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THE CULTURE WAR TEARING AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM APART  
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Jerusalem Demsas
January 18, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ In Minneapolis, the housing shortage has fractured the green
community. _

, Tim Gruber / The New York Times / Redux

 

Environmentalism has never been a stable ideology, and its adherents
have never been a monolithic group. But, in Minneapolis, the green
community has fractured as a wide array of self-described
environmentalists find that they don’t agree on very much anymore.

Back in 2018, Minneapolis generated national
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being the first major American city to eliminate single-family zoning.
Under a plan called Minneapolis 2040, the city legalized duplexes and
triplexes in all residential neighborhoods. The plan led to a frenzy
of ambitious regulatory changes
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to yield denser, transit-accessible, and more affordable homes across
the city.

The stated goals of Minneapolis 2040 included housing affordability
and racial equity, but supporters also stressed the environmental
benefits of funneling population growth toward the urban core instead
of outlying counties. “All the evidence and data shows that when you
reduce your carbon footprint by, for instance, not having a 45-minute
commute in from the suburbs … it helps the environment,”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me at a downtown ice-cream shop in
September. “It’s really simple, right?” Maybe.

From the March 2015 issue: The miracle of Minneapolis
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From the beginning, though, many in Minneapolis perceived the plan as
an attack on their way of life. Red signs popped up
proclaiming don’t bulldoze our neighborhoods, falsely implying that
bureaucrats would forcibly demolish existing homes. The city council
passed Minneapolis 2040 with a resounding 12–1 vote. But, as is now
common with attempts to legalize more housing, the plan soon came
under legal threat. A newly formed group called Smart Growth
Minneapolis, the local chapter of the National Audubon Society, and
another bird-enthusiast group sued under
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Environmental Rights Act, which gave Minnesotans the right to legally
challenge a public or private action that is
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the pollution, impairment, or destruction of the air, water, land or
other natural resources located within the state.”

After a five-year legal battle, District Court Judge Joseph R. Klein
ordered the city in September to stop implementation of Minneapolis
2040. The city has appealed Klein’s ruling, but as of now it must
revert to the legal regime that existed prior to December 2018 until
an environmental review has been completed. Hundreds of planned
housing units are on hold.

On its face, the battle in Minneapolis is a fight over what types of
housing should go where. But the debate is also revealing
generational, ideological, and temperamental divides within the large
umbrella of the environmental movement. And how these disputes are
resolved will shape the future of cities, the politics of growth, and
the contours of American liberalism.

I began to think of those who favored the Minneapolis plan as the
“Crisis Greens.” They saw environmentalism largely through the
lens of climate change and urgently demanded more government action to
address the problem. They were less enamored of process than their
opponents were, and less wary of change. And those skeptical of the
plan, those involved in the lawsuit and those outside of it, I termed
“Cautious Greens.” They were suspicious of development and
sweeping government action. They saw environmentalism as encompassing
varied lifestyle concerns and were thus much more focused on local
impacts. But perhaps most telling, the Cautious Greens were apt to
ask, with some bewilderment, _What’s the problem with just taking
our time?_

My sympathies, I admit, lie with the Crisis Greens. The problem
with_ taking our time_ is self-evident. For decades, America’s
primary solution to building housing has been to encourage low-density
sprawl that offered large single-family homes in exchange for traffic,
onerous commutes, car-dependency, and a built environment often
inhospitable to mass transit. And even sprawl can’t keep up with the
demand for new housing, sending prices soaring. The Twin Cities
area added 226,000 people
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2010 to 2017, according to the Metropolitan Council, a regional
government agency. In that same amount of time, the region added just
63,600 homes. In Minneapolis proper
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accompanied by just 12,000 new homes from 2010 to 2016.

But the debate over Minneapolis 2040 won’t be won by the side with
the best stats. “Debates about how to use and value the natural
world get persistently entangled with questions of honor or
status—questions about whose way of life is best,” the legal
scholar Jedediah Purdy once wrote
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That holds true in Minneapolis. Fundamentally, this isn’t a factual
dispute; it’s a culture war over what values should define
environmentalism.

If you were born after 1980 or so, the central environmental debate
of your life has been climate change. Indeed, you may have learned
about all other environmental problems—including retreating Arctic
sea ice, disappearing polar bears, hurricanes, and other extreme
weather—through the logic of ending carbon emissions. Your image of
living a greener life likely has more to do with technological and
behavioral changes—taking the bus instead of driving a car, buying
energy-efficient appliances—that reduce your carbon footprint,
rather than with whether you garden or enjoy hiking.

