SPEAKER_01: If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.
SPEAKER_01: CBS reports, the silent spring of Rachel Carson.
SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Jerusalem Demsis.
SPEAKER_04: I'm Matthew Glacius.
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the argument.
SPEAKER_02: Uh this week, Matt and I read Silent Spring, a book that launched the modern environmental movement, and I liked it way more than I thought I was going to.
SPEAKER_04: Because you hate nature animals?
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely hate nature.
SPEAKER_02: I I mean I hate I mean, in general, like I, as someone who's written a lot about housing and the need to like build more housing and care a lot about transit, I'm an urbanist.
SPEAKER_02: I've been very frustrated by a lot of parts of the modern environmental movement that have been anti-modernity, anti-science in some respects.
SPEAKER_02: And I was expecting a lot more of that from Rachel Carson's book because of the movement she spawned.
SPEAKER_04: But I gotta say, I I mean you you flip this book open, or in my case, read it digitally.
SPEAKER_04: Um the very first page though is old and picture a cutesy old-time farm and like the chickens are clucking and like soon it's doomed.
SPEAKER_04: You know, and it it is it has this very like, you know, like the industrial era of Mordor is like, you know, despoiling the Shire.
SPEAKER_04: And I was like, all right, like this is exactly what aggravates me about these people.
SPEAKER_04: And it's in there.
SPEAKER_04: And then, but most of the book is actually pretty boring.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: It's like a lot of very um I don't want to say tedious, it's a lot of very specific information about specific instances in which insecticide was sprayed in some community, and then there was some negative consequences of spraying the insecticide.
SPEAKER_04: There's a little bit of herbicide spraying, a lot of insecticide spraying.
SPEAKER_04: And it's given its reputation, it's just kind of narrower than I thought it was going to be.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the book itself, so as Matt says, like, you know, it opens up with a sort of like fable about this like idyllic town, and um that chapter sort of ends, and this is also the um way that her famous New Yorker piece also starts off, which is what actually really I think most people probably read.
SPEAKER_02: I don't think people really read this book, um, because of how dense it is.
SPEAKER_02: But like the entire book is really like a scientist, like piece-by-piece case study of like what she is witnessing.
SPEAKER_02: And she's a scientist, so that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02: But the way that people talk about Silent Spring now, I mean, even like again, this cover, the classic that launched the in modern environment the or the environmental movement.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I really expected it to be sort of this diatribe against modernity and like these really far out there claims, but in reality, it just seems like largely correct, a bunch of like statements that follow each other that are all difficult to really go with.
SPEAKER_04: I I guess to to pull this out, right?
SPEAKER_04: Um she the the story she tells, which I I mean I think is historically correct, is that there was a lot of development in the chemical industry associated with the world wars.
SPEAKER_04: Um, and then after the wars, there was a push to find civilian uses for these kinds of chemicals.
SPEAKER_04: And one of the main things that they discovered was that certain uh neurotoxic agents that were, you know, related to things that were used in chemical warfare in World War I could be used in sort of attenuated forms or lower doses to kill insects.
SPEAKER_04: Uh, because insects are small uh compared to mammals.
SPEAKER_04: They have um, they like absorb uh material uh from the environment through their skin, things like that.
SPEAKER_04: So you can spray crops with these various different things.
SPEAKER_04: DDT is sort of the headline chemical, um, and you can kill a lot of bugs this way.
SPEAKER_04: Um and the point of the book, I guess, is that these small doses of insecticide damage birds, mammals, and humans downstream in ways that are not being accounted for correctly by the industry, the farmers, and government officials.
SPEAKER_02: And I think the context here is just that there actually really wasn't widespread awareness that there was potential damage, um, like side effects of widespread spray.
SPEAKER_02: Like right now I'm kind of like I went into this book sort of like, well, yeah, of course, duh.
SPEAKER_02: Like there might be like some knock-on effects of spraying shit into the environment.
