In 1962, Consolidated Edison, the largest power utility in the United States, had what seemed like a safe plan to build a plant at Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River. The company was supported by union allies and political connections to both parties and protected by a regulatory system dedicated to the generation of electricity. It had even gained the grudging support of Hudson River conservation groups to build the plant, which would be a sort of enormous battery that would use excess night-generated electricity to pump water into a reservoir cut into the mountain and then drain it again to generate electricity at moments of peak usage. By 1974, not only was Storm King not built, but Con Ed itself was all but shut out of Hudson River development and tipping perilously close to bankruptcy. It had been pushed, in part, by Scenic Hudson, a tiny environmental group that had splintered off from older conservation organizations to fight the plant. Scenic Hudson would by 1974 become a powerful player among the host of groups fighting development on the Hudson. The Storm King fight had attracted national attention and spurred congressional hearings and proposed federal legislation. Some members of Scenic Hudson spun off to found the National Resources Defense Council, which, along with the Environmental Defense Fund, is still one of the primary groups using litigation as a tool of environmental activism.

In Power on the Hudson, Robert Lifset traces the complex causes and enormous ramifications of this turnaround in fascinating detail. The Storm King battle has long been recognized as a turning point in environmental law. By giving environmentalists standing to sue in environmental cases, absent any direct economic connection, Scenic Hudson's successful appeal against the Federal Power Commission's (FPC's) already-granted license for the plant enabled a new wave of environmental litigation. By making Con Ed and the FPC responsible for studying the effects of the plant, the ruling removed from environmental groups themselves the burden of proving environmental damage, ushering in a new regime of environmental impact studies. Lifset shows us other effects as well, including the closing off of potential strategies for power generation, the birth and strengthening of new political alliances and coalitions, and the creation of a range of new activist tactics.

Lifset deftly dodges the cluster of narrative lines that can so easily warp this kind of history. In particular, he argues that the common characterization of the battle as a collision between aesthetically concerned elites and profit-driven industry is an inaccurate, retroactive construction. In fact, Lifset shows, arguments based on scenic value were repeatedly knocked down in hearings and court cases. Instead, he argues, Con Ed's defeat should be attributed to a new ecological strategy. What proved most damning to the plant were quantitative studies demonstrating its effect on the striped bass, a fish with commercial and recreational allies including the many working-class members of the Hudson River Fishermen's Association. In the face of such studies, even members of Scenic Hudson changed their approach to the river. Initially defending the beauty of the mountain, they ended by insisting, briefly, that Con Ed outfit its plants with 450-foot cooling towers to protect the fish.

The book's enduring value comes not only from its overarching depiction of this transformation in strategy, but also from its remarkable attention to the grittier details of the fight. Rather than depicting Con Ed—known in the sixties as “the company you love to hate”—as a black-box behemoth, Lifset is careful to place it in the midst of a broader energy crisis that included the end of an age of efficiency-based price drops and the struggle to deal with ever-increasing demand, price hikes in oil, and a string of humiliating blackouts. Moreover, he shows that the Storm King plant itself was proposed in part to manage environmental concerns: specifically, it would decrease out-of-control air pollution in New York City, which was killing an estimated one to two thousand New Yorkers a year by the 1960s. Likewise, rather than painting environmental groups as plucky grassroots Davids facing Con Ed's Goliath, Lifset is careful to show the infighting that broke out as different ideas of the value of the river and the nature of energy production collided; further, he catalogs the resources, donated wealth, and political capital that environmental groups mobilized. Working through an extraordinary set of archival records and interviews from activist groups, law firms, and local, regional, and national politicians, Lifset gives us a clear picture of a set of allegiances that predated the expected partisan separations of our age—for example, the liberal Democratic Representative Richard Ottinger was welcomed to the Crotonville American Legion Hall despite his anti-Vietnam stance because, not in spite of, his public support of environmentalism (p. 132). Such revealing moments, which fill the book in quick succession, reward close reading.

Particularly in the later sections of the book, Lifset's choice to follow a well-delineated cast of characters through this thicket of organizations and alliances gives his work both a strong narrative line and a sense of human encounter, rather than a disembodied and unrealistic picture of institutional collisions. However this choice is more than good writing. While at first glance his argument suggests the triumph of a broad rhetorical strategy, his twisting storylines continually stress the fast-paced improvising of the activists and politicians as they threw together new organizations, recruited followers, and hastily erected new kinds of legal arguments on the shifting sands of late-sixties/early-seventies environmental legislation. Following their tracks offers a remarkable picture of still-molten social forms. While Lifset's primary audience is historians of environmentalism, his work will be of great value to business historians working to understand how the regulatory environment changed so greatly in the 1960s and 1970s.