Hypocrisy, NIMBY, and the Politics of Everybody's Backyard

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Notes

Notes

¹ The authors’ account of the preference ranking for ‘NIABY-like NIMBY’ further confuses matters (p.8). They describe the NIABY's first choice as locating the undesired use ‘in the backyard of someone else who consents to have it there,’ and the second choice as not building it. Yet as the NIABY acronym itself makes clear (Not In Anybody's Backyard), and as Sally's position illustrates, not building it is by definition the NIABYs’ first choice. Surely Sally would not prefer that a nuclear power plant be built in another place with local consent, given her conviction that it ought not be built at all.

² By contrast, Feldman and Turner's framework only allows us to see NIMBY claims as a source of conflict with environmental justice (pp. 23–26).

³ Indeed, ‘Everybody's Backyard’ is the name of the newsletter of Gibbs’ national organisation—the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (www.chej.org).

⁴ The Oxford English Dictionary traces the acronym back to 1980. One of the first uses they find is from Forbes Magazine: ‘Home builders and city planners have a new name for an old enemy—the “Nimbys” … those who want no construction that might disturb the character and real estate value of their neighborhoods.’

⁵ Attachment to place is also, of course, a subject of scholarly interest to readers of this journal.