Paul Fitzgerald's (1998) The Sydney Airport Fiasco (ISBN: 9780868066721) is hard to get now (I believe it's out of print) but is a very good critical account of the dodgey planning and politics of the environmental impact assessment process for Sydney airport's third runway.
A shoddy EIA was done that recommended the new runway be built and that it would have minimal environmental impacts. The truth was far from this. The runway resulted in thousands of inner-Sydney residents being affected by unbearable noise (110 dB plus every few minutes) and brought more air pollution and disturbance to aquatic ecosystems in Botany Bay. Community outrage ensued; several hundred of the most noise-affected homes were acquired by the fed govt after embarrassing political backlash, and subsequently demolished, with resistant residents in some cases having to be torn from their homes by police to make way for the bulldozers. Fitzgerald's book describes all this and the influence of big capital (airlines, CBD financial corps) in convincing the federal government to keep the airport 6kms from Sydney's city centre for the ease and convenience of business travellers, rather than move it to a new greenfields site (which had been the preferred option through the 1980s)!
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Chris Gibson
Associate Professor in Human Geography
Geoquest Research Centre
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Wollongong NSW 2522
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Ph: +61 2 4221 3448
Fax: +61 2 4221 4250
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1 ream of paper = 6% of a tree and 5.4kg CO2 in the atmosphere
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