LULU (loo’ loo) — acronym for “Locally Unwanted Land Uses”; a LULU is something that a developer or land owner wants to build in, but abutters and other neighbors don’t want. LULUs can include prisons, toxic waste dumps, wind turbine farms, high-speed rail lines, halfway houses, churches, etc.
NIMBY (nim’ bee) — acronym for “Not In My Back Yard”.” Both developers and environmentalists use the acronym pejoratively to describe persons who fight to keep a project out of their neighborhood. Environmentalists may call opponents of the Cape Wind projects NIMBYs; developers call environmentalists NIMBYs on a regular basis.
PIBBY (pib’ bee) — acronym for “Put It in the Blacks’ Back Yard” or “Put It in the Browns’ Back Yard.” Used to explain the high incidence of LULUs in communities of color, based on lack of political access for those communities, blindness of mainstream environmentalism, job or economic blackmail, etc. Example: “NIMBYism leads to the PIBBY syndrome.”
Another one: PIMBY — Put It in the Midwest’s Back Yard. Same definition as for PIBBY.
Sometimes people are accused of NIMBYism when in fact, they don’t want the item in question in anyone’s back yard. It is not NIMBYism to oppose a nuclear power plant in your town if you oppose all nuclear power.
True NIMBYism is when you want the benefits of a power plant, medical-waste incinerator, wind farm, prison, etc., but insist that someone else should endure its disadvantages.
Amy @ 2 — And then there’s international NIMBYism. If we manage to prevent a LULU from being sited in the U.S., in a globalized economy the chances are good that the LULU will simply be moved to another country; e.g., we love to buy all those cheap goods being produced in China, as long as we don’t have to deal with the huge environmental problems that China is now facing.
Dan @3: Ayup. A form of PIBBYism. Want to come up with a new acronym? And per your previous post: We ship huge amounts of toxic electronics waste to other countries, where it pollutes the water etc. Even most of the “recycling” of computer parts means “send to China” (or to US prisons) “for workers there to be poisoned in the course of smashing them to bits.” There are true recycle centers, but we’re not going to get very recyclable, reusable computer components until we pass laws that force manufacturers to bear the waste costs. Working on this: Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
PIBBY is not a new phenomenon. In 1968, I lived in a small town in Central California. My home was in a subdivision called Home Garden, which was 99% African American. Exactly one half mile upwind was the town dump. In those pre-CleanAirAct days, much of the garbage was burned.