The End of Joni Mitchell Environmentalism

California's environmental rollback proves that, when it comes to the environment, protecting the status quo isn't always the best approach.

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Last week’s dramatic rollback of California’s environmental law made national news – and rightly so. Although it wasn’t a complete overhaul of the cumbersome California system, it’s the beginning of the end of ‘70s environmentalism – call it “Joni Mitchell environmentalism” – which was designed to protect the status quo on the theory that any change will make things worse.

The main feature of the rollback is exempting all “infill” housing – housing in already existing urban areas – from the notorious California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. The hope is that this will stimulate more housing construction, which has been persistently sluggish in California, and thereby make housing more affordable. It’s a big change and a big win for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who held the state budget hostage until the changes were made.

California environmentalists chain themselves to a rock to protest damming the Stanislaus River, 1979.

I don’t know whether these changes are going to work. For one thing, California’s been passing similar laws for almost a decade now and housing construction hasn’t increased. And for another, there are lots of other factors at work in depressing California’s housing construction, including high interest rates, expensive construction materials, a shortage of construction workers, and construction defect liability laws that discourage condo development.

But one thing is for sure: It’s the strongest signal we’ve had so far that ‘70s environmentalism is dead.

The “If Only We’d Known” Laws

We have lots of laws that protect the environment, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, all of which create standards that polluters and developers have to meet. But environmental review laws like the California Environmental Quality Act (as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, at the federal level) are different.

CEQA and NEPA don’t directly protect the environment. Rather, they create an extended process by which the public debates the possible environmental damage caused by a proposed public infrastructure project such as a highway or reservoir (and, in the case of CEQA, private development projects as well).

I always call these laws the “if only we’d known” laws. At the time they were passed more than a half-century ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the environment because disastrous environmental events had caught most people in the United States by surprise. In January 1969, Santa Barbara suffered a major oil spill, and six months later the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire because it was filled with industrial waste. Concern was so widespread that even Sports Illustrated devoted a cover story to it. (That made quite an impression on an adolescent boy who lived and died by SI every week.)

The famous 1970 Sports Illustrated cover that helped win political support for environmental laws like CEQA.

A lot of the focus was not on the environmental damage itself, but the fact that we didn’t know what kind of environmental damage we were causing. So both the CEQA and NEPA were built around knowing – analyzing a project to identify possible environmental damage and engaging in a robust public debate about whether the benefits of the project are worth the cost.

Within a year, both “if only we’d known” laws were passed – setting up a process by which we would daylight the possible environmental damage of any project. Over time, these daylighting processes have gotten more and more complicated, expensive, and time-consuming, and sometimes the laws – CEQA especially – provide project opponents with the opportunity to sue and gum up the works.

In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson criticize CEQA for creating a “vetocracy” – the ability of small groups of people to veto needed housing. That’s somewhat true, but it’s not really the problem.

The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that helped launch the environmental movement.

The problem is these laws favor the status quo. They are forever comparing something new to no change and focusing on the bad things that happen when you build something new. They compare, for example, whether you build housing or not – not whether you build house in one location or another.

Is Nothing Really Better Than Something?

I call this “Joni Mitchell environmentalism” because the assumption is that what we already had was “paradise,” and any change is “paving paradise” – because, as she sings in her famous song Big Yello Taxi, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. Everything about CEQA and NEPA reflects this ‘70s mindset. Think of Jerry Brown’s philosophy (in his first go-round as governor of California) of “small is beautiful,” people being chained to trees to prevent a new reservoir from being filled, and residents battling greedy developers because they didn’t want their community to be destroyed.

That’s why there’s a generational divide in the environmental movement today. Older environmentalists, who came of age a half-century ago, are accustomed to thinking that any change is bad change and, to put it bluntly, nothing is better than something.

A lot of today’s environmentalists realize that this approach isn’t always right – that our previous environmental sins were so great that building something (especially in the right place) actually can make things better than building nothing. Yes, this is the abundance argument, but it’s more nuanced than that. Building a lot of housing really fast, as we did in the postwar era, can help a lot of families, but it can also create a lot of problems if things like water, sewer, and road systems aren’t set up well in the first place.

There’s a lot of speculation in California right now about what will happen next with CEQA. (I won’t go into that in detail here, but if you want my perspective on it, check out this op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle.) But the battle lines nationally are still being drawn. Coincidentally, just a day or two after Newsom’s big CEQA win, the Trump Administration announced plans to streamline NEPA processes – which immediately led to an outcry from the big environmental groups. Are Abundance Democrats really going to line up with the Trump Administration on this one?

So, even though California’s rollback represents a big win for the YIMBYS and the Abundance Movement, it’s really only the beginning of the battle over Joni Mitchell environmentalism. Because even though infill housing now gets a free pass, lots of other things – for example, new public infrastructure projects – are still mired in the environmental review process. In other words, the underlying “status quo is better” presumption remains embedded in the system. The Abundance folks have to change the system, not just end-run it. Otherwise the Joni environmentalists will continue to prevail most of the time.