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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?)

But if you grew up thinking that environmentalism is first and foremost an aesthetic... the NIMBYism makes perfect sense. /thread

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.

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.

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.