SPEAKER_02: But like my awareness of that is largely downstream of like work by Carson to like point out that this was the case.
SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of like just denialism, both from the chemical industry, but also um, you know, regulators, that there was like any potential risk whatsoever to wildlife and humans, et cetera.
SPEAKER_02: I think one thing, because we're being like pretty complimentary at this point, um, that I'll point out is that the book often like quickly slides between various types of harm in ways that I find like very persuasive but somewhat like deceptive from like a more critical point of view.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes she's talking about like, oh, like this is hurting birds.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes she's like, oh wow, like doesn't it like look ugly?
SPEAKER_02: Isn't there like an aesthetic loss because now the beautiful trees and like the verdant grasses are like gone?
SPEAKER_02: And then sometimes it's like, well, also maybe it causes cancer.
SPEAKER_02: And also maybe it doesn't work because um uh, you know, uh the insects are becoming adaptive and they're now becoming resistant to the spraying that we're doing.
SPEAKER_02: And you know, it's fine to like make all of these specific individual claims, but I think at its core, a lot of people are mostly concerned about the impact to human like life and well-being.
SPEAKER_02: And most of the evidence really isn't strongest there.
SPEAKER_02: Like the evidence is mostly really strong in the it's hurting the ecosystem, this could eventually have knock-on effects to hurt humans, but like largely, you know, seems like it hurts some birds.
SPEAKER_02: The best evidence that it hurts humans seems to be in like very specific cases where there are accidents when workers are using the chemicals improperly, or, you know, you know, or they are just like there's like an accident happens while they're working.
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I I think it's like, you know, Carson herself dies like shortly after this book is published of of breast cancer.
SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that, you know, that had like a really, really big impact itself on people's understanding of this.
SPEAKER_02: Like there's no obviously it's very difficult to link where someone got cancer from.
SPEAKER_02: Like, was it a result of the chemical environment she was in?
SPEAKER_02: And like, we don't know, like that's not true.
SPEAKER_02: But um uh, you know, that that is something that many people do believe now.
SPEAKER_02: And I think that like that link to like this is really hurting humans is like both like the least well supported by the evidence, but the most persuasive element of the whole book.
SPEAKER_04: Well, I mean, that's what I want to say.
SPEAKER_04: One thing about this book is that it doesn't have a lot of really clear policy prescriptions, you know, and she leans at the end a lot on the argument that the spraying literally doesn't work, that insects are developing resistance.
SPEAKER_04: Um, and so one thing, when when I was um a young blogger uh in the mid-oughts, there was a lot of discourse um that was being put forward by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and some other sort of conservative uh organizations.
SPEAKER_04: And they wanted to make people understand that Rachel Carson and her stigmatization of DDT was responsible for the deaths of millions of people uh by malaria in in the third world.
SPEAKER_04: So I I was familiar with that discourse at that time, and it is both true that human deaths due to malaria is, in my opinion, a much bigger problem than uh eggshell thinning among bald eagles, which was the sort of signature critique of DDT.
SPEAKER_04: But actually, DDT resistance among mosquitoes became a huge problem by 1970.
SPEAKER_04: And the main reason DDT was sprayed out, large-scale DDT spraying, was phased out, wasn't actually to save the bald eagles.
SPEAKER_04: It was because it wasn't working anymore.
SPEAKER_04: And that so both, I think there's an unfair attack on Carson that was mounted about this, but also that Carson herself is not being very clear about what she's saying at times.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that's true.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, I think that there are two claims, policy-relevant claims that she's making.
SPEAKER_02: One is that there are more targeted mechanisms one we could use, right?
SPEAKER_02: She talks over and over again about how you don't have to do this, like, like they were literally just like spraying large scale over towns.
SPEAKER_02: Like there's this one anecdote that she tells, which I didn't personally look into the veracity of our fact tracker will let me know if it's wrong.
SPEAKER_02: But like we're we're like literally they're just there are these low-flying aircraft that they're just dropping all across like various parts of this of this town without like telling anyone.
