Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


When Peter Goodman learned in December 1996 that a new glass plant would soon start spewing toxins into the air just six miles from his western New York home, he didn’t stage a protest at city hall or canvass in the streets. Instead, this soft-spoken, 54-year-old social worker did his homework. He discovered that state regulators were about to give Guardian Industries a license to emit 30 percent more nitrogen oxide than necessary.

State leaders had given the Guardian glass plant their full backing from its inception. After all, it was to be the largest industrial project built in the Finger Lakes region in 20 years. The plant would bring millions of dollars and more than 260 new jobs to the city of Geneva. It would also, supposedly, be the cleanest plant of its kind in the nation.

All the same, Goodman was concerned for his community’s welfare and set about learning everything he could about the plant. He waded through reports in the local library, picked the brains of university professors, and badgered government bureaucrats. During his research, he stumbled upon a glass plant in California run by one of Guardian’s competitors. To his surprise, the plant employed a superior technology, producing much cleaner emissions.

Further research convinced Goodman that this technology could also be used at the Guardian plant. He raised his concerns with regulators at a public hearing in February 1997. The state listened to Goodman’s findings but left the permit unchanged; by April, Guardian had final approval to proceed with its plant.

Frustrated, Goodman mailed a copy of his findings to the EPA. The EPA promptly wrote back to inform him of his right, as a participant in the February hearing, to appeal Guardian’s permit under provisions of the Clean Air Act. Goodman hired a lawyer and filed an appeal, claiming that Guardian failed to meet the act’s best-available-technology provision.

The appeal was not a popular move in Geneva. “People were scared,” Goodman says. “We needed the jobs. We needed the economic stimulus.”

But in early May 1997, Goodman and an ally, Linda Ochs, convinced state Assemblyman Richard Brodsky to begin an investigation into the state’s handling of the Guardian affair.

Under pressure from both state and federal investigators, Guardian approached Goodman at the end of May with an offer to settle the case out of court. After some negotiation, Goodman agreed to the settlement in July 1997. Soon afterward, Guardian announced it had discovered a new technology that would cut pollution at the plant by 1,638 pounds of nitrogen oxide per day. It made no mention of Peter Goodman.

Behind the scenes, though, the company paid Goodman’s $20,000 in legal bills. Several months later, an EPA regulator wrote Goodman to commend him on an effort that was “instrumental in achieving a fine result for the environment.” The Guardian plant, completed in April 1998, now sets the national standard for the glass industry.

Goodman insists he doesn’t deserve much credit. “It was the laws on the books that allowed an individual to have this clean air lawsuit,” he says. “If those laws had not been on the books, I would have been nowhere.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate