Industrial Parks: Linkages between Labor History and the Environmental Movement

This paper will provide background on the heritage area program, in particular its roots in open space protection and historic preservation efforts in communities impacted by capital flight in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. Too often, environmentalism and deindustrialization are seen as unrelated or even opposed to one another. My paper complicates this simple binary by demonstrating that economic dislocation and the organization of working-class constituencies often spurred, rather than impeded, the development of innovative practices in protected area management, including projects that sought to operate on a landscape scale.