NIMBY is a bad word. It means "Not in My Backyard." And it is a Red Letter worn by local activists who dare to intrude on the bureaucratic routines involved in authorizing large real estate developments or similar projects that tend to alter the life of a community.

NIMBY is a putdown. Government officials and businesspeople use the term to suggest that the amateurs who insist on involving themselves in public policy decisions are driven solely by selfish desires. The term usually pops up in the context of an environmental protest to a development proposal.

The inference is that NIMBYs are so caught up in their own concerns — usually meaning their own property values — that they can't see see how whatever it is that is being proposed fits into the big picture. That collectively NIMBYs suffer from myopia. Or paranoia. Or racism, when it comes to a new housing development. Or, maybe, they just don't have anything better to do.

The question from a top-down perspective on environmental v development issues is: Why not just let the professionals do their jobs? "Anybody who is not an environmentalist to some degree is not paying attention," says Larry Christmas, executive director of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which provides planning services to 265 local governments (212 pay dues) in the six-county greater Chicago region. At the same time, he says, environmental issues are so sensitive that they are vulnerable to exploitation: "I don't think there is anybody out there who objects to the idea that there are citizens who are concerned over the environment. Whether their motives always are pure or not, only their psychiatrist knows."

Photo by Photoprose/Richard Foertsch Eraina Dunn, executive director of HACA

From the bottom-up, the view looks different. Motivating many so-called NIMBYs is a belief that the individual — alone or banded together with neighbors — can, and indeed must, exercise a direct influence over public policy and, by extension, over private enterprise. In the Chicago-area, protest groups are a tradition, but over the past two decades, a new generation of protestors has emerged whose focus is the environment. They could easily be called the footsoldiers of the Green movement. They are:

• An executive of a south suburban community organization that won't accept a garbage incinerator as a means of economic salvation.

• A dentist who leads a corps of volunteers in keeping watch over a fast-diminishing stock of wetlands.

• An environmental consultant who is quitting the profession over a nasty fight to block a landfill in the northwest suburbs.

• A leader of a grass-roots environmental group that is building a political coalition inside county government rather than gambling on influencing policy from the outside.

An odd lot as individuals, the new generation of protestors share several characteristics as a group. They are most prevalent on the outskirts of the Chicago urban/suburban region, where sprawl threatens what remains of a rural landscape. They are increasingly sophisticated. Where a county board member or a developer a decade ago might have confronted a housewife on an issue, today the confrontation is as likely to come from a Ph.D., moonlighting from private practice. These protestors have

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secured for themselves a place at the negotiating table, and they don't like to be called NIMBYs.

While marketed as an economic panacea for the region by their backers, incinerators in Dunn's view represent a form of environmental exploitation ...

The environment Eraina Dunn is fighting to protect already bears the scars of a century of industrial abuse. As executive director of the Human Action Community Organization (HACO) based in Harvey, Dunn, 45, has successfully fought off a half-dozen proposals since the mid-1980s to build large solid-waste incinerators in the economically blighted, heavily minority populated industrial suburbs south of Chicago.

While marketed as an economic panacea for the region by their backers, incinerators in Dunn's view represent a form of environmental exploitation coldly aimed at communities starving for new investment. A hot topic in legal and academic circles, so-called "environmental racism" is the practice of singling out poor minority communities for dirty industries. Dunn says, "They feel that we are black and we are powerless and we are desperate for money, and that is why they target our neighborhoods."

Last December Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland W. Burris filed suit to block the furthest along of those proposals, a plan for a $275 million trash incinerator to be built in Robbins by Philadelphia-based Reading Energy Co. The suit was filed on the grounds that some local property owners had not been notified of the project prior to its approval by the village board in the mid-1980s.

With a dozen volunteers who staff HACO, Dunn has conducted a deft rearguard action against the incinerators by exhaustively testifying against them in local public hearings and filing protests to applications for permits that are pending before environmental regulatory agencies. In their zeal they have proved frustrating to local elected officials and their staffs, who generally have been supportive of the incinerators and confident of their high-tech environmental safeguards.

