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In a lot of ways, the environmentalism of my parents' generation didn't ask anyone to sacrifice anything. People still drove (but it was a Prius), lived in the burbs (but with a beautiful garden), bought supermarket food (but bought organic). It was an aesthetic choice as much as anything. 🧵

I grew up around a lot of these types of people. I went to high school in a college town that was famous for an early eco-development with bike paths, solar power, communal gardens, and natural drainage. It's called Village Homes.

It's an idyllic, beautiful place to live, and I had friends who grew up there. Hell, the streets are Tolkien-themed, with names like Rivendell, Bree, Elendil and Evenstar. The President of France even paid a visit.

But at its core, Village Homes is just a suburban subdivision with a green veneer. It's a great way to cosplay as a Hobbit, but it's actively worse for the planet than living in a steel tower on top of a subway station.

And that's the kind of generational split that we're seeing. For a lot of greying NorCal environmentalists, it's the appearance of green living that matters more than anything else. (After all, what kind of *true* environmentalist lives in the urban jungle?)

If you've spent your whole life going hiking, driving a Prius and having a beautiful garden in the 'burbs, it's horrifying to think that the guy who takes the train and lives in a steel tower is doing a better job of saving the planet than you.

Aesthetics are certainly part of it, but the boomer era environmental movement gave us great things as well: organic produce, reduce-reuse-recycle, veganism, and many others. Also it’s easier to convince a “NorCal graybeard” to support bike lanes and housing than a die hard MAGA boomer.

I’m honestly not sure I agree about older NorCal liberals vs MAGA folks on housing, tbh, but that’s partly just trauma from seeing the former shut down new housing time and time again when I lived in the Bay Area. It’s a closer call than I’d like to admit.

More crucially, though, older environmentalist types are the ones who have tend to have local power in the areas where reforms to the urban fabric could actually help the environment. MAGA folks have almost zero local power there, so we don’t concentrate on them.

All of those things have minuscule adoption levels, though, so how great are they, really? If you can't convince most people to do a given thing, it's not solving the problem.

Miniscule relative to what? Organic farming and recycling initiatives were developed, standardized and implemented by the US government and eventually the EU at the very least.

I went on vacation recently, stayed on a farm in Vermont; it was beautiful, full of plants and hills and all that nice stuff, and I had to drive 20+ minutes to do ANYthing. It FELT a lot more nature-y than my 20K-people-per-square-mile city, but boy do I use less carbon here!

Traditional small-town development like what you see in New England is a great way to square the circle. My classic example is Belfast, Maine, population 6900.