The sustainability city program in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which began in the early eighties, is one that attracted enormous public attention and comment by public officials, government bodies, academic analysts, policy researchers, journalists and other media around the nation. In general, it received extravagant praise for its efforts and accomplishments, being variously characterized as “crown jewel” or “belle” of America's national sustainability efforts and portrayed as a modern-day “Cinderella story” yielding a model strategy dubbed the “Chattanooga Process” or “Chattanooga Way.” Indeed, scholarly case analyses and policy studies of the “iron city to greenest sustainable city” narrative have brought to this southeastern railway hub (historically symbolized by its iconic train, the Chattanooga Choo-choo) not only a raft of regional and national awards and recognition. It has put this city on the sustainability map as one of two dozen or so cities that “take sustainable cities seriously” (Portney, 2003). That this southeastern mid-sized Tennessee city should have achieved such a hallowed status in the annals of the short history of sustainability in the United States was neither self-evident to most Chattanoogans nor a matter of destiny, given its origins and circumstances in the tumultuous decades of the sixties.

In this chapter, we offer a case study of the Chattanooga sustainability program that begins with the officially-sponsored story of its rise and success constructed from mainstream promoters and supporters of this campaign who often had strong interests in telling this story in a manner that gave Chattanooga's efforts maximum positive exposure and played to their personal benefit.