How NIMBYs hijacked the climate movement

Have today’s environmentalists lost the plot?

Vineyard Wind, which supplies enough clean energy to power 400,000 homes in Massachusetts, spent nearly three years in federal environmental review. (Photo by Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

I expected to hate Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring — Carson is often name-checked as a precursor to modern degrowth environmentalism (including by degrowthers themselves). But Silent Spring wasn’t some 400-page diatribe against progress and growth; it was a thorough, dense, and methodical explanation of the harms of various pesticides and herbicides. And it was very persuasive. (And boring!)

In all likelihood, most environmentalists and anti-environmentalists haven’t read the book. What they remember is what the book came to symbolize, in large part due to the public opposition:

When Carson published her book in 1962, the backlash was fierce. Chemical industry groups claimed Carson wanted to send America back to the Dark Ages, with predictions of famine and insect swarms. They wrote books attacking her credibility, spread rumors she was a communist, and suggested that a mere lady biologist had no business second-guessing the manly chemists.

“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” Carson wrote. Her case was that DDT was increasingly harmful to humans and wildlife and decreasingly harmful to mosquitoes. She believed we could use biological controls, targeted application, and other tested solutions that would more effectively solve the problem. That’s pretty much the whole book.

In the end, Carson prevailed over the lobbyists, and DDT was banned, thanks in large part to the fact that she was thorough in her research and advocated for a measured and science-based approach to solving natural issues, rather than an ideological agenda.

I don’t want to oversell it. There are parts of the book that reveal Carson’s underlying Romantic and tech-negative tendencies, most notably the opening chapter, a “fable” that imagines a mythical perfect town with tons of beautiful wildlife and happy farms and travelers who come to fish. The town is destroyed by an “evil spell” that rid the town of birds and made farm life untenable, and the once-verdant countryside is now “lined with browned and withered vegetation.”

It’s telling that this town has no industry (outside of farming, which at the time was under 9% of the population) and therefore no clear way of sustaining human life. This type of Romantic fairy tale (dystopia?) of a place unspoiled by human activity is a recurring one in the degrowth-environmental imagination.

I came up through the climate movement — interning at the Climate Action Campaign and the Center for American Progress’ Energy & Environment team. Climate change is, to me, a genuine threat to human flourishing. But over a decade later, I’m struck by how much energy in the green movement has been focused on efforts like banning natural gas, blocking denser housing, and counterproductive protest strategies instead of engaging in more objectively effective policies.

The roots of this mismatch are worth understanding. The large-scale environmental movement was fueled by suburbanites who were fundamentally anti-growth. When wealthy people moved to the suburbs in the postwar era, they resented that newer developments kept eating into the green space and seclusion they had been promised.

On our newest podcast episode, Matt Yglesias summed up this mentality based on his own observations from living part-time in Maine: “I’m here to be near the forest. I cut down trees for my house. But you can’t cut down trees for your house because I’m trying to be close to the trees.”

When the movement’s base lives in sprawling suburbs and defines environmental protection as keeping things the way they are, the focus becomes less “protect the environment” and more “degrowth.” That explains why building denser housing, rather than single-family homes with big lawns, is seen as the enemy instead of the solution.

The effects of these positions are felt globally, mostly by poor people in the developing world. The people holding them mostly live in pleasant suburbs.

The real lesson of Carson’s book isn’t in its version of the good life but in its implicit argument for how to be persuasive. Carson is methodical and sober-minded. In the face of increasingly hysterical and sexist attacks, she remained poised and focused on her goals: eliminating DDT and spreading awareness of the negative externalities of various chemical spraying practices.

And she won! The U.S. banned DDT for farming in 1972, the Stockholm Convention put it on its original list of “dirty dozen” pollutants to be eliminated, and global use has collapsed to 369 metric tons in 2023, with just three countries still spraying it.

We get into all of it on this week’s episode of The Argument.

