Historic Environments

Scenic Hudson, the environmental organization that has protected over 45,000 acres in the Hudson Valley since its inception, didn’t start out nearly quite so large. Indeed, it started as one of the first grassroots environmental movements. When Con Edison proposed installing a hydropower plant at Storm King Mountain, just up the Hudson River from Cold Spring, most small local environmental groups were not willing to jump into a fight against the major utility company they felt they couldn’t win. However, six individuals from these various groups came together to form the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference in 1963, gaining grassroots support from the local community and researchers about the true environmental cost of the hydropower plant. Scenic Hudson’s court victory in 1965 gave local residents standing in court to fight the plant, which set the precedent for modern environmental law cases. In essence, the court agreed that local residents would lose more from the plant than the electricity anyone gained and set precedent for the process of citizen input into projects such as power plants.

View of Storm King Mountain from Scenic Hudson’s Foundry Dock Park Cold Spring

Con Ed continued trying to push through the plant at Storm King until 1980, and in the meantime Scenic Hudson continued taking on other projects aligning with their mission of preserving the Hudson River. While parts of the group wanted to pursue their conservation mission nationally, the organization remained focused on the Hudson Valley, and some people split off to form the National Environmental Defense Council. Scenic Hudson’s other work includes preservation of farmland from development; riverfront land for habitat restoration, river health, public recreations, and future impact mitigation of sea level rise; advocacy for PCB cleanup and against pipelines; and much more. In doing so they have acquired an enormous amount of land in the Hudson Valley, some of which they manage as their own parks as well as land that has or will be incorporated with State and National parks. One intersection of many of these goals is West Point Foundry Preserve, which required extensive remediation, and now couples historic and environmental preservation with ecosystem restoration.

The replica water wheel at West Point Foundry Preserve.

For more information, including locations of parks, see https://www.scenichudson.org