Illuminates how borough residents, urban planners, and politicians used environmental policy to cement a racially restrictive landscape.
Though it was once home to the world's largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, and four ecological zoning districts. In this book, Patrick D. Nugent details the political forces that gave rise to this wealth of greenery in a famously dense city. He demonstrates how postwar economic and political trajectories intersected in the 1960s with the rising consciousness of environmentalism to create a distinctive laboratory in Staten Island, where white communities and politicians heeded the rising call for the preservation of green space-but often as a tool to maintain racial segregation. Ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easement, environmental litigation, and other strategies created a lush, discriminatory landscape. Nugent refers to these policies as greenlining.
The Greenlining of Staten Island shows that the political and environmental history of Staten Island is key to understanding how environmentalism has been used to reinforce racial discrimination, not just in New York City, but nationwide. By the mid-1970s, conservationists had embraced urban planning that preserved low-density housing districts and bolstered the sprawling and segregated landscape that took shape in metropolitan America over the coming decades. In exploring the gap between the modern environmental movement's ambitious goals and its tangible outcomes, Nugent excavates important lessons for contemporary city dwellers debating zoning reform and planning for climate change's impending effects.
Table of Contents:
List of Organizational Names and Acronyms
List of Archival Collections
1. Greenlining “the Forgotten Borough”
2. Fresh Kills Landfill and the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge, 1916–1966
3. Open Space and the Annadale-Huguenot Urban-Renewal Plan, 1961–1969
4. Richmond Parkway and the Staten Island Greenbelt, 1964–1972
5. New Towns and National Parks, 1967–1973
6. Community Planning Boards and Ecological Zoning, 1969–1976
7. The Staten Island Greenbelt, 1979–1994
8. “Black Ecology” on Sandy Ground, 1969–1997
9. Staten Island Secession and Environmental Justice, 1983–1999
Epilogue: Resiliency Planning and a Tale of Two Cities
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Patrick D. Nugent is the Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. Director of Civic Engagement at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study American Experience, as well as assistant research professor in the Department of Political Science.
Review :
“Nugent’s The Greenlining of Staten Island is not only a refreshing addition to the paucity of scholarship on Staten Island, but a valuable reconsideration of aspects of the modern environmental movement and its relationship to issues of race and class. Using the concept of ‘greenlining,’ Nugent elaborates the tensions and affinities associated with extending environmental goals and the connection to segregation. This is a very instructive read.”
“The Greenlining of Staten Island continues to complicate our understanding of late twentieth-century environmentalism by showing how its rhetoric and agenda of preserving natural ecosystems were adopted by political actors whose environmental goals were secondary to the maintenance of exclusive residential zones. Whereas most studies of environmental inequality explain how degraded environments proliferated in poorer communities of color, Nugent inverts the formulation by concentrating on the placement of environmental amenities in or near affluent, white neighborhoods. Most forcefully, Nugent exposes environmentalism as an agent of residential segregation. He makes the bold claim that environmental protection succeeded racial covenants and redlining as the primary means by which white Americans preserved racially exclusive housing markets in the post-civil rights era.”
