the country, suburbanites felt justified in moving to protect their communities by proclaiming “Not in my backyard!” and invoking the underlying logic of necessary home defense. They were not merely parroting environmental critiques but revising them to include any number of local grievances broadly understood as environmental. They did so, not to support environmentalism per se, but to achieve the suburban dream of political autonomy and spatial separation in the face of widespread threat. In each of those circumstances, Nimbys exercised privilege and power unavailable to many other communities. Foremost among those privileges, suburbanites expected to live in a world safe from environmental hazard. As favored consumers and constituents, they also presumed that local government and corporations would bend to their will when threats did emerge. By crying “Not in my backyard!” they leveraged those privileges to shape the landscape, protect their interests, and often imperil others.
Starting in the 1970s, real events, news narratives, and popular culture texts associated suburban America with environmental disasters while producing fears of more such cataclysms on the horizon. In the age of the Nimby, environmental dangers appeared less as aberrations on the suburban landscape than as the expected outcome of government and corporate failure to protect average citizens and as symbols of lost suburban environmental privilege. Justified by the imperative of home defense and the legitimate belief in environmental danger, Nimbys leveraged that sense of danger to persuade the government and corporate bureaucracies they criticized to ultimately do their bidding. Through that productive victimization, Nimby protest power shaped the suburban landscape and the predominant associations of the natural environment of suburban America.
This shifting notion of suburban life is clearly seen in the seemingly pragmatic responses to the siting and construction of nuclear power plants after the events of spring 1979. Suburban protestors were successful in Long Island and elsewhere because the rightward shift in American politics and culture that encouraged skepticism, particularly of government, made it possible to leverage liberal critiques, like those of environmentalism, for private advantage. In that cultural climate, the dangers of nuclear power were neither an isolated incident nor the fantasy of liberal activists. Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post, articulated this thinking in explaining how he went from distrusting demonstrators against nuclear power to believing they were right. Echoing the general distrust of American institutions in the 1970s, he asked, “How could energy companies build something unsafe? Why would they?” Turning to the supposed safety of nuclear power, he wrote: “It was something we wanted to believe. It was as mean and big a lie as that. It was this system and that system and even if there was a meltdown you could never have the sort of thing they talked about in ‘The China Syndrome.’ The stuff would never go all the way to China. Ha, ha they said. Don’t be ridiculous, they said, who do we think we are, they said. Liar, I say. That’s who they are.”130 In the world born of the deceptions and dangers of Vietnam, Watergate, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island, suburbanites made use of an environmentalist mindset and a conservative political perspective to protect and extend local suburban privilege, as seen at Shoreham and across the country, in the age of the Nimby.
Nimby victories over the nuclear power industry lasted beyond the viability of Nimbyism itself. Residents stopped many plants from being built in suburban locales while also helping to brand the industry as reckless, poorly regulated, and inherently dangerous. This view of nuclear power became so entrenched that The Simpsons frequently used it over the animated sitcom’s thirty-plus seasons as a comic trope to depict the fictional Springfield’s nuclear power plant.131 The 1990 episode “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” portrayed the Springfield power plant owner Montgomery Burns callously allowing contamination of the water supply so he could earn more profit. With a lovable three-eyed fish named Blinky and the newspaper headline “Mutation Caught at Ol’ Fishing Hole—Is Power Plant Responsible?” The Simpsons episode further reflected contemporary doubt about the ability and willingness of government, industry, and environmentalists to keep people safe.132 In later episodes, Mr. Burns is shown to be totally corrupt and the plant to be irredeemably mismanaged. Into the 1990s, an economic boom that included cheap oil and gas rendered debates about alternative energy, including nuclear power, largely moot. The general lull in building new plants continued through 2014, with a few previously approved reactors beginning construction in 2012.133 International events also intervened periodically to remind the public of the dangers of nuclear power. On April 26, 1986, in Chernobyl, Ukraine, and on March 11, 2011, in Fukushima, Japan, catastrophic nuclear power disasters reinforced the notion that while nuclear power provides certain advantages over traditional sources of energy, a nuclear reactor was still inherently capable of massive destruction.134
Yet, by the mid-1990s, Nimbys had lost the political middle ground on which their power depended, as critics questioned the broader implications of their vision of home and neighborhood defense. Those on the right decried Nimby opposition to office parks in ever-growing rings of suburban towns as the narrow, self-interested, and antigrowth view of the few who sought to live in “elitist preserves” rather than facilitate land use policies that promoted economic development.135 On the left, activists who were increasingly invested in environmental justice rejected the inequality resulting from the relocation of undesirable projects to less politically powerful communities.136 Eco-justice advocates pointed out the implications of homeowners’ Nimby logic. Like other “colorblind” policies and tactics of postwar suburbanites, Nimbyism had a profound impact on race and class. By shaping the suburban landscape through the displacement of public projects to rural and urban places despite residents’ objections, suburbanites turned a blind eye to the effects of their practices on politically and socially marginalized groups.137
Still, thanks to the success of Nimbyism, suburbanites became central to the process corporations and government followed in siting public projects. Hoping to avoid a spectacle that may turn public opinion against a project or even a whole industry, they dealt directly with local residents before building. In some cases, communities received some kind of monetary compensation (e.g., lower taxes, reduced power rates) in exchange for allowing a project to be built in their town, reflecting a renewed emphasis on economic values and willingness to compromise in lieu of protest.138 The federal government also sought to avoid local agitation by frequently reviewing and improving environmental laws and procedures so as to protect communities; the Superfund program to clean up abandoned waste sites is one example.139 “Not in my backyard!” had become an epithet in American culture denoting an irresponsible middle-class suburban attitude by the end of the 1990s, but the suburban privilege and spatial power it represented endured.140 Indeed, while Nimbyism became marginalized, suburbanites became stakeholders privileged enough to no longer even need to protest.
The examples analyzed in this chapter demonstrate that Nimbys nearly always protected privilege by dressing it up as commonsense, necessary behavior. As the New York Times reported in 1990, “Neighbors, these days, are much less likely to submit to municipal authority with docile good citizenship.” A Syracuse Post-Standard editorial argued that “no one wants nuclear waste, even the low-level stuff, anywhere nearby; no one wants an incinerator, or worse yet, a landfill down the road; no one wants nearby farmers to work sludge into the soil.”141 This avowed ideological disassociation, then, was actually ideological investment in place and privilege rather than in national or identity politics. As a New York City Council member said of Nimbyism, “There is no doubt that citizens rising up in fear and rage to fight what some corporation or government agency has planned for their neighborhood has added to the cost of these projects, often delayed them and sometimes killed them outright. That is the purpose of Nimbys. But what is the alternative?”142 For Nimbys faced with toxins and cooling towers, there was no other tactic that kept their privileged status as middle-class homeowners safe from these local threats.
Yet insidious everyday threats from industrial sites that made postwar suburbs possible and from the consumer products that made suburban life comfortable marked that life as environmentally hazardous. Unlike nuclear power plants, however, these other dangers were invisible chemicals and toxins that Nimby protest could not protect against. The following chapter analyzes how, under siege from invisible threats without a clear cause or solution, popular culture texts, individuals, and “experts” imagined affective solutions and psychologically prophylactic practices to help suburbanites cope with the contamination inherent in modern suburban living.