SPEAKER_02: So people like kind of freak out.
SPEAKER_02: They're like, why are these planes like really low over the whatever?
SPEAKER_02: And so it's like that sort of thing, like it's not like targeted at all.
SPEAKER_02: And like then she puts points to evidence that there's ways to like target the spraying on specific crops that you're trying to actually, or the specific weeds or herbs that you're trying to actually kill, or the places where you really don't want insects because it's gonna hurt agriculture or whatever it is.
SPEAKER_02: The second policy-relevant claim she makes is that it's and I find this one actually really revealing, is that you could actually introduce other natural, natural elements uh into the ecosystem.
SPEAKER_02: So for instance, like inse- uh uh uh bugs that would eat the insects or moths that would eat the insects or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Um, I find this super interesting because the larger claim that she has, right, is that like the ecological claim she's making is that there's like some sort of like uh n uh natural equilibrium that a uh biosystem will like eventually reach if you just like let it be the way it's supposed to be.
SPEAKER_02: I'm doing air quotes for our contrary listeners.
SPEAKER_04: That's what I mean, though.
SPEAKER_04: I I feel like a lot of the book is this kind of mott and bailey, right?
SPEAKER_04: Where I always forget which one is the mott and which one is the bailey.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
SPEAKER_04: Um but I think the mott is that the pesticide industry is out of control, right?
SPEAKER_04: That there are health risks associated with pesticides, and the regulators are not taking those risks seriously at all.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And she absolutely convinced me of that.
SPEAKER_04: Like we need to think more clearly about what is happening and why and for what benefit and at what cost.
SPEAKER_04: But then there's this bailey, which is that, you know, there's a natural balance in the ecosystem, there's the old ways, and that, you know, these chemical disruptors are toying with, you know, it reminds me of like um, you know, the the implicit politics of Frankenstein, right?
SPEAKER_04: That like we've messed with forces that are beyond our control, and there's going to be hell to pay for this, right?
SPEAKER_04: And notably, right, the cover of the book, if you hold it up, right?
SPEAKER_04: So it's not like a sick person, it's a bird.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Right.
SPEAKER_04: And a question that, you know, if I could resurrect her or would have for you or for anybody, is like insofar as there is a balance between producing food for the rapidly growing human population of the second half of the 20th century and birds, like, shouldn't we side with the people?
SPEAKER_02: I agree that I mean, this is again why I expected not to like this book, because I sort of assumed that it was gonna come much more, like much harder on this question.
SPEAKER_02: Like, obviously, I don't care about humans as much as I care about like general wildlife.
SPEAKER_02: She doesn't, I mean, just like stick to the text for like, she doesn't say any of that.
SPEAKER_02: Like, there's like implications, and I think that you raising Frankenstein is really interesting because like in the intro, I don't know if you did you read the Linda Lear intro?
SPEAKER_04: I know, I might I I have a different edition.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so she writes about her her biography that she had read widely in the English romantic tradition and had articulated a personal sense of mission, her quote, vision splendid.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like, the English romantic tradition, like, and I I've like gotten like weirdly into this recently of like reading about their like a bunch of romantic books, but like romanticism is a reaction to the Enlightenment movement, and like not to make everything about this, but in many ways, all debates are sort of like between like romantic sensibilities and enlightenment sensibilities if you're like super reductive about it.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like, what you're witnessing here is like the post-war, like the World War moment was this like real veneration of science, of scientific progress, our ability to like, I mean, even the atom bomb is like kind of like the moment where we're like, oh shit, like have we gone too far here?
SPEAKER_02: And like she's obviously coming at the tail end of this, and so much of her book is a romantic backlash to this moment, this to modernity in general.
SPEAKER_02: And she does this in like various ways, right?
SPEAKER_02: Like, it's not just this um question here where she is really kind of against like progress, but throughout the book, she really articulates a frustration with um hubris of man's ability to dominate nature, right?
