I’M AN ENVIRONMENTALIST, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. We’re often quite good at it, and thank heaven; I’ll go to my grave satisfied by, if nothing else, having played some part in stopping Big Oil from building the Keystone XL pipeline 1,700 miles across the heart of the continent. Right now I’m deeply engaged with American colleagues in trying to stop our big banks from funding fossil fuel expansion, and rooting on friends in Africa as they battle the giant EACOP pipeline, and watching with admiration as European confreres fight plans to expand coal mines at the expense of forests and villages. In a world where giant corporations, and the governments they too often control, ceaselessly do dangerous and unnecessary things, saying no is a valuable survival skill for civilizations.
But we’re at a hinge moment now, when solving our biggest problems—environmental but also social—means we need to say yes to some things: solar panels and wind turbines and factories to make batteries and mines to extract lithium. And new affordable housing that will make cities denser and more efficient while cutting the ruinous price of housing. And—well, it’s a long list. And in every case there are both benefits and costs, all played out in particular places with particular histories. But what interests me is the search for some general principles that might make these disputes easier, at least for people of good will. I’m thinking of people like me: older white people, a class particularly used to working the system, and perhaps psychologically tilted toward keeping things the way they are.
Is there some way to calculate when the balance tips one way or the other? Some way to figure out when we should protest change and when we should just be quiet?
LET ME START the search for such a rule by telling two stories about one place. I lived most of my life deep in rural America, and much of it in a red, hardscrabble, and very beautiful pocket of upstate New York, the southeastern Adirondacks. You can get a quick sense of its culture by knowing that it’s represented in Congress by Elise Stefanik, though as always, it’s more complicated than that.
First story. Three decades ago, in the early 1990s, our county decided it wanted to build a vast new landfill. Even though our tiny town was 30 miles from the city where almost all
