Get Plum Island!: Place and Politics in Massachusetts's Ten-Year Fight Over the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge (Environmental History of the Northeast)

An environmental history of resistance, negotiation, and conservation on the Massachusetts coastAn hour north of Boston, Parker River National Wildlife Refuge occupies the southern three-quarters of Plum Island, a barrier island off the Massachusetts coast.Parker River is a nationally renowned birding destination and the second most-visited wildlife refuge in the Northeast, drawing over 300,000 visitors annually.Today, environmentally minded Massachusetts barely remembers the decade-long fight that reduced the refuge to half its original size.Get Plum Island! tells the forgotten story of how six small towns in Essex County (Newbury, West Newbury, Rowley, Ipswich, Groveland, and Georgetown) fought the establishment of the refuge in the 1940s.Through political organizing across local, state, and federal levels, the opposition nearly abolished the refuge and ultimately succeeded in making it smaller. The conflict was deeply shaped by class, geography, and competing visions of land use.On