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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

It makes a lot more sense when you realize the entire "environmental movement" arose as the justifiable/defensible workaround for the Fair Housing Act in 1968: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=environmentali...

e: I can't get the direct link to work properly, but press the blue "Search lots of books" button and it will work.

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Linking to a ngrams graph that shows "environmentalism" graphed against "civil rights" as evidence that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for segregation is beyond flimsy. Surely this must be the arch example of correlation ≠ causation.

Of course there's so much more to it, but there isn't really a single source I can link you that makes this argument. One example I can easily show is the history of planned freeways in the Bay Area that were canceled due to environmental concerns. Take a look at what areas the canceled freeways would have connected, then take a look at the demographics of those areas. Notice in particular how no freeway (or rail!) connection to the Golden Gate was ever allowed, since that would have connected Marin to the Bay Area megalopolis.

https://www.kurumi.com/roads/3di/sanfran.html

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea

Robert Moses was criticized for doing similar things in New York City (making overpasses too low so buses couldn't go through, etc). Have you read The Power Broker by Robert Caro?

Yep, I have. I'm not saying freeways would be all roses, but I generally believe that connecting people can only be an overall good thing. It's absolutely true that viaduct structures, for example, are visible separations between low-lying neighborhoods, but they weren't intended to stay low-lying neighborhoods. The original planning documents for e.g. the Embarcadero Freeway talk about the proposed developments that would complement it.

I also think the common framing as freeways "cutting a path through neighborhoods" is exactly the wrong way to look at it. San Francisco's, for example, were based on this 1935 traffic study. The whole point was to get already-existing traffic up off the streets and keep neighborhoods livable: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5409261018/in/album-...

There's (unfortunately) a real-world example I can point to showing this still holds up in the 21st Century. The northernmost part of the Central Freeway carried more than 50% crosstown (non-neighborhood) traffic in San Francisco but was torn down in the very early 2000s and replaced with the horrible Octavia Blvd that keeps killing cyclists and has made neighborhood traffic worse in every way, even necessitating crosswalk closures. Here's the full study on before and after the "Freeway Removal" (now there's a dogwhistle for ya!) https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/Final%20Re...

"In the absence of meaningful improvements to travel improvements, the reduction in automobile capacity has not been accompanied by noticeable mode shift. Instead, the neighborhood has been challenged to effectively deal with high peak‐period traffic levels and resulting congestion"

The canceling of those planned freeways for environmental concerns is not problematic in itself - the failure to deliver the planned rail alternative is. [1]

1 - https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o.... (Proposed rail lines for BART, 1961)

Freeways vs rail is a false dichotomy. The best transit systems are multi-modal for different needs, and those things do serve different needs. What we're really talking about is establishing rights of way. Once you have those it's usually no harder (politically) to build one type of artery alongside the other, like how BART's Concord and Dublin lines were built in the medians of the existing CA-24 and I-580, respectively.

powerful forces aren't able to block decentralized developments dotting the country, but they're able to gather enough momentum to pass centralized and controversial regulations? that doesn't pass the smell test.

that said, CEQA challenges have become a de facto tool in the nimby arsenal in CA.

More like "forces seeking to block development lend their backing to environmentalists because they realize that they share some common ground" but I agree that the blanket characterization of environmentalism is an exaggeration.

A lot of local governments were overtaken by the anti-growth environmental crowd at the time. Marin County in particular had their 1968 growth plan revoked and a famously anti-growth plan replaced it in 1971:

http://www.sausalitohistoricalsociety.com/new-blog/2018/3/7/...

'The decisive blow against growth was initiated in 1971 with the issuance of a Marin Planning Department report that proposed preserving Marin's lands except along the Highway 101 corridor. Entitled "Can the Last Place Last?" the report took its theme from Lew Welch's 1969 poem "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings" The poem lamented the "hordes" that were "now piling up" and contained a refrain that captured perfectly the sentiment in Marin: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go."'

The city of Bolinas is notorious for vandalizing signs that point to it, to ensure outsiders can't find their way there. And they have a Bolinas Border Patrol, in a "ha, ha, only serious" kind of xenophobic way.

https://www.belle-aurore.com/mike/2013/05/bolinas-vigilante-...

yes, marin is a bastion of nimbyism (it's also quite pretty) but that's not the "entire environmental movement". the objection is to the exaggeration.

Fair, sorry for my histrionic wording. The "roots of the environmental movement" is more like what I'm getting at. Put it this way: I care about the environment more than ever but no longer consider myself an Environmentalist™ after learning more of its history :)

no worries, labels like "environmentalist" don't matter nearly as much as intent and action.

In 1968 the number of books on 'environment movement' here rockets up. It will be more compelling if there is a link between events related to housing regulations and the other massive upswing in 1985, and then the downswing in 1997.

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