Millennials and subsequent generations have also grown up amid an
urban renaissance. Minneapolis and most other major cities
hemorrhaged residents after World War II
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but since the 1990s, Americans—and young adults in
particular—have rediscovered the economic, social, and cultural
opportunities that cities offer
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Unfortunately, this urban renaissance has been undermined by
anti-growth laws that failed to produce enough houses and apartments
for new residents.

To the Crisis Greens, dense housing development in cities
straightforwardly helps on all fronts. Writing in the local-news
outlet _MinnPost_, the University of Minnesota urban geographer Bill
Lindeke argues
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dense
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housing is “by far the most effective carbon reduction policy.”
Focusing development in the urban environment, he writes, is
fundamentally conservationist. “If regional newcomers can’t live
in Minneapolis, they’ll live in Carver, Dakota and Anoka
counties”—suburban areas with limited access to transit. “The
direct result,” Lindeke continues, “will be habitat loss and the
erasure of agricultural land in the exurbs, creating impervious
surface and heat island intensification at a much larger scale.”

This argument can be counterintuitive if you’re used to thinking of
new construction as inherently anti-environment. Nevertheless,
one recent paper
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that the “skyscraper revolution” since 1975 has been responsible
for the “preservation of surrounding rural land, over 80% of which
is covered in tree canopy or short vegetation.” A popular Crisis
Green internet meme depicts two potential development scenarios for a
fictional island: In one, all of the land is cleared for 100
single-family homes, each with its own lawn; in the other, a
100-apartment building perches along the shore, and the forest
covering the remaining 96 percent of the island is intact. The moral
at the bottom: “Density saves nature.”

The problem with an environmentalism that venerates _just one more
study_ is that it struggles to make decisions in the face of
uncertainty and often refuses to see the high cost of inaction and
delay. Minneapolis 2040 supporters’ suspicion has boiled over into
openly questioning whether their opponents actually care about the
environment at all. When I asked Frey how he evaluates which side
comprises the true environmentalists, he said, “The side that is
legitimate is the side that’s looking at the evidence and the
data.” The environmental arguments against Minneapolis 2040, Frey
concluded, aren’t “backed by intellectual honesty.”

Other supporters of the plan described a common pattern in which
not-in-my-backyard types look for any excuse to block things they
dislike. “A lot of people come to us to stop development
projects,” Colleen O’Connor Toberman, the land-use director at a
Minnesota environmental organization, told me. “I definitely also
hear from people who are like, ‘I don’t like this. Please help me
find the environmental grounds to oppose it.’”

Janne Flisrand, a board member of Neighbors for More Neighbors—a
group pivotal to helping pass Minneapolis 2040—characterizes the
opposition as “a small crew of mostly wealthy neighbors, mostly in
very expensive neighborhoods.” “They do the same thing when it
comes to bike lanes or transit stops,” Flisrand told me. “It’s a
very familiar story.” But is it the whole story?

“I’m obviously not against development,” David Hartwell, a
Smart Growth Minneapolis supporter and a former board member of the
Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis, told me. Although he grew up in the
suburbs, Hartwell, now in his late 60s, has lived in the city for
nearly all of his adult life. His liberal bona fides were burnished by
opposition to the Vietnam War, other forms of student protest, and his
decades-long activism in favor of conservation.

When we spoke, Hartwell derided the suburbs as a “cultural
wasteland”—the sort of comment that, in other circumstances, would
align him with the very urbanists he’s fighting now. But his
understanding of environmentalism is radically different from theirs.
“I certainly think adding anything close to [the number of homes]
the city wants to add is certainly going to change the environment in
the city,” he told me. “One of the reasons we live here is because
it’s a green place and, you know, it’s not like D.C. or New
York.” (As a resident of the nation’s capital, I should point out
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Washington beat out St. Paul _and _Minneapolis as having the “best
big-city park system” while consistently authorizing more housing.)

In 2021, the Minneapolis _Star Tribune_ wrote an article
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Hartwell’s love affair with his home—a 1906 six-bedroom beauty
bought in 1995 and proudly restored, including by replacing the
backyard pool with a 2,000-square-foot organic garden. Hartwell has
done what many environmentalists of his generation did: buy a
dilapidated old house and rehabilitate it instead of buying a new one.
This speaks to one of the principal objections the litigants have to
the 2040 plan: The green way to live has swung from preservation to
supporting new construction. But Hartwell’s way of life has become
much harder to attain after decades of underbuilding and price
appreciation.

Hartwell and his allies present many other arguments against
Minneapolis 2040. They tell me about stormwater runoff and impervious
surfaces. They say that electric cars will solve the climate problem
and make annoying bike lanes and buses obsolete. They point out that
no one is preventing suburban jurisdictions from sprawling even if
Minneapolis were to build more densely. They argue that transit is not
a feasible option for many during the brutal Minneapolis
winters—even though “more than 31 million passengers took Metro
Transit buses and trains during the first eight months of
2023,” according to the _Star Tribune_
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and 14 percent
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Minneapolis households don’t have a car.

