Creating Sustainable Communities: Lessons from the Hudson River Region(Excelsior Editions)

Explores efforts aimed at creating sustainable communities throughout the Hudson River region. From Mount Marcy to Manhattan and beyond, the Hudson River region has become an incubator for rich and varied experiments in sustainable living. In this fascinating book, Rik Scarce showcases some of these efforts by telling the stories of dynamic individuals and organizations that are remaking the region's landscape through ecosystem stewardship, nurturing agricultural practices, and urban renewal for the twenty-first century, along with those promoting creative land-use planning, richly functioning communities, and green businesses. Together, their achievements point to the potential for other areas of the country to forge sustainable futures, and also remind us of the sobering realities and daunting challenges that await us as we attempt to remake our relationships with the planet and with each other. SUNY Press has collaborated with Knowledge Unlatched to unlock KU Select titles. The Knowledge Unlatched titles have been made open access through libraries coming together to crowd fund the publication cost. Each monograph has been released as open access making the eBook freely available to readers worldwide. Discover more about the Knowledge Unlatched program here: https://knowledgeunlatched.org/. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository at https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/8440.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Remaking a Region-Intentionally 1. How We Lost Sustainability 2. A Place under Siege 3. A Constant Bounty 4. Two Hundred Subdivisions Too Late? 5. Remaking Communities 6. How It All Adds Up 7. A Complete Disruption 8. A Landscape to Fight For Conclusion: A Practical Revolution Methodological Note Notes Index

About the Author :
Rik Scarce is Associate Professor of Sociology at Skidmore College and the author of Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement. He lives in Averill Park, just up the street from the Wynantskill, a minor but direct tributary of the Hudson River.

Review :
"Powerful, massively inspiring stories from one of the loveliest spots on the planet: this is the new Hudson River School, and we all should be taking notes!" - Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future "Unlike the bulk of environmental writing from the post-World War II era, dominated as it is by dystopian works and pessimistic predictions, this book offers hope. We meet good people doing good things, and doing them effectively as models for others to imitate." - Mark Hamilton Lytle, author of The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement