AND ABOVE ALL, SOCIAL PRIVILEGES

More writers are now seeing through what subconsciously motivates much "environmentalism" - the desire to stay on top by keeping the others down. In our Sept. 77 issue we pointed out that the deeper cause of last July's New York blackout was the lack of electric capacity, brought about by the environmentalist tactics of preventing any construction of new power plants, such as the Storm King pumped storage project. The detailed history of that project is the subject of an excellent article Environmentalism and the Leisure Class by W. Tucker in the December issue of Harper's; it is fitingly subtitled Protecting birds, fishes, and above all social privileges.

It is a story worth reading. Scenic Hudson is an environmental organization founded - in "the public interest," of course - by a handful of families of wealthy New York City businessmen and attorneys who objected to having the view from their weekend homes near Storm King spoiled by transmission lines. If the lesser people would not have enough electricity, that was their problem.

"We [would call] in stories to the newspapers on deadline so they couldn't get Con Ed's reaction until the next day," boasts R. Vandivert, an advertising salesman hired full time as Scenic Hudson's public relations director. "The newspapers were very responsive. I remember dictating editorials over the phone to them dozens of times." And when the courts in 1965 threw out the licence for the Storm King plant as "incomplete," this disinformation peddler was willing to take some of the credit: "Court decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Judges read newspapers."

To this day, the Storm King Project has never been finally rejected by any court or licensing agency. It has just, like so many other projects, been delayed and obstructed to death.

It was one of the first of the now familiar ripoffs in the country. and it played a significant part in the events leading to the night of income redistribution of July 13, 1977 (and it wasn't the income of the Scenic Hudson fat cats that was being redistributed) .

The shock troops of the rip-off were the old familiars - Sierra, Wilderness, Walton, Audubon, Conservation Soc., but they were ably assisted by Senators Ribicoff and Kennedy.

The ones who get ripped off in the first place, of course, are the people of New York City, but the politicians who run it couldn't care less. Mayor elect Koch, interviewed by Tucker, didn't even know the City was one of the legal opponents of the project, and neither did the president of the City Council; State Assemblymen Stein and Steingut thought that Storm King was a nuclear plant, so in doubly compounded logic, they oppose it; and Norman Cousins, the Saturday Review's soporific dean of banality is not only an ex writer, but also ex chairman of the Mayor's Special Task Force on Air Pollution he remembers that Storm King "had something to do with radiation."

When the robber barons of a century ago wanted a view unspoiled by the facilities of the riff raff, they simply bought up the land, for they were amateurs. Today's professionals hire lawyers and PR men to legislate and manipulate at the small guy's expense; and when they have ripped him off they feel good about it, for they serve the noble cause of the environment.