A green dream--on paper. (Books).

It was a bright, shining dream in a sea of blight: A plan for a state-of-the-art paper recycling plant in the heart of the impoverished South Bronx, a partnership between a do-good community group and one of the nation's largest environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Instead, as two new books, Liz Harris' lively Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Squeeze (Houghton Mifflin, $25) and Allen Hershkowitz' more technical Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism (Island Press, $25) make painfully clear, the project, launched amid great fanfare in 1992, disintegrated in 2000 under the weight of bureaucratic wrangling and simple greed. The community group, Banana Kelly, helped wreck the plan, as did the apparently misnamed South Bronx Clean Air Coalition (which at one point said the mill would "kill babies"). "I didn't anticipate evil," says Hershkowitz, who was NRDC's indefatigable point man on the project. "I didn't anticipate schemes. I thought everyone was on the same page and we all had the same idea--let's do good and let business make money." No such luck.