Saving the Shawangunks: The Struggle to Protect One of the Earth's Last Great Places

The successful grassroots fight to stop the construction of a 400-room hotel/conference center and 500 condominiums around Lake Minnewaska in New York State’s Shawangunk Mountains in the 1980s was a landmark victory for Hudson Valley environmentalists and became a blueprint for subsequent struggles to preserve open space against encroaching development in a uniquely beautiful landscape that The Nature Conservancy in 1991 selected as one of the 75 “Last Great Places on Earth.”
But the fight d...