[ Click for Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ]
NOTE: This is the conclusion of a piece which originally appeared in last year’s environment issue of Our Town (the Columbia County quarterly), under the title The Bullet We Dodged: How the Cement War was Won.* I’m offering it here in several installments over the next week, in a somewhat expanded form, and with added visuals and links, both for those who lived through the tumultuous years of 1998-2005, and for others who moved to the area more recently—who may wonder what all the fuss was about...
THE FUN PART • Believe it or not, we did manage to find some fun in this deadly-serious fight; we never would have made it if we hadn’t. Printing up red “swat the plant” fly swatters. Painting signs in people’s backyards and barns with leftover latex and scrap wood, and plenty of beer. Puzzling out Tom Koulos’ sphinx-like letters-to-the-editor.
Poking fun at the more absurd pro-plant arguments—like the claim that more pollution would bring more rain for famrs by seeding clouds with dust particles, or that the giant stack would draw industrial tourists, just like the Paris sewers.
Opening the office for Winter Walk, with cookies and carolers. Rushing around during SLC balloon tests to spot the most devastating views of the dirigibles on 406-foot tethers.
Clamoring up scaffolding to hang giant murals and banners in the gym before the big benefit. There was always lots to do, and a lot of gallows humor. Naturally we would have traded it all away to be rid of the threat, and go back to the quieter lives we led before anyone ever heard of PM 2.5. But getting to know our neighbors and finding creative ways to stave off destruction was a challenge that brought out the personalities and talents of everyone involved.
LAST BUT THE OPPOSITE OF LEAST • I’ve still not mentioned the person whose involvement and contributions I can fairly say stood above all others—Hudson business owner (and bass player) Peter Jung.
For nearly seven years, despite the pressure to keep his own business afloat, Peter never said no when called upon for help, advice, or more of his time. I lost track of how many dozen times we loaded up his van with signs and flyers and posterboards— Jehovah’s Witnesses, he called us—to spend an afternoon in the house of another virtual stranger, soon to be a good friend, talking about the world’s driest subject, cement. We burned up the phone lines at all hours of the night, strategizing the group’s next moves, dealing with some mini-crisis within the ranks, or crafting a sharp response to the company’s latest nonsense.
Weekends and holidays became irrelevant; there could be no letting up until we won. Peter was not merely a terrific sounding board, but also brought along a relentlessly-positive outlook and a special knack for boiling complicated issues down to their essence. One of his favorite spiels, after I’d done an exhaustive presentation of the gory details of proposal, was: “If any of this technical mumbojumbo has you scratching your heads, I got a good one for ’ya—just take a drive across the river down Route 9W, from the Ravena cement plant down to the Catskill facility in Cementon. What convinced me to get involved was the devastation and misery that this industry has brought to those places...” Immersing ourselves in the particulars of Portland cement manufacturing was definitely not how any of us planned to spend the better part of a decade in the Hudson Valley, but Peter stuck with it through the exhilarating times and the exasperating, and for that I’m eternally grateful.
AS FOR YOURS TRULY • I’m not going to pretend that an all-consuming crusade which overwhelmed every waking hour of my life for nearly seven years—79 months, all without pay— was not something of a mitzvah.
Though that calling constantly put my name in the press and planted my feet in front of Senators and celebrities, it was seldom, if ever, glamorous.
This line of work entails walking around with a target on one’s back, a willingness to be a lightning rod and take a lot of flack—in part, so that others didn’t have to. It meant taking out the garbage and cleaning toilets in our first simple third-floor walk-up office, spending Saturday nights distilling deadly-dull applications and legal briefs into manageable summaries, checking and double-checking every organizational and factual and personal detail to make sure the cause wasn’t jeopardized by a slipup.
It meant being constantly on call and on guard, and living as virtuously as a monk—knowing that many eyes were on the lookout for any hint of scandal that could bring down the opposition. It also meant managing people’s anxieties and misguided brainstorms and freak-outs, pacifying those seeking assurance, and sometimes having to be the bad guy who pushed erratic or toxic members to the fringes of the fight. Yes, there were internal wars, even bitter rivalries within the ranks. But another part of the job was to keep uppermost in people’s minds that the real enemy was never our neighbors, even when we disagreed.
It meant constantly adapting to new twists, keeping a seemingly never-ending issue fresh, finding new angles. Life under the threat of SLC was a surreal continuum of writing, speaking, presenting, designing, fundraising, leafletting, convincing, cajoling, arguing, watchdogging, and barely ever leaving the 30-mile circle of towns around Hudson for years on end—because whenever you did, you’d wind up getting called back to handle some emergency.
The upside was not just the hope of securing the region’s safety and future; as a result of SLC’s greed, we all met more of our neighbors (and got more of an education) in seven years than we otherwise could have in seventy.
Even today, nearing the sixth anniversary of our victory, I still get stopped in the grocery store by a stranger who wants to thank me “for all that work you did.” My standard replies are “Well, I had a lot of help,” and “If I hadn’t stepped up to the plate, I trust that someone else would have.” Both of those replies I mean sincerely. I also know that stopping the plant was never a sure thing. On the contrary: There were thousands of ways to fail, and only a handful of ways to prevail. To win against the odds (with $60 million and the political establishment lined up against us like a firing squad) required every ounce of an entire community’s brain- and willpower.
My role was to gather, harness, and focus that immense collective energy.
So I’ve jotted down these sketches of the people who came along for the ride on our bandwagon—naming just a few of the countless spokes of a vast wheel—in the hope that whenever the next disastrously foolish idea comes along, as it surely will, someone may read this and realize it can be done: by extraordinary ordinary people like us, and you.
* Readers who want to read the full, original OT article as edited by Enid Futterman and designed by John Isaacs can download it as a PDF right away by clicking here. A full, week-by-week chronology of the fight can be found at Stop the Plant.com.
