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:
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)