Environment
While a Yale student, Galanter and "scores of others" opposed a New Haven urban renewal program that would have bulldozed buildings and cut streets through poor and working-class neighborhoods. In 1973 she was the first California resident to file an appeal under the state's Coastal Preservation Act against an approved project—a Santa Monica plan "first proposed as 1,480 luxury residential units wound up as 340 condos and 160 units for seniors."
In 1973, working as the newsletter editor with the National Health Law Program, a federally funded legal-services program for the poor, she was part of a group endorsing a statewide campaign for national and state health insurance.
Living in Santa Monica at the time, Galanter was active in opposition to a 1976 plan to move two decrepit frame Carpenter Gothic houses from their Ocean Avenue addresses north of Wilshire Boulevard to a city-owned lot in Ocean Park, turning one into an upscale restaurant and the other into a historic museum. Both were built around the start of the 20th Century, one of them by Roy Jones, son of Senator John P. Jones, founder of Santa Monica. The opposition was enough to kill the project, dubbed Heritage Square, which was eventually finished years later under tighter regulations.
In 1979, she became the Southern California director of the California League of Conservation Voters.
Read more about this topic: Ruth Galanter
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“Today the young actors regard their environment with rage and disgust. They regard their Master not as disciples regard their Master, but as slaves regard their Master.”
—Judith Malina (b. 1926)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“... several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity ...”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)