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's how she actually ends the book, is that she specifically says the quote, control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it's supposed when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.
SPEAKER_02: And it's like to me, as someone who like finds myself more on like obviously the enlightenment side of these debates, like I find her affect to be like wrong and like not properly progress-oriented or human-focused or censor or centered.
SPEAKER_02: But I do think that like in the moment, this was probably like a correct counterbalance to like a culture of science that had gotten way ahead of its ability to um to care for the the the the um you know negative externalities of progress.
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Well, what's interesting, so she dies in 1964.
SPEAKER_04: The book comes at what, 62?
SPEAKER_04: CBS does a huge hour-long documentary based on this in 1963, at a time when big three, you know, m like a third of Americans would actually watch an hour-long documentary.
SPEAKER_04: And and she dies.
SPEAKER_04: She dies really fast.
SPEAKER_04: So we don't we don't know like what she would have said about things that happened later in life.
SPEAKER_04: And, you know, a a question that we can have is, you know, do things that we think happen later in time represent an inappropriate reading of these ideas, or are the ideas like present within the text all along?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: It does seem to me that the like she absolutely convinces me that there is too much insecticide spraying, and that in particular that DDT is actually not a good way to kill mosquitoes.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And clearly, right, in the cost-benefit calculus, uh, if the point of broad DDT spraying is to prevent disease-bearing mosquitoes, but it doesn't work, like then there's no good reason to do it.
SPEAKER_04: But uh it seems to me like that it's a it's a correct reading of that that lay, you know, we we're not doing book club on the population bomb.
SPEAKER_04: But that the the line between those books uh is quite clear and quite direct.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, she's not like really going out of her way to say, I just have a narrow technical critique of these pesticides.
SPEAKER_04: She does keep coming back to the idea of the like harmonic balance of nature that is being uh disturbed and distended here.
SPEAKER_04: And it's the moments where she breaks that frame that are fascinating.
SPEAKER_04: Like she has this thing about New World screw worms that I found to be like out of step with the rest of the book.
SPEAKER_04: This is uh some kind of bug.
SPEAKER_04: It lays uh larvae in wounds uh on the external, you know, on the skin of cattle and livestock, things like this.
SPEAKER_04: It's apparently like a really agonizing death, uh, one of the most like horrible ways to go, and also is costly to farmers and ranchers.
SPEAKER_04: So originally they wanted to spray against the New World screw worm, um, but they decided actually not to do this because there aren't that many New World screw worms.
SPEAKER_04: It's just not that thick on the ground.
SPEAKER_04: It wasn't a good way to do it.
SPEAKER_04: So people came up with this other idea, which was we could irradiate male screw worms raised in captivity, and then that will sterilize them.
SPEAKER_04: And then you'll just drop huge quantities of sterilized male screw worms on the area.
SPEAKER_04: They will impregnate uh the female screw worms, and then they will lay like dud eggs, and the whole thing will wipe out.
SPEAKER_04: She says they did this in Florida and it worked, they extended it to Georgia and it works.
SPEAKER_04: And she says, like, maybe this could be a promising model that we could expand, but it would be really hard because it might be reinfected from Texas.
SPEAKER_04: Now, in the real world, we know they not only took this, they took this as far west as Texas, they took this down into Mexico, they took it all the way across Central America.
SPEAKER_04: And there is like every, I don't know if it's once a year, once a month or something, but like there's a US government-funded effort ongoing in Panama to like bomb the world with irradiated male New World screw worms and prevent the parasite from crossing back into Central America.
SPEAKER_04: So this is like an incredible triumph of science and modernity, right?
SPEAKER_04: And if if that was the main theme of the book, I would say like this is the greatest book I've ever read.
SPEAKER_04: And every environmentalist needs to go back to the original text and be like, this is a book about not being idiots and not being like slaves to the interest group politics of the chemistry industry, and like looking capaciously at what we can do with science and reason to solve these problems.
