Away from my Desk

As a pair, the two images in this gallery capture how I was feeling as I wrote this

I don’t think there’s a more important political principle in the world than “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution”.¹ 

This was brought forcefully home to me two nights ago in a rec center near my house, in an un-air conditioned room packed with local people, several of whom had had the foresight to bring their own box fans from home. 

The occasion was a meeting of our “community planning group”. Locals were out in force because the city of San Diego plans to put new storm drains into one of our neighborhood’s canyons to prepare for El Niño. 

San Diego’s canyons are marvels of wildness. The one we’d come out to defend is always a few degrees cooler than the streets around it. It trills with birdsong, a family of coyotes lives in it, and the stream bed fills with water when it rains. I’ve been taking my kids there since they were tiny, except for a stretch during lockdown when the city blocked off the entrance with caution tape (not the most effective COVID precaution, but it was at the time when none of us knew what to do). Folks from the neighborhood (including kids at the school next to it) have been growing native plants and clearing out invasive ones for years, and the Natural History museum has been studying the (apparently surprisingly diverse) bat population. 

Flooding can be terrible in San Diego, and the one thing we know for certain about the coming El Niño is that we are unprepared. So we all want the canyon to be able to take it when the rain comes. But we also have no reason to think that the engineers currently making plans for the 150+ canyons in the city of San Diego don’t know, or love, our canyon like we do. So the most alarming thing we heard at the meeting was that public consultation had been waived for storm drain replacement. It sounds like the city’s plan is that they will decide what kind of pipes to put in the canyon and how to install them, and we will be expected to put up with it. 

Standing by the wall in this very warm, very crowded room, I worried that these new laws that streamlined building by cutting public consultation sounded a lot like they were inspired by a book I’ve spent a lot of time defending over the past year: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I’m not going to summarize it here—if you want that, I recommend Sammy Roth’s self-described “lukewarm take” on Substack and Ezra Klein’s New York Times piece reflecting on “abundance discourse”, a growing puddle of spilled internet ink only incidentally connected to the book itself. The book covers a lot of ground, but this paragraph from the book gives a pretty good summary of its argument:

Liberals have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers. That may have made sense in a past era, but given the problems we face now, it is a mistake. Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers (p. 128).

In interviews, Klein has made the pithier point that progressives need to stop celebrating when a bill passes, and start celebrating when the infrastructure promised by the bill actually gets built. This insight has transformed how I think about policy. 

One argument in the book has got a lot of attention is that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has been weaponized repeatedly as a tool to slow down infrastructure that anybody doesn’t want, which is particularly frustrating if that infrastructure is, say, a wind farm. As Klein and Thompson write, “It is not always clear how to strike the right balance, but a balance that does not allow us to meet our climate goals has to be the wrong one.”

This is easy to nod along to in a book, but it landed differently when I learned, in the meeting, that the city seems to have waived CEQA for storm drain replacement. As I listened, I was mulling over whether I will be handcuffing myself to a bulldozer this year. It occurred to me later on that I was feeling a lot like Mabel Tanaka in Hoppers.²

In short, it sucks to find out that people you don’t know are invested with the authority to literally tear up the soil of a canyon you love, and you don’t get a say. 

The feeling in my gut during this meeting made me think about a book I read this summer, Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth. I bought it in London because Weymouth follows the path of a wolf that walked through the alps from Slovenia to Northern Italy. I was going to the alps, and I like wolves, so it seemed like it would be a fun read. 

I’m glad I read it, but it was not “fun”. Weymouth walked the whole route, and wherever he went he found people to talk to about how they felt about the return of wolves to Europe—ecologically, one of the few success stories of my lifetime. 

Overwhelmingly, the people he talked to, farmers and shepherds—hated the wolves. More than that, they hated the EU for saying they weren’t allowed to shoot them. And wherever he went, Weymouth found far right politicians capitalizing on this resentment to build political power. 

It’s a pretty big problem that across Europe, the people whose livelihoods are most deeply and obviously connected to the local ecology are, for the most part, disgusted by the environmental legislation that protects wolves. 

I understood where these farmers and shepherds were coming from when I read the book. But sitting in that rec center, I really understood where they were coming from. 

This is why I said at the start that there’s no more important political principle than “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.” If policy is something done TO ordinary people rather than done WITH us, we will always be heading towards a breaking point. One of my biggest fears is that this top-down approach is the default everywhere, from San Diego to the EU, and we are all heading towards our own breaking points across the world. 

Notes:

1. Until today I thought W. Edwards Deming said this, but appears to have been coined by Glenn Martin, founder of Just Leadership USA. 

2. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do yourself a favor and watch Hoppers. It’s a delight. Sammy Roth also wrote about it.