Carol Becker, a fierce detractor of Minneapolis 2040, expresses
frustration with a “bike lobby” that is pushing a solution that
works only for “young, white, childless men.” How are parents
going to transport their 3-year-old to day care on a bike after a
snowfall? Who but a very privileged set could afford to show up to
work “dirty, sweaty, smelly, and filthy”?

Some of the Cautious Greens I met did acknowledge that, although
requiring the city to go through an environmental-review process is at
the core of the lawsuit, it’s certainly _not_ the only—or even
primary—motivation of every plaintiff. Proponents of the lawsuit
tell me they are worried about lost property value, about buildings
that are too big, and about feeling unheard by the democratic process.
Jack Perry, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, told me that his own concerns
with Minneapolis 2040 are related to racial justice: “That’s the
entire thrust of it for me, was to use this environmental lawsuit to
force” the city to give the Black community a seat at the table.

But the legal avenue available to opponents was through environmental
law because, across this country, if you want to stop the government
from doing something—such as building a border wall or just allowing
new housing
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environmental lawsuit is the clearest way to challenge it.

The plaintiffs are frustrated by negative characterizations of them in
the public discourse. Proponents of the 2040 plan, Perry argued, have
“spent a lot of time trying to demonize good citizens as elitists
and racists and NIMBYists and whatever-ists you want to have. It’s
really offensive to everybody involved.” Rebecca Arons, the
executive director of Smart Growth Minneapolis, is angry that “for
five years, all [the city] did say was ‘You’re fake
environmentalists’” instead of being willing to conduct an
environmental review.

The historian Jake Anbinder advises against “the blinkers of the
NIMBY framework.” Instead of seeing the Cautious Greens as
self-interested, hypocritical homeowners, we might better understand
them as adherents to an ideology deeply enmeshed in American politics.
Incubated during a succession of development failures by Big
Government, the Cautious Greens remain scarred by the highway
construction and rapid suburbanization that characterized America’s
built environment in the postwar era. Anbinder traces the historical
development of anti-growth liberalism through a “wide array of local
skirmishes whose participants had only a vague sense of being part of
the same war.”

Anti-growth liberals, Anbinder has written,

began to question the previously unassailable idea that “the good
life” demanded the unmolested physical expansion of the places where
they lived. Skyscrapers, shopping malls, and apartment complexes
became signs of something terribly amiss with postwar society rather
than the symbols of progress they had once been. In response,
conservationists fought for sweeping new open-space protections and
environmental review requirements. Architectural preservationists
advocated for landmark laws and historic districts, while community
groups in neighborhoods rich and poor alike mobilized against new real
estate developments.

In theory, you can be alarmed by the reality of climate change without
caring whether your neighbors remove their 200-year-old windows. But
what united these causes was that the people who cared about these
issues were similar: They had similar professional backgrounds, they
favored single-family homes, and all of them were focused, in one way
or another, on blocking or slowing the rapid changes they were
observing in the built environment. As the historian Lily Geismer
explains in her 2014 book, _Don’t Blame Us_, about the development
of suburban liberalism in the Boston area: anti-highway activists
“redirected the ideology of postwar liberalism away from a
growth-oriented vision and toward an emphasis on quality-of-life
issues including a new appreciation of nature.” Geismer notes that
this shift also obscured “an acknowledgment of their role in
perpetuating many of the problems of environmental and social
inequality.”

The way that ideas get tied together into a basket of beliefs we call
an _ideology_ is not through a careful assessment of various factual
claims. In many cases, it’s the work of “coalition merchants”
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Cautious Greens’ case, did the hard work of tying together the cause
of upper-middle-class homeowners and conservationists who wanted to
see the preservation of natural land.

The Cautious Greens of yesteryear fundamentally reshaped the legal and
democratic mechanisms by which development is governed. As the debate
over Minneapolis 2040 has revealed these fault lines in Minnesota’s
environmental community, activists have begun pushing to revise the
Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, the statute that gives them
grounds to sue in the first place.

Minnesota is not the only state having these debates; similar clashes
are occurring in Michigan, Washington, California, Utah, Texas, New
York, and New Jersey and at the federal level. When Crisis Greens win
legislatively, Cautious Greens fight back in court—as they have,
with some success, in such places as Austin, Texas; Berkeley,
California; and Arlington, Virginia.

