Not in My Backyard: A Book Roundtable

Brian Balogh's Not in My Backyard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs (Yale, 2024) tells the story of the decades-long fight for environmental conservation in Green Springs, Virginia. This book illuminates the economic tradeoffs of protecting the environment, the origins of NIMBYism, the changing nature of local control, and the surprising power of history to advance public policy. The Green Springs protesters fought to preserve the historic character of their neighborhood and the surrounding environment in a quest that epitomized the conflict in late twentieth-century America between unbridled economic development for all and protecting the quality of life for an economically privileged few.
In this roundtable, the author will meet readers in a wide-ranging conversation about historic preservation, economic development, business versus citizen lobbying and litigating, and environmental conservation.