Storm King: The Fight That Made Environmental Law

Storm King Mountain rises above the Hudson River in Orange County, just south of the point where the river bends through the Hudson Highlands, and it does so with a geological abruptness that stops conversation. The mountain drops almost straight into the river on its eastern face. The traprock cliffs are dramatic by any standard.

In nineteen sixty-three, Consolidated Edison, the New York City electric utility, announced plans to build a pumped-storage hydroelectric facility inside Storm King Mountain. The plan required blasting an enormous tunnel through the mountain's base and constructing a reservoir on the summit, with turbines in the mountain's interior reversing direction at night to pump water back up from the Hudson when electricity was cheap. The engineering was sound. The chosen site was, in the view of a great many people, one of the most beautiful landscapes in the Hudson Valley. Con Edison did not consider this a problem.

The opposition organized. A group of local residents and conservationists formed the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference in nineteen sixty-three. Their legal challenge produced a landmark nineteen sixty-five ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit: Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference versus the Federal Power Commission. The ruling held that citizens who valued a river for aesthetic, recreational, and historical reasons had legal standing to challenge federal licensing decisions that would alter it, even if those citizens had no economic stake in the outcome. Standing had previously required a direct economic interest. After Storm King, it did not.

The ruling is considered the founding moment of modern environmental law in the United States. It preceded the National Environmental Policy Act of nineteen seventy, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, and it provided the legal theory that made citizen challenges to federal environmental decisions possible under all of them.

The Storm King fight itself lasted seventeen years. Con Edison finally abandoned the project in nineteen eighty as part of a consent decree that also resulted in significant improvements to Hudson River fish passage. The mountain is still there. It is still extraordinary. The Storm King Art Center, which occupies an adjacent five hundred acres and displays large-scale sculpture in the landscape, was part of what the mountain was saved for.