Photo by Photoprose/Richard Foertsch Ken Stoffel of the Swamp Squad

Robbins Village President Irene Brodie, however, says she stopped getting angry with the protesters when she realized she could use them as leverage in her negotiations with Reading. "They have a right and a reason to exist," she says, "and they make us more exacting in what we are going to do."

From Dunn's perspective the most surprising aspect of the incinerator struggle has been the technical and financial support HACO has received from private-sector environmental groups such as Greenpeace. Her organization ususally lacks this kind of support.

The role of environmental activist has been a whole new ballgame for HACO. Since its founding in 1970, the organization has focused mainly on rebuilding the foundation of a region that has suffered from three decades of wrenching economic and social change. Dunn still perceives social pathologies, such as drug addiction and crime, as more immediate dangers to the community and herself. "The element of danger is more intense on the drug issue or the crime issue because there is always a chance of retaliation," she says.

Ken Stoffel fits the mold of a middle-class suburbanite, except that he has eight-foot-tall weeds growing where his front lawn is supposed to be. The weeds are an assortment of prairie grasses he planted there on purpose. They are the kinds of native plants that preceded concrete and Bermuda grass as the predominant ground cover in Chicago's suburbs. They don't require watering or fertilizing, which in excess hold potentially dire consequences for the environment.

Stoffel, a 33-year-old dentist, picked up a heightened concern for the environment while earning a degree in biology at Indiana University. He spent what hardly could be described as a pastoral childhood in Cicero, a close-in suburb where he still maintains his father's practice. Four years ago he became a founding member and the somewhat reluctant co-leader of the Swamp Squad, an offshoot of the Chicago Sierra Club, whose 100 volunteers keep watch over the dwindling stock of wetlands in the metropolitan

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Photo by Photoprose/Richard Foertsch Linda Kinkel, environmental consultant

area. It's not a job Stoffel or his fellow volunteers take lightly. But neither is the Swamp Squad an obsession. "Real life tends to intrude a lot," he says, bouncing his one-year-old daughter on his arm.

Wetlands, which take various forms including marshes and low meadows, are nature's buffers against floods and groundwater pollution. They are estimated to cover about 81,000 acres in the Chicago area. Prior to its settlement, however, virtually the whole region could have been categorized as wetlands. And to some extent, the loss of wetlands can be blamed for increases in flooding and well pollution in the region, as well as such singular events as a catastrophic flood of Salt Creek in DuPage County in 1987.

The Swamp Squad was founded partially in response to the Salt Creek flood. Stoffel, who attended its first meeting out of curiosity, was nominated by an officer of the Sierra Club to help coordinate the group's activities. He says he was too abashed to decline in front of an audience.

Each Swamp Squad volunteer functions as little more than a spotter. A volunteer stakes out a region to watch over, researches the stock of wetlands and reports any apparent violation of federal wetlands protection policy — acts that usually involve private developers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers jointly oversee wetlands protection.

The Swamp Squad's passive methodology has helped it build an unusually friendly relationship with the professional regulators. Two years ago, the group received a $50,000 training grant from the U.S. EPA. "It starts with them being focused in a proper direction," says Charles Orzehoskie, chief of wetlands regulation at the U.S. EPA in Chicago. "People who aren't necessarily engineers and scientists still have common sense, and if focused correctly, they can be a lot of help."

Linda Kinkel, 40, is a casualty of environmental trench warfare, an exhausting struggle that is played out in close quarters bounded by the media, the regulatory agencies and the courts. She holds a Ph.D. in ornithology from Northern Illinois University and has spent the past several years as a principal environmental consultant to the northwest suburban village of Bartlett in its protracted fight to block construction of a giant landfill on 142 acres next-door.

She is a native of Prospect Heights, another northwest suburban village, and grew up in an era before development overran the region. Her grandfather was a birdwatcher, and she recalls seeing foxes in her backyard when she was a child.

The landfill (technically a "balefill" that would accept only compressed pre-sorted trash) is the centerpiece of a $100 million waste disposal system proposed by the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC), a quasi-governmental agency representing 23 suburbs in the region.

