Alan Hershkowitz, Bronx Ecology

It seemed like such a good idea. A development group headed up by the relatively mainstream environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) would build a recycling plant on a giant empty lot in the South Bronx. The neighborhood would get jobs and see a contaminated site redeveloped. New York City would get a cheaper place to send its vast stream of waste paper. The city’s businesses, including the New York Times, would get a source of quality, recycled newsprint. The plant would use wastewater for its processes, reduce the damage done by transporting waste to distant sites, and would exceed clean air requirements. And it would be beautiful, designed by Maya Lin to look its part: a clean, futuristic, ideal factory straddling the Triborough Bridge. But a good idea–even a host of good ideas married together–was not enough to float the Bronx Community Paper Company, despite the passion and smarts of people like Alan Hershkowitz, the NRDC staffer who cooked up the idea and has chronicled its rise and premature fall in Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism. 

The project was born of an anti-eureka moment. After a disheartening congressional battle over a recycling bill, Hershkowitz decided that lobbying and legislation were not going to suffice to protect the environment. Environmentalists had to get involved in industrial development–the process they were trying to control through regulation. The Bronx project was meant to show that this “new environmentalism” could work.

Hershkowitz’s book shifts rapidly–sometimes within a single paragraph–between three levels of specificity. It attempts to describe at once the abstract challenges of building environmentally-friendly industrial facilities, the particular problems of building a recycled-paper plant in an inner-city neighborhood, and the detailed story of the Bronx project. In this often confusing mix of viewpoints, the narrative gets disappointingly shortchanged. It is never entirely clear, for example, how exactly the plan failed. It apparently had to do with ethical questions surrounding the community group allied with NRDC as a local partner in the project. But the story is never told straight. Bronx Ecology is much more successful at the mid-level focus. The chapters that catalog the damage done by traditional paper plants and the advantages and challenges of recycling plants rally a vast store of information for use in many future arguments.

At its most theoretical, Bronx Ecology runs into more trouble, not because its ideas are weak, but because they cannot fulfill the task of outlining a “new environmentalism.” Hershkowitz presents the recycling plant as an exercise in “industrial ecology,” a term of shifting meaning. It is initially defined as an analytical approach: it “involves studying the flows of materials and energy in industrial and consumer activities to assess their effects on the environment, and also involves an analysis of how economic, political, regulatory, and social factors affect the flow, use, and transformation of resources.” But a few chapters later, this diagnostic neutrality has metamorphosed into a vision of industrial ecology as a means to a particular end, complete with its own mantra: “‘What can I do to heal ecological impacts related to this sector?’”

Disinterested analysis is abandoned by necessity, because no straightforward study of the paper market could convince a company to build a plant like the one Hershkowitz wanted. He devotes pages and pages of Bronx Ecology to explain why a smart builder of paper mills who cares about a good profit will build a mill in a rural area to make virgin paper rather than build a recycling mill in a city. Most readers will know intuitively that the more environmentally wasteful option is cheaper. Hershkowitz’s great strength is as a lucid compiler of the facts that lurk behind ideas his readers think they already understand; he shows the details of a plant’s siting decision, and the details are damning. Zoning and environmental regulations are stricter in cities, local politics are more likely to be unstable and hostile, and everything–land, labor, water, waste disposal, energy–costs more. And direct and indirect subsidies consistently give conventional, environmentally-damaging industries a cost advantage. He is forced to admit that the dream of some proponents of sustainability is an empty one. In the market as it stands, environmental protection doesn’t pay. Instead, he finds, it is “more difficult, time-consuming, risky, and costly to develop environmentally superior practices.”

In light of this inevitable conclusion, the “new environmentalism” of the title does not look very different from the old. Both propose the same basic solution to the unprofitability of environmental protection: do it anyway, and if that shrinks profits, so be it. The old environmentalism of regulation and litigation, which Hershkowitz finds hopelessly compromised by the political process, forces companies to play along. They have a choice: take profits reduced by expensive but protective practices, or break the law, be put out of business, and lose all their profits. Hershkowitz proposes that volunteerism make up for regulation’s failings. If environmentalists ran companies, they would protect the environment and take lower profits all on their own. These two environmentalisms are not really different. Both depend on restricting companies’ behavior. Whether the companies adopt restrictions on principle or because the government demands it, environmental protection is still paid for the same way: by forgoing profit.

This model is neither new nor unique to environmental protection. At the turn of the century, philanthropist-entrepreneurs striving to improve New York City’s wretched tenements offered superior housing for the poor, taking lower profit margins for themselves. They fared little better than Hershkowitz. While they did succeed in constructing a few buildings, even those stand today mostly in textbooks, not on the streets.

As long as there is some profit to be made, and dedicated industrial ecologists like Hershkowitz to spearhead projects, the approach might lead to a certain number of cleaner plants and heathier neighborhoods. And if these plants could be built on a large enough scale to shift markets towards sustainability, as the Bronx plant was meant to do for the global newsprint market, they could effect real change. In any event, industrial ecologists could siphon off some of the hand-outs that now go to dinosaur industries. But it seems unlikely that developments like the Bronx plant could ever make up more than a small fraction of the world’s industry. Purely self-interested industrialists will always outnumber ecological ones; reining in greedy practices will require more than an ethics of voluntarism.