The 70s Push Back
The Culture of Constraint was around long before Earth Day.
April 1970. I’m walking along one of those shallow, sandy rivers that flow from the Rockies across the Great Plains. I smell my destination before I see it; the outfall from the packing plant, the place where the mud-brown water turns bright blood red. I snap photos and trudge back to my ancient Chevy truck. I will get the film developed before the teach-in at our community college on the 22nd.
55 years later, I’m on the same path (though not the same river), and dismayed by a narrative that’s going around Substack and other media. I’ve touched on this in previous editions of The Practice of Community, but reading a recent newsletter made me realize that I needed to respond with some passion.
So today, after wrestling this essay through a bout of COVID (I hoped to have it posted days ago), I am here to take exception to the notion that the environmental awakening of the early 1970s was the beginning of a “politics of constraint.” That’s what Teles, Dagan, and Meyers contend in a May 1 edition of hypertext. A Burke and Barnes essay posted the same day expands on their claim.
I’m speaking out to everyone, but with a specific audience in mind. I’m impressed with the enthusiasm and insight of the younger writers who are addressing the health of cities and housing on Substack. I also want to have a word with the green energy advocates who seek to hasten (or end) the environmental review of installations like major transmission lines or lithium mines. I believe it is my role as an elder to offer a different story about how we arrived at this conversation in 2025. It’s a story that, if my reading is representative, is harder to find. Here we go.
The 1970s were a time when legislation – much of which had been debated since the mid-1960s (1) - backed by a loose movement of college kids and professors, rod-and-gun conservationists, birders (we called them “bird watchers” back then), garden clubs, farmers who understood themselves as stewards, and a Congress that was sympathetic on both sides of the aisle (unbelievable, huh?) took the blood out of that river.
Yes, there was a temporary constraint on the production of hot dogs. But closing that outfall was a liberation for any kid who walks that riverbank today. And for the eagles who have returned.
We have cleaner waterways than we had in 1970, and more abundant wildlife. We have better opportunities to enjoy those resources. The flames that made the Cuyahoga River infamous were extinguished (again, the river burned regularly back then) in 1969. It would soon become the centerpiece of a national park that hosted more than 300,000 visits last year. And how about the other riverine greenways that grace so many cities? Few of those predate the 70s. I could continue. I could say there’s less lead in the air, that acid rain has been suppressed and lakes in the Adirondacks are recovering, that wolves have returned to Yellowstone.
So, sorry about your claim, gentlemen, but the record shows that those of us who began our work in 1970 did not author a culture of constraint. We have restored. We have built (though I would rather say, cultivated or nurtured) healthier landscapes.
It may take an informed eye to see “building” in an empty aspen and sagebrush meadow. But that meadow is on the edge of a national park where 1,000 condominiums were going to go up (2). It’s easier to see building along a streamside trail filled with happy people and dogs that seems to have been there forever (but wasn’t).
It is true that we haven’t done much to enable the flying cars and spindly skyscrapers featured in the 1960s cartoon, The Jetsons, and again (this is amazing to me) a few mornings ago in a “let’s just build it” themed newsletter, another essay that touted nuclear power, without once mentioning the word “waste.”
Those of us who got started in the 1970s have restored and built things that serve us all. Those public goods are hard to monetize. They’re gifts to our own delight, to our nonhuman relatives, and to the future. That is hard to understand for those who measure the quality of life in profits. And their frustration has popped like an ugly pimple in the Trump regime. But the culture of [at least perceived] constraint was established long before Earth Day. It was there in the 1960s to hound Rachel Carson. It opposed the New Deal. TR dealt with it when he established the National Forests.
The current version of the culture of constraint is well-explained by another edition of hyper text (they should give me a commission) which points out that procedural objection to projects has become an industry, an enterprise driven not as much by a drive to build, as by the desire to minimize risk.
“Procedural fetishism,” to borrow another term from the hyper text essays was waiting to pounce on the legislation of the early ‘70s. It is embedded in an American legal system that assumes we are all adversaries.
That’s not a great starting place for anyone who wants to produce public goods, and it wasn’t long after the first Earth Day (1974, for me), that we began exploring mediation and collaborative strategies. We also tried market-based strategies. All those have worked at times, but as long as the underlying narrative of how we resolve issues is one of dominance, not of partnership, the procedural tangle is inevitable.
Whenever (there have been notable exceptions, but this rule holds) conservation even appears to be succeeding, someone who expects to turn a profit will litigate or lobby (or both) to undercut it. Agencies anticipate the lawsuits and shifting policies, which slows them down. Those advocating for the public good are compelled to respond or surrender. Time marches on, polarization with it.
Now the Trump regime (abetted by earnest reformers, who should be asking themselves what they’re enabling) would suppress all conversations about what should be built. How long do you think it will be before the blood is back in the river?
The message coming from 1970 has never been that we need more constraints. It is that we need to restore health. It is that we need to build wisely, starting with what serves everyone. If all we want, for example, is to shelter folks, we could set up an abundance of yurts or travel trailers PDQ.
That’s not what people are asking for though. Folks want housing, yes, but in a place from which it’s a safe, pleasant walk to a corner store or café. Which is to say, we want the framework of community. To provide that – the ultimate public good – we must proactively nurture it.
We must also push back on narratives that are too simple. I’m done with that task for today. But I’ll be back soon, and instead of starting with a walk along a Great Plains river 55 years ago, I’ll tell you what I saw when landing at a particular airport out West last week.
(1) You can find some of this history in Douglas Brinkley’s Silent Spring Revolution.
(2) Just to be clear for all you housing advocates, not one of those thousand units would have been affordable to anyone who worked there. They were intended as vacation rentals. The people who changed the sheets would have had to drive in from trailer parks miles away.
Did the Culture of Constraint begin with the alleged closing of the frontier?
Airbnb and plastics are destroying the world.