The process of writing an article — even a short one — requires leaving a lot out. And when I receive counter-arguments or thoughts I haven’t yet considered after publication, there isn’t a natural way to engage with it. So, after toying around with the idea for a bit, I decided to start this newsletter in order to share some of the gems that are left on the cutting room floor. Feel free to subscribe for more musings/unedited thoughts from me though my official writing will continue to be at The Atlantic.
I recently published an article titled “The Culture War Tearing American Environmentalism Apart.” The piece is about a legal battle in Minnesota where a group of Minneapolis residents is suing the city over a plan that would legalize more and denser housing. Both the plaintiffs and their opponents who support the plan (called Minneapolis 2040) call themselves environmentalists, but they have very different ideas of what that is. On one side there are the Crisis Greens who see environmentalism largely as the fight to stop climate change, this group is less wary of change and in fact urgently wants the government to move faster to address the climate crisis. On the other are the Cautious Greens, this group is older, they’re suspicious of development, suspicious of so called government experts telling them to step aside, and suspicious of speed and change.
A few people who read the piece — including David Roberts who has a thoughtful thread — have objected to me referring to this latter group as environmentalists: “The NIMBYs in Minneapolis are not a ‘different kind of environmentalist.’ They’re not environmentalists at all! They are reactionaries using environmental arguments as fig leafs.”
The disagreement posed here can seem trivial: Roberts and I agree that the Cautious Greens are wrong, that they are fanning the flames of a housing unaffordability crisis, and that if their lawsuit ultimately prevents Minneapolis from developing in a dense, transit-oriented manner it will result in more GHG emissions, all else equal. But while he refers to this group as entirely full of bad faith actors or NIMBYs, I accept their own self-definition as environmentalists.
David Schleicher, a Yale Law professor who I think probably agrees more with Roberts on this question than with me, recently interviewed two other law professors on his podcast. The professors had authored a paper called “The Greens’ Dilemma” regarding the choice confronting environmentalists whether to stick by the 20th century environmental statutes and principles that slow and halt the development of green infrastructure or to abandon them in order to hasten the development of things like transmission lines or, in our case, infill development.
While interviewing the pair, Schleicher quipped that “This is a dilemma the way that the Harlem Globetrotters versus the Washington Generals is a basketball game.” We often use the word dilemma to mean “problem” but it’s more correct to use it to describe a situation where someone is forced to choose between two options, neither of which is clearly preferable.
Schleicher’s point is that between addressing the climate crisis and sticking with a decades old formulation of environmentalism that is standing in the way of a green energy transition and a greener built environment, it’s easy to bet on the Harlem Globetrotters. (For non-basketball people, Wikipedia says that the Washington Generals have beat the Globetrotters only 6 times and have lost more than 16,000 times).
In basketball, it’s largely understood that winning the games is the highest value outcome. Someone who tried to argue that the Generals were better would have to convince her interlocutors that being “good” at basketball meant something other than “winning basketball games.” A high bar. But with broad ideologies like environmentalism, the values themselves are regularly contested. Being an environmentalist is not universally understood to mean a singular or even large focus on reducing carbon pollution. I think this is wrong and I am glad that there is a movement of people — including YIMBYs — who are fighting the political fight to push environmentalism towards that set of ends.
The goals of environmentalism aren’t facts to be discovered. What it means to be devoted to the protection of the environment is contestable based on the values that you hold. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t better or worse values but that you have to actually win the argument! (Note, none of this is exclusive to “environmentalism”: . Take the Republican Party which provides a neat example with the existence of the term RINO (Republican-In-Name-Only). Here again one part of a movement is claiming that its intra-group opponents is actually a fake. Is John Cornyn a fake Republican? It depends on what Republicanism means, who makes up the movement, and what values win out in the end.
There are several strong reasons to believe that many of the litigants and their allies are motivated at least in large part by their opposition to the end of single family zoning. And it is this that prompts Roberts to write that Cautious Greens (or NIMBYs in his formulation) are “approaching the whole thing in bad faith, who are using arguments as pretexts to cover their real motivations.”
This is where I break with Roberts most clearly. Being wrong, having bad values, and even having non-explicitly environmental concerns behind your environmental beliefs is neither damning for the Cautious Greens, nor is it unique to them. The pro-Minneapolis 2040 folks also tie their environmentalism to questions of racial justice, housing affordability, gentrification, and more. Because ideologies aren’t clean and people aren’t machines.
When I first made this argument to one of my editors, she asked me why it mattered. Who cares if people understand their opponents to be fake environmentalists or real ones with bad values. Well, the reason it matters is that most people don’t exist on the poles. There are very few true Crisis or Cautious Greens (case-in-point the heroine of my story Marian) there are just a lot of people who have favorable associations with environmentalism and probably have a lot of mixed views about what it means to be an environmentalist. Convincing them to your side is possible, I see it happening in my work all the time. But it won’t work if the presumption is that holding Cautious Green views is unequivocal evidence of NIMBY-ism. People like to have reasons. They like to have good reasons. Crisis Greens are right, they don’t have to pretend all their opponents are liars to prove it.
The philosophy of social science concept at the heart of this is "essentially contested concept". ECCs have both empirical and normative dimensions, and there are different conceptions of the same core concept. The different conceptions of a ECC concept are mutually intelligible to holders of other conceptions (Roberts would be forced to admit he understands *why* the caution greens think they're environmentalists), and the different concepts are used defensively and aggressively by those who prefer them; this is just part of politics and life in a diverse society.
The article that came up with the ECC idea was from the 50's and used three examples: democracy, art, and 'a good Christian life.' I think the general parameters of the idea supports your view. Roberts wants a win for our side on the merits, but conceptions of an ECC can only defeat other conceptions in political and sociological terms, by crowding them out and replacing them over time. ("Winning arguments on technical terms" can of course be part of how we do that, but mostly it happens slowly, perhaps generationally, as your piece shows..)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept
Just about anyone, but the person OUGHT to advocate for Pigou taxes or be able to explain why they do not.