The landfill (technically a 'balefill'...) is the centerpiece of a $100 million waste disposal system proposed by the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC)

SWANCC has won approval for the balefill, which would handle 500,000 pounds of trash a year, from the Cook County Board of Commissioners and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. But SWANCC has been denied a permit by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the grounds that the balefill would damage woodlands and wetlands and threaten endangered species of wildlife. Local opposition from Bartlett officials and a small army of community activists has been fierce. At a rally last year, they even burned SWANCC officials in effigy. "Clearly, the lines get drawn," says SWANCC executive director William Abolt. "It's either a facility or no facility; people are never faced with options."

Kinkel's main job has been to compile an inventory of wildlife on the balefill site, an inventory that ultimately established that the site was a habitat for endangered species, including the veery, a migratory bird in the robin family. Her work proved key to the decision by the Army Corps to deny SWANCC a permit.

In addition to field work, Kinkel has given depositions to

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Photo by Photoprose/Richard Foertsch Gerald Paulsen of the McHenry County Defenders

SWANCC attorneys, whom she describes as "totally consumed in an artificial world of their own creation." On a pro bono basis, she also has walked reporters through a technical analysis of the environmental liabilities of the balefill site. "I've come to be very disillusioned," she says of the resulting coverage, which she characterizes as "inaccurate at best" and at worst "distortion."

She gets paid well as a consultant, $75 an hour in professional fees. She likes the hours spent outdoors and the intellectual discipline of working as a scientist. Her experiences on the balefill, however, have led her to begin putting to bed a 15-year career as a professional consultant. A one-time literature major, she would like to become a writer. "There is quite a tremendous personal cost involved for me to be paid to get involved in these projects," she says, "perhaps because I take it too seriously."

Illinois has a green political party. It's the McHenry County Defenders, a well-respected environmental group that traces its founding to Earth Day in 1970. A lot has changed since then, when the Defenders were a loose-knit, single-issue coalition dedicated to blocking construction of a proposed freeway that would run the length of the Fox River Valley. The freeway proposal is still a proposal and remains at the top of the Defenders' agenda. But even without a new freeway, intense development pressure spilling over from congested closer-in suburbs has begun forcing its way into largely rural McHenry County.

In response, the Defenders have grown into a broad-based grass-roots organization with 1,200 members and a $365,000 annual budget for its combined operating and recycling programs. The group built the first successful countywide recycling program in the metropolitan area. The Defenders have a permanent staff, an office on the town square in Woodstock and, most tellingly, a closely affiliated political action committee.

"They say, 'All politics is local,' " says Defenders executive director Gerald Paulsen, 44, a former state environmental regulator. "All environmental issues are local also. And it is the people who work at the grass-roots level who are the most effective."

'They say, "All politics is local." ... All environmental issues are local also, and it is the people who work at the grass-roots level who are the most effective'

Clearly, the Defenders grass-roots organizing muscle has begun to pay dividends at the county level. Paulsen, for example, holds a seat on the county advisory committee on solid-waste management and was instrumental last year in delivering a solid-waste management plan to the county board with a goal of recycling 70 percent of the trash produced locally by 2010. The board approved the plan.

Even more impressive have been political victories in the two most recent general election cycles by candidates supported by McHenry County Conservation Voters, a political action committee (PAC) spun off by the Defenders. The PAC typically lends its support to candidates during the primary season, where a victory is tantamount to election in November in this heavily Republican county.

In 1990, candidates supported by the Conservation Voters PAC won six of 12 seats on the McHenry County Board. In 1992, with every seat on an expanded 24-member county board up for grabs, 12 candidates backed by the Conservation Voters PAC won their primary elections. Conservation Voters also tasted success in their first foray into a countywide election, when Gary Pack, their candidate for state's attorney in the March primary, upset the incumbent, Thomas Baker, by a wide margin.

The Defenders political successes haven't been lost on the powerful county Republican organization. "Anybody has influence if they are out there taking the public pulse," says Albert Jourdan, chairman of the McHenry County Republican Party and state chairman of the Illinois Republican Party. Says Paulsen: "This group is a lot like a church, or more exactly like a Unitarian church. It embraces a lot of beliefs and people from a lot of different backgrounds. It helps foster local leadership."

Tom Andreoli is suburban bureau chief of Crain's Chicago Business.

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