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Show notes:

• Silent Spring, book about pesticides by Rachel Carson that serves as the central point of discussion: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Silent Spring,” series of articles by Rachel Carson that formed the basis for much of her book: New Yorker article

• Coverage of World War II chemicals being repurposed for pesticides: American Heritage article, The Pantagraph article

• Coverage of Carson dying of breast cancer: Silent Spring Institute page, NOAA page

• Conservative discourse arguing Carson’s work was responsible for millions of malaria deaths: Competitive Enterprise Institute op-ed, AEI article

• Coverage of DDT resistance becoming a big problem in the 1970s: EPA archive, Royal Society of Chemistry article, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health article

• Coverage of planes spreading aldrin over Detroit suburbs in 1959 to kill Japanese beetles. The program was not a secret, but government agencies were not required to inform or gain permission from landowners: Detroit Free Press archive

• Coverage of planes spreading DDT over Long Island in 1957 to kill gypsy moth caterpillars: The New York Times article, Literary Hub article, New York Entomological Society article

• Frankenstein, book by Mary Shelley about messing with forces beyond our control: Goodreads page, Project Gutenberg e-book

• CBS documentary about Silent Spring: IMDb page, YouTube video

• The Population Bomb, book about overpopulation by Paul Ehrlich, mentioned by Matt as a contrast to Silent Spring: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Coverage of program to drop sterilized screwworms in an area to kill large populations and stop them from affecting American farming: The Atlantic article

• Coverage of DOGE cutting monitoring for the effective screwworm program: Agri-Pulse article, Slow Boring article

• Coverage of Clean Power Plan, Obama-era regulation agenda for existing and new coal power plants: EPA archive, The Guardian article, EIA article

• Jerusalem Demsas article about tension in environmentalism between technologists and degrowth, anti-change elements: The Atlantic article

• Coverage of Endangered Species Act being invoked to restrict logging in spotted owl habitats, causing a loss of jobs: EBSCO research, Bird Alliance of Oregon article, University of Chicago article, Los Angeles Times article

• Article about campaign to save the snail darter as a pretense for blocking a dam: The New York Times article, The New York Times archive

• Coverage of deer population in the U.S.: World Population Review data, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service page

• Definition of “angler”: “A person who catches fish with a hook and fishing line,” Merriam-Webster entry

• Don’t Blame Us, book by Lily Geismer about suburban liberalism: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Coverage of Congressional negotiations over energy permitting bill, which would make it easier to construct both renewable and hydrocarbon energy: Politico article, Bloomberg Government article

• Coverage of natural gas power being marginally better for greenhouse gas emissions and significantly better for air particulate matter than coal power: iScience article, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions article, Swarthmore research

• The Feminine Mystique, book by Betty Friedan encouraging women to rejoin the workforce, discussed in previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Previous podcast episode discussing The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast episode

• Coverage of Carson being maligned as a crazy spinster: JSTOR article,

• Speculation of Carson’s relationship with a neighboring woman: Clean Water Action article, Lida Maxwell book

• Coverage of the term “Boston Marriage”: National Park Service article, Boston.com article

• Coverage of Carson not identifying as a feminist (“I’m not interested in things done by women or by men but in things done by people”): Environment and Society portal article

• Coverage of letter to President Eisenhower by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson arguing Carson must be a communist because she was pretty but unmarried: Tulane University article, Environmental History article

• Coverage of solar energy sites being slowed down or halted by environmental reviews: E&E News article, NPR article, Los Angeles Times article, Union of Concerned Scientists explainer

• Coverage of New England oil companies using environmental impact litigation to halt the construction of transmission lines from Canada: Boston Globe article, AP article

• Coverage of boundary reanalysis in Montgomery County, Maryland: Montgomery County Public Schools article, Bethesda Magazine article

• Peer review: “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks,” paper by Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark, and Tim A. Bruckner showing that people who took early retirement faced worse cognitive decline than similar people who didn’t: NBER working paper

• Coverage of the “Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)” movement, a community of people who made it their mission to retire as early as 35: The Boston Globe article, r/Fire subreddit

• “Grandparents’ cognition and caregiving for grandchildren,” paper by Flavia Chereches, Gabriel Olaru, Nicola Ballhausen, and Yvonne Brehmer showing that spending time caregiving for grandchildren was associated with slower cognitive decline among grandparents: Psychology and Aging article

• Montessori Baby Visual Stimulation Cards, which purportedly encourage cognitive development among infants by engaging their eyes: Montessori Toys page

• Clarification of millennial ages, with birth years ranging from 1981 through 1996: Britannica page

Transcript