SPEAKER_04: But that like that that screwed thing is in the book, but it's not what the book is.
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02: I actually find I've had a very different reading than you.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, first of all, it's good to it's important to note that um Rachel Carson is a scientist.
SPEAKER_02: So she is, she's a master's degree, she's a biologist, because uh, and and we'll get into this later because that's the that's the lady science.
SPEAKER_02: They let the women do biology, they didn't like them in chemistry or physics or anything like that.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, she's a scientist.
SPEAKER_02: She works in the federal government.
SPEAKER_02: Um she's like kind of doing like she's the head of all of the Department of Uh uh Interior's, like editorial products, et cetera.
SPEAKER_02: And she's writing editing and she's coming across all of these findings that like there are these knock-on effects, or are there are in like specific places all across the country or across the world, places where DDT or other um insecides or herbicides are causing problems.
SPEAKER_02: And while I agree there's like the like throughout her book, there's like this kind of like romantic sensibility that's that that exists there, she does repeatedly go out of her way to say there are techniques that you can use to address this that are not getting rid of DDT.
SPEAKER_02: She like never actually says we should not use insecticides, we should not use herbicides.
SPEAKER_02: And like she suggests even bringing uh different kinds of like moths or whatever into the ecosystems, just like you said.
SPEAKER_02: And so I my reading of it is like actually, I do find this a very persuasive way for environmentalists to go back to like, I actually think that like if environmentalists today, instead of just like, you know, like uh trying to get a lot of like really out there attention by, I don't know, stopping traffic or spraying paint on c uh, you know, priceless artifacts in museums, um, we're instead like doing really, really careful analysis of ways that like damage to the environment was creating harm for things that we care about life, health, aesthetics, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_02: Like I find that like really, really persuasive.
SPEAKER_02: And one thing to note is part of the reason why Carson is so influential is because the reaction to her was so unhinged.
SPEAKER_02: Like the I think that like this is a very much like the like one of the first like stry sand moments of like the modern era, where like the chemical industry, where they find this book, they're like gonna sue her publisher for libel, they're going after her, they're saying all this crazy stuff about her.
SPEAKER_02: The CBS hour-long special they do, it's kind of like a documentary.
SPEAKER_02: They interview her, they also interview this like, you know, industry kind of scientist.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, he's like, he's like a real scientist, he's not just like a paid chill, but he's like in a lab coat.
SPEAKER_02: He's like, obviously, like he's just like this man, he's like sci, he's like a PhD, et cetera.
SPEAKER_02: Like, she wasn't a PhD.
SPEAKER_02: Um, and like she comes off like, I didn't, I couldn't find the whole thing online.
SPEAKER_02: I watched like parts and clips of it, but she's like really, really chill.
SPEAKER_02: She's just like, you know, like, here is the science that I found.
SPEAKER_04: Mari Weiss, if you're out there, put this, put this back on CBS.
SPEAKER_02: But it's just like, to me, I'm like watching it, like she just seems so credible immediately.
SPEAKER_02: This guy seems like a little bit angry.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't know if this is true contemporaneously, but the way that it's read from like more modern people who are obviously more biased in Carson's direction, is that he was just like, he was like this man like yelling about how she was gonna destroy all human progress.
SPEAKER_02: And like to me, like if we're talking about uh, you know, enlightenment sensibilities, like she has way more of like an enlightenment rational sensibility than he does throughout the entire thing.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, so environmentalists in general.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Like, what's what's your beef?
SPEAKER_04: What's what's the problem?
SPEAKER_04: Because you sort of reference this.
SPEAKER_04: You reference like throwing paint and other stuff like that, but but not but not just on a tactical.
SPEAKER_02: So I came up through environmental, like climate movement stuff.
SPEAKER_02: Like my first um one of my early internships was at the climate action campaign when I was still in college.
