This Is Our Land

Montana ranchers in the 1970s were incensed to learn that land many of them had lived on for generations might be ripped apart so corporations could mine coal deposits. The landowners did not hold the underlying mineral rights, making them subject to eminent domain laws that could allow the practice. And with the federal drive to make the United States more energy self-sufficient—which included a push to extract more coal resources and build more coal-fired electrical plants—the possibility loomed large that their homelands might be forever altered. “Like a summer storm that builds slowly on the horizon throughout the day and then arrives with a crash, the coal boom of the 1970s arose as rumors and then poured like a deluge upon the region,” the historian Cody Ferguson writes in This Is Our Land (p. 23). The subsequent coalition of landowners and their difficult, passionate grassroots efforts to stop coal mining and planned adjacent generating plants that would spew air pollution, is the base of the opening segment of Ferguson's fascinating and readable new history. By examining this fight and case studies of two other groups opposing copper smelters in the American Southwest and massive trash dumps in Tennessee, Ferguson illuminates how crises in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s drew citizens—many of them unlikely activists—into the environmental fray. It reveals how people on the local level fought seemingly insurmountable odds to be heard, using new regulatory avenues to oppose powerful foes and deal with shifting political winds

Boom · Environmentalism · Grassroots · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Engineering · History · Law

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