Tilting at Mills

by Harris, Lis

• ISBN13: 9780395984178
• ISBN10: 0395984173
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-11
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

It is New York City in 1992. Unaware of the heartbreak he will encounter, the veteran environmentalist Allen Hershkowitz proposes developing a major recycled-paper mill in the city. He's tired of being outgunned too often by industry lobbyists in legislative battles and wants to develop an environmentally friendly and profitable business that will bring jobs to one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. What's more, the project could become a national model.But Hershkowitz quickly finds himself pitted against surprising forces. To the idealist's surprise, neighborhood activists fiercely resist outsiders, and he must confront byzantine politics and powerful industry hostility. The project may be outstanding environmentally and socially, but often that's not what matters. From beginning to end, Tilting at Mills reveals what can occur in attempted alliances between big business and environmentalists and is filled with shocking stories of what really happens behind the scenes in major deal-making.

Author Biography

Lis Harris originally researched the project for an article she wrote while a staff writer at The New Yorker. The author of the much-admired Holy Days and Rules of Engagement and a professor of writing at Columbia University, Harris has won numerous grants and fellowships.

Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Rules of the Game 1
2 First Steps 18
3 Who’s Driving This Car? 30
4 The Harlem River Railyard 48
5 Communitas 65
6 Banana Kelly: Slipping from Grace 83
7 Looking for Mr. Good Paper 97
8 Incrementalism and a Simple Lesson in Economics 121
9 Dancing with New Partners 131
10 Once More into the Fray 145
11 All Hands on Deck 161
12 A Rolls-Royce with a Flat 171
13 Signed, Sealed, and Deconstructed 186
14 The New Order 207
Appendix: Dramatis Personae 237

Excerpts

1 Rules of the GameOn a chilly late December day in 1992, Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the countrys preeminent environmental advocacy and legal action groups, left his office in lower Manhattan at around six-thirty in the evening, drove up to the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, and inched his green Subaru uncertainly along Prospect Avenue near 161st Street. He had an eight oclock appointment with a community development group named Banana Kelly and, though he arrived early, it was already dark, the street badly lit, and he was having a hard time locating its storefront headquarters. Hershkowitz had grown up in New York, but in Brooklyn, and didnt know the Bronx that well. He had been invited to speak to Banana Kellys board of directors by the organizations chair and executive director, Yolanda Rivera, about his idea of their joining forces with NRDC and a paper company to build a paper mill in the South Bronx, an ambitious, innovative project that he had been thinking about for nearly a year. It was an idea that some called visionary, others crazy. An intense, tousle-haired man in his late thirties with thick, black, upward-tending eyebrows that gave him a permanently quizzical look, Hershkowitz drove past the address he had been given several times, but the shutters were down, so he thought he was at the wrong place. Looking for help, he drew alongside a parked car, where he saw someone sitting in the front seat, but, as he would tell one of his colleagues the next day, "when I pulled up to the car to ask where Banana Kelly was, so help me god, the guy in the drivers seat was shooting up. Now Im not a naive guy," he went on, "and growing up in East Flatbush youre not exactly sheltered, but that was the first time in my life I ever saw anyone shooting up. He was certainly the wrong guy to ask for directions. So I parked the car and walked up to a door that I thought was the right one, but there was no bell. I knocked but nobody answered, so I stood there for maybe an hour in my suit and tie with my briefcase and, quite frankly, Im the only white guy around." For a while he watched some young children playing in the street, vainly looking for the adult he wished were looking after them. "Finally," as he told it, "Yolanda comes out and sees the scene, and shes being very solicitous, but shes also laughing - because, of course, the board has been sitting there all that time waiting for me." A long and complicated path had brought him to Banana Kellys doorstep. Over the past fifteen years, Hershkowitz, who has a Ph.D. in political economics from the City University of New York, where he had specialized in electric utilities technology and the environment, had become one of the countrys leading experts on recycling - especially on waste management, municipal waste, medical waste, and sludge. He had trodden the well-established path of environmental advocacy and, in cour

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Excerpted from Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings, and the Corporate Squeeze by Lis Harris
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