Save the Mountain's Tenth Reunion

One of the two most successful environmental activist groups I’ve ever been involved with is the group I founded ten years ago in Hadley, Massachusetts: Save the Mountain.

We were formed specifically for one purpose: to stop a super-destructive proposed housing development going up the entire side of a mountain immediately next to the much-loved state Mount Holyoke Range State Park/Joseph Allen Skinner State Park.

All the “experts” agreed this was a terrible project, but they said “there’s nothing we can do.” And that’s when I got mad enough to do something about it. I figured the campaign would take five years, but we involved over a thousand environmental activists (at least to the level of putting up a bumper sticker or yard sign, or singing a petition)–and we stopped the project in just 13 months. About 35 people were in the core, working on a number of fronts to make sure this monstrosity was never built. People brought a wide range of strengths to the effort. I had an organizing and marketing background, but I knew nothing about lobbying, state land issues, or endangered species. Others in the group had all that expertise, to name just a few things.

Yesterday, about half of that core group gathered for a tenth-anniversary celebration: a hike through the land we’d saved (now owned by the adjoining state park) and a potluck at my house (site of the very first meeting, which drew over 70 people).