SPEAKER_02: I lived in, I was in DC for the summer and I, you know, worked on a climate action campaign, which was the big um uh you know table of all the big environmental groups that was trying to help pass the Clean Power Plan, which was Barack Obama's signature climate regulation to regulate existing point source pollution uh uh uh and you know, like coal on existing coal plants and power plants.
SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, like I was like like many people of my generation were like very, very concerned about climate change.
SPEAKER_02: I see it as like an existential threat for um uh for humans.
SPEAKER_02: I see it as a as a concern for health and for uh you know ecosystems, but also just like for people to be able to live like lives like that they want to and for human progress.
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, uh that's where I come out of.
SPEAKER_02: And then um, you know, over the course of you know the past like, you know, decade and a half, um realizing how few groups in the environmental movement are actually like just focused on doing like cost benefit analysis of various policies to figure out how can we actually reduce.
SPEAKER_02: Reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that is being emitted, and instead are like doing kind of really unproductive things, whether they're focusing, I mean you talk about all the time, like you know, straw bands or whatever, but also like focusing on like non-environmental or non-climate change aspects of environmentalism, which is like to me like very anti-progress.
SPEAKER_02: So obviously I come out of housing, and like to me, one of the biggest things that you can do to reduce emissions in the Western world at least, is that you live in more dense areas.
SPEAKER_02: So you build a lot more housing in center cities, you build great transportation networks, and then you find over and over again these green groups are the ones who are the problem in actually developing in a quote unquote green way.
SPEAKER_02: And I mean, I wrote this piece in The Atlantic years back about like this kind of like tension with environmentalism around like, well, real environmentalists would be really pro a lot of the scientific progress, a lot of this kind of modern uh modern building.
SPEAKER_02: And instead, they find themselves on the side of like this conservative views of the way that the world should look.
SPEAKER_02: And they're very anti-change and anti-progress.
SPEAKER_02: And so that's my beef with modern environmentalism, but like I'm like still like pro we should take on climate change.
SPEAKER_04: Like that's I guess I never really went back when I was more progressive, I was I was more of a like a like a labor guy.
SPEAKER_04: And I'm older than you.
SPEAKER_04: So this always used to be a fight that like the big factional fight inside the Democratic Party used to be, you know, there was a there was a famous thing from the Pacific Northwest in the 80s and 90s where environmentalists found a spotted owl, uh, which was allegedly like different from other owls and more special than these other owls.
SPEAKER_04: And the spotted owl's habitat was in these woodlands that were being used for logging.
SPEAKER_04: And so the Endangered Species Act was invoked to restrict logging in these forests.
SPEAKER_04: A lot of people lost their jobs.
SPEAKER_04: There was a lot of, you know, concern from working class people in Oregon about this.
SPEAKER_04: And part of what made the whole thing uh annoying to me is that the spotted owl, it wasn't like the unintended consequence of protecting the spotted owl was to shut down the logging industry.
SPEAKER_04: The spotted owl was a pretext for shutting down the logging industry, right?
SPEAKER_04: And there's a famous case of the snail darter, which is some kind of fish.
SPEAKER_04: And this was invoked to prevent a dam from being constructed that was going to provide, you know, like emission-free electricity to lots and lots of people.
SPEAKER_04: And again, there was a New York Times story about this recently, but like there is no such species.
SPEAKER_04: Like they they cooked it up in order to have a litigation hook to stop the dam.
SPEAKER_02: Well, to be fair, it's like what is a species is not like a thing that is naturally occurring in Australia.
SPEAKER_04: To me, though, this has always been the uh essence of the environmental movement is seeking pretexts to do things that are bad for humans in order to preserve nature.
SPEAKER_04: And so it's almost like now sometimes they hit on something.
SPEAKER_04: The spotted owl, I think, is real, the snail darter is fake, the neural.
SPEAKER_02: There is a fish.
SPEAKER_02: That's a real fish.
SPEAKER_04: Sure.
SPEAKER_02: But but the thing that happened here is that the Endangered Species Act, it like you, you if you if you can count something as being endangered, so like you basically like if you're trying to figure out whether an animal is like a new kind of species or just like the same fish, but it has different stripes.
