by Edward Ring
Environmentalists push for denser urban areas and restricted land use, overlooking practical solutions like deregulated fire management and expanded development to address climate risks.
“I think what we can learn here is that we are guests in this landscape.”
– Marissa Christiansen, Executive Director of the Climate and Wildfire Institute, Los Angeles
If you’re looking for one sentence that encapsulates the mentality and premise that underlines mainstream environmentalism in America today, these words from Marissa Christiansen, quoted in the closing paragraphs of a recent article “The Lost City” in New York Magazine, are a top candidate.
To be fair, nothing on Christiansen’s Climate and Wildfire Institute website is overtly calling for every wildland environment to be depopulated, or for “climate refugees” to then be relocated into mid-rise apartments where street parking has given way to bike lanes, or for every human being to have their “carbon footprint” remotely monitored in order to ration their consumption of water and energy. Much of this organization’s work appears to be focused on how to reduce the severity of wildfires by making greater use of prescribed burns.
But Christiansen stayed firmly within conventional environmentalist orthodoxy in the rest of what she told New York Magazine, saying that “the city has an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild in a more resilient manner with denser urban housing and wide firebreaks abutting the mountains.”
Denser urban housing. Wide firebreaks abutting the mountains. God help us if environmentalist bureaucrats are allowed to implement that vision. California is only 5 percent urbanized, and that is where 94 percent of the state’s population lives. California has the most densely populated urban areas of any state in America. So let’s make it even denser. The skeptics call that “stack and pack.” The environmentalists call it “smart cities.”
Redefining environmentalism must begin by changing the premises. We are not “guests” on any landscape. If you accept the premise that we are only “guests,” where do you draw the line? According to its annual report, Christiansen’s organization “received $7 million in startup funding from the state of California in 2022.” When it comes to land use, it is therefore unlikely their ultimate policy recommendations will deviate significantly from the priorities set by the state legislature. This means that an average population density for California’s urban areas of nearly 5,000 people per square mile is not enough. We need to bring everyone off those flammable hillsides and turn the state’s scattered forest communities into ghost towns. The “guests” have worn out their welcome.
Meanwhile, California’s state government has enacted regulations and enabled litigation against new housing that rewards special interests while costing taxpayers literally hundreds of billions of dollars. These policies have made housing unaffordable, leaving subsidized developers to inadequately fulfill a mission that the private sector used to do abundantly and affordably. So by all means, let’s pack the cities even more so that politically connected developers, generous with their contributions to politicians and donations to aligned NGOs, can collect additional billions in subsidies.
The logic of considering humans “guests in this landscape” invites a rather urgent question: What landscape qualifies for this designation? Landscape at risk of fire? Then why not log, graze, burn, and thin the vegetation, the way natural fires did for millennia? Shoreline at risk of storm surges? Then invest in resilient architecture and adapt. But that would be too easy. Bring on the regulations and the litigation. Permanent evacuation becomes the only option.
If humans are only “guests” on the sacred earth, why stop at canyons and coastlines? What business does the City of Los Angeles have to even exist? It used to be an arcadian paradise, a wildlife haven, routinely flooding when atmospheric rivers collided with the San Gabriel Mountains and sent cascades of runoff pouring across a verdant alluvial plain. Why not restore this natural wonderland? Depopulate Los Angeles! Evict the unwanted guests, all ten million of them!
This is preposterous hyperbole, but only slightly less preposterous is the notion that California should absorb its entire population into the footprint of existing cities, in the case of Los Angeles, surrounded by “wide firebreaks.” Urban containment, which is clearly a priority for California’s state legislature, is an extremist, special interest-driven set of policies, continuously being strengthened, that have lowered the standard of living and diminished the quality of life for every Californian that doesn’t happen to be wealthy enough to be indifferent to the consequences.
There is an alternative that might be considered common sense if, for decades, voters hadn’t been conditioned to believe that the climate is in “crisis” and that every scrap of wilderness in the entire state is in imminent threat of destruction from urban “sprawl.” Rejecting both of these premises is where sanity is restored to policy.