Last year, two law professors, J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, coined
the phrase “the Greens’ Dilemma
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describe the tension between 20th-century environmental statutes
designed to slow or halt new development and a climate crisis that
necessitates building faster and more than ever before. If your
primary concern is lowering carbon emissions to prevent the
catastrophic effects of climate change, stopping or slowing
development is good _if what’s being developed is bad. _In that
world, it’s easy to band together with classic NIMBYs like
homeowners who hate development, because your causes are aligned. But
when the country needs transmission lines to connect renewable energy
to the grid or carbon pipelines to ensure that greenhouse gas
doesn’t diffuse into the air—or when it needs new housing to
accommodate growth—the coalition begins to fracture.

The first time i spoke with Marian Weidner, she was furious with me.
Six months later, she was picking me up from my Minneapolis hotel to
go birdwatching.

Weidner is the chair of the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis. Protecting
birds is part of her group’s core mission. Earlier this year, I’d
mentioned her organization—the biggest name among the
plaintiffs—in an article
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written about groups that, in my view, were using environmental
statutes for non-environmental ends. Weidner told me that her
organization had just pulled out of the lawsuit, and she clearly
didn’t enjoy being roped in with the remaining litigants.

When we met in person, Weidner took me to the Eloise Butler Wildflower
and Bird Sanctuary, within the city limits. As we walked through the
wooded pathways, she provided the most pragmatic reason for birding
I’ve ever heard: It’s a pastime she’ll be able to enjoy for the
rest of her life. “Even if I’m, like, 90 years old … I’ll be
able to appreciate birds, and it’s not like jogging or like running,
where your knees give out.”

In all our conversations, Weidner, who joined her organization’s
board in 2020 and became chair two years later, was tight-lipped about
the Audubon Society’s internal machinations. But natural turnover
within the organization seems to have played a role in Audubon’s
withdrawal from the lawsuit; only two of the board’s seven members,
Weidner said, had held their position when it was initially filed.

Weidner handed me an extra set of binoculars to use. We walked through
a gate, under a sign that read let nature be your teacher, and sat
for a while on a bench. I learned how to listen for catbirds, and I
briefly forgot that I was just a couple of miles from downtown.

Later, I looked up Eloise Butler, the city-owned wildflower garden’s
first curator and later its namesake. Born in Appleton, Maine, in
1851, she moved to Minneapolis in her early 20s. Butler was a
teacher—“At that time and place no other career than teaching was
thought of for a studious girl,” she once wrote
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at the center of her world was the garden: “As you will know, I
chiefly live and move and have my being in and for the Wild Botanic
Garden.”

Butler was living at a time of growth far faster than our own.
According to the census
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the population of Minneapolis was 13,066 in 1870; by the time Butler
died, in 1933
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the city had grown to 464,356 people. A local-history blog run by
Augsburg University notes
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Butler was “opinionated and uncompromising in her advocacy for
saving wild spaces from thoughtless development,” and
historical sources indicate
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“concerned with the impact of the growing city on nature.”

Obsessed with preserving the native flora of her home, she railed
against
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foreigners like burdock, sand-bur, and Russian thistle.” Her
irritation with the changing physical environment did not seem to be
contained to the changing vegetation. “Most of our vegetable tramps,
like the human ones,” she continued, “are from the Old World.
Inured to keener competition, they multiply rapidly and crowd out our
native wildings.” Butler is a product of her time and does not fit
neatly into either of today’s warring camps. She clearly disliked
rapid population growth and venerated the preservation of native
wildlife; she also disdained suburban cottagers, whom she
characterized as “apparently dissatisfied until the wilderness is
reduced to a dead level of monotonous, songless tameness.” In short,
she was wrestling with the same tensions between growth and
conservation that we’re dealing with today.

About 425,000 people currently
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Minneapolis. Despite all this change, Butler’s wildflower sanctuary
remains a public park, quiet proof that growth and preservation
don’t have to be at odds. Even if triplexes replace single-family
homes in nearby neighborhoods, from the sanctuary of the garden, no
one would be able to tell.

The local Audubon chapter’s withdrawal from the lawsuit did not make
headlines. But this was the group that stuck out the most to me—one
that measured its stance on a current controversy against its core
mission and decided to change direction. Weidner has not become a
rabid pro-development ideologue, nor has her group completely cast off
its former commitments. Instead, it is showing exactly how ideologies
change. No side of any debate can ever claim total victory. Instead,
competing values meld, organizations turn over, and at least a few
people change their mind—just in time for new fault lines to emerge.

_JERUSALEM DEMSAS
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writer at The Atlantic._

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
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and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind
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* environment
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* affordable housing
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* Racial Inequity
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* Audubon Society
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* suburbs
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* development
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