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A former practitioner of environmental and local government law, Crawford tells the story of how a few ordinary people prevented three persistent and well-financed out-of-state companies from locating a hazardous waste facility in rural Noxubee County. Crawford invokes the name of Dancing Rabbit Creek in the title because, as he explains, that is the place in the county where "in 1830, the Choctaw nation was forced to sign one of the most oppressive treaties ever foisted on a native tribe by the U.S. government." Were the Choctaws' modern-day successors, Crawford wondered, facing a similar legal rout?
In describing Noxubee County, the author paints a picture of a region so geographically and culturally bleak that it soon becomes apparent that beauty under siege is not a part of the dramatic equation. Rather, the emotional tension comes from watching an escalating contest for dominance between slick-talking "outsiders" and plodding, but good-hearted, locals. Epitomizing these two extremes are Ed Netherland, front man for Hughes-FN, the most cunning of the garbage-bearing suitors, and Martha Blackwell, a young housewife and mother who is determined to keep her ancestral area clean.
Because Netherland had early gained the support of a prominent black activist and a blue-collar, gentry-hating county supervisor, the battle became not just outsider vs. insider but black vs. white and well-to-do vs. poor as well. Probably the most useful part of Crawford's book is his over-the-shoulder account of how Blackwell evolves from a quiet and thoroughly domestic political conservative into a self-assured, coalition-building dynamo.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.