To begin with, if the climate is in “crisis,” then allowing logging, grazing, burning, and thinning should be a more urgent priority and not instead nearly impossible propositions thanks to layers of bureaucracy, regulations, litigation, and inflated costs that are all the result of misguided political choices and special interest corruption that feeds on obstruction and scarcity. Deregulate all four of these practices and allow the private sector to get busy. Most of these efforts would create jobs and generate tax revenue.
Prevailing environmentalist mentalities, however, prevent the deregulation that might allow this, and they are encouraged by the bureaucrats and billionaires who amass power and profit, respectively, from anything that obstructs decentralized acquisition and enterprise. Environmentalist policies centralize political power and private wealth, which is one of many compelling reasons it must be completely redefined. Which brings us to sprawl.
Current official state policy is to designate 30 percent of the state’s land area off-limits to development. Notwithstanding the fact that publicly managed land is far worse off ecologically in California than privately managed land—compare our national forests to the private timberland in the state for proof of this—why not at the least offer some reciprocity against this law? Why not remove all constraints to private development of urban adjacent areas so that the urban footprint of California is permitted to double? Why is this so unthinkable?
If this were done, the numbers do not point to an environmentally apocalyptic outcome. If California is only 5 percent urbanized, doubling would only incorporate another 5 percent of this vast state. And even developing much less would still offer a transformative improvement to our quality of life. For example, you could move ten million people onto quarter-acre lots, four people per home, allowing equal area for roads, parks, schools, retail and commercial centers, etc., and that would consume 2,000 square miles. This supposedly abominable new sprawl would only increase California’s urban footprint by 1.2 percent, from 5.0 to 6.2 percent. That’s how much room we’ve got.
Environmentalists claim we are “guests” on this land. No. We are not “guests.” And putting every single subspecies of plant and animal onto a list of threatened species to block logging, grazing, burning, and thinning, along with all suburban and exurban development, is a special interest-driven scam.
The Santa Monica Mountains, along with the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and, for that matter, every bit of the more than 30 million acres of forest where we have now suppressed fires for over a century, are no longer historically natural environments. It is impossible to restore most of it to what it once was, nor, if you absolve yourself of the nihilistic idea that we are only “guests” on this landscape, is it even desirable to try.
What is needed in Los Angeles County is more development into the ridges and canyons surrounding the existing city, not less. This brings us to another piety of environmentalists that must be overcome, the goal of so-called “equity.” The new homes that can and should arise as Angelenos expand their urban footprint further into the Santa Monica Mountains will need to be hardened against fire, with swimming pools hooked to curbside hydrants and fire retardant stockpiled in every neighborhood, among other things. And the residents will be not only permitted but encouraged to engage in mechanical thinning and grazing on the open land around their neighborhoods.
All of this will cost money, meaning people of modest means will not be able to afford to live in these areas. But “equity” in the form of mandated “affordable housing” is not a preferable remedy. Regulations to harden homes in fire-prone canyons—while deregulating homebuilding elsewhere—are not incompatible concepts. But they do mean communities end up stratified by income. That ought to be a natural outcome in a healthy meritocratic society, but environmentalists fiercely deny its utility in providing incentives for everyone to achieve their dreams.
What well-intentioned environmentalists ought to consider is the possibility that they are behaving as useful idiots not for communists but for monopolistic capitalists and self-serving bureaucracies. We are not guests on this earth. We are of the earth and have every right to occupy it. There is a healthy version of environmentalism that recognizes this and strikes a reasonable balance between the aspirations of humans and the preservation of ecosystems.
The disaster in Los Angeles is indeed a clarifying moment. The leaders running California today can allow a deregulated private sector to create millions of good jobs delivering abundant energy, water, lumber, and housing—including rebuilding the lost homes in Los Angeles—at a price normal people can afford, or we can ration our water and energy and land, expecting the government to subsidize millions of households that can no longer afford the essentials. We can manage our environment and expand our suburbs, redefining what constitutes a reasonable environmental impact, or we can retreat into high-density urban cores and pretend the entire earth should be turned back over to nature.
Edward Ring
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/19/redefining-environmentalism/
No comments:
Post a Comment