Storm King and the History of Ecology and Environmentalism

Hudson River: Scenery and Striped Bass (credit: Rolf M�ller)

Andrew Revkin has an interesting post this morning about the history of the controversy over the proposed Storm King pumped storage plant on the Hudson River upstream from New York City.  The controversy continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s, turning on both the project's impact on scenic beauty, and its potential damage to striped bass populations in the Hudson.  The arguments both sides made, and how they were made, changed many aspects of how Americans would fight for the environment, especially in the courtroom.

Revkin also posts a lecture, "Remembering Storm King," by Robert Lifset, author of Power on the Hudson a new history of the controversy.  It's a fascinating talk.  And his last paragraphs are particularly interesting � especially for an historian of ecology.  He explains how environmentalism developed stronger ties with ecological science, as that science became better able to quantify environmental impacts, and so could generate defensible conclusions that environmentalists could use.  Ecology became, in effect, the "subversive science".  As he concludes:

In other words, the kinds of arguments environmentalists deployed, the nature of environmental conflict, shifted and became more ecology-focused in part because as a quantifiable science ecological arguments were more persuasive in court. And it was the struggle over Storm King that first cracked open those courtroom doors.

All of this encouraged and accelerated the growing professionalization of the American environmental movement. Scholars have largely seen this development as beneficial if not somewhat unavoidable. But we should recognize that this development was contingent on changes in the nature of environmental conflict, changes that can be traced right back to Storm King.

He's entirely right, of course.  I described this shift back in 1997, using the Hudson River striped bass story (and a nuclear power station) as one of my case studies in Ecologists and Environmental Politics.  (Striped bass have been important in other issues as well, which is why I nominated them last year as the first citizens of New York City.)

But there's another point to be made here: that it wasn't just ecology, but a particular way of doing ecology, that became so useful.  It's a long story, but the summary is that this controversy marked a shift from relying on ecosystem ecology to support environmental claims, to instead using population ecology (like models of striped bass populations) to make predictions of impacts.  These predictions, focused on a single species, could be far more precise than vague claims about impacts on entire ecosystems.  And as a result, ecosystem ecology had to often take a back seat whenever environmentalists used science to support their claims.

This might seem counterintuitive, because ecosystem ecologists (like Eugene Odum) have also often been prominent environmentalists.  But it's a useful reminder of how so much of the history of American environmentalism after the 1960s has not been played out in the public political arena, but in courtrooms and negotiations, where quantification and prediction were what environmentalists needed to be persuasive.