SPEAKER_02: Like there are humans that come in very different shapes and sizes, but they're all human.
SPEAKER_04: But so like I could kill a million deer, right?
SPEAKER_04: And that's fine, because there's 10 million deer.
SPEAKER_04: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_04: But legally speaking.
SPEAKER_04: But if it turns out that it's like a special kind of deer, right?
SPEAKER_04: Like the purple toe deer, right.
SPEAKER_04: Then I can't even kill six of them because they're endangered.
SPEAKER_04: So there's this quest, though, for litigation hooks, like this snail darter.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Because you can stop the dam, because they're just against dams, right?
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But I think there's like this core thing, right, about like what is the environmental movement actually about is at the heart of what we're talking about here.
SPEAKER_02: So I think that there are many, many people within the environmental movement, many leaders who are like actually specifically concerned about climate change or wildlife preservation or you know, just natural beauty, and then there's like, you know, hunters and anglers that just like want to preserve their like wildlife for their, you know, sports purposes.
SPEAKER_04: Um can I I was just in a conversation about hunters and anglers yesterday, and I was pretending to know what an angler is.
SPEAKER_04: Does that just mean you fish?
SPEAKER_02: I thought so.
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: That's what I thought it was.
SPEAKER_02: Now I'm scared.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, so you're also faking.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a person who fishes with a rod and line for pleasure.
SPEAKER_02: That's what I thought it was, too.
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: I I yeah.
SPEAKER_04: That's to like distinguish you from like the bad fishermen who like the commercial crawlers with the biggest.
SPEAKER_02: Like the big nets, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Something that's definitely true, right?
SPEAKER_02: Is that like the environmental movement as a large-scale mass movement was really fueled by a lot of suburbanites who were anti-growth.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of great books about this.
SPEAKER_02: Lily Geismer's Don't Blame Us is uh a really great book about this in in in in the Boston context.
SPEAKER_02: But basically, this idea that, yeah, like there were these people who really cared about the environment, and then they needed to find a mass movement of people.
SPEAKER_02: And the people who were attracted to this were often suburbanites who had moved themselves in very quote-unquote anti-environmental ways to like suburbs of major cities for the first time in the post-war era, as these suburbs were being like literally created, and then were like frustrated that like there was more development happening because they wanted that green space, they wanted their lawns, they didn't want it to be endless suburbia and like they wanted the last house to be built to be like their house, you know?
SPEAKER_02: And this happens all the time.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, people go to Maine because they like nature.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And then other people want to come to Maine because they also like nature.
SPEAKER_04: But the people who already got there are like, no, I'm here and I like the I'm here to be near the forest.
SPEAKER_04: Like I cut down trees for my house, but you can't cut down trees for your house because I'm trying to be close to the trees.
SPEAKER_02: And this is like a core base of the environmental movement.
SPEAKER_02: And I don't think it like invalidates the fact that there are and I mean, this becomes politically relevant because if your base is not actually people who want to like live densely so as to prevent wildlife loss, but actually want to themselves have a like house in the suburbs, but no one else to, you actually become much more an anti-growth movement than in a pro-environment movement.
SPEAKER_02: And but again, like I think it's really important that it doesn't mean it actually invalidates the existence of these other people.
SPEAKER_02: Like, for instance, me and you have been like doing this Yimbi thing for a while, you've been doing it much longer than I have.
SPEAKER_02: Um, and like if like the Yimbi movement ends up like getting allies that like we ourselves are like, yeah, you just have to have allies in a movement in order to win factional battles in politics, but then those allies end up being like much more powerful than the people who originally cared about housing, and those people are actually, I don't know, secretly like pro-housing but hate immigrants or whatever, right?
SPEAKER_02: Like that's like not our fault.
SPEAKER_04: No, no, okay, but that's not what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_04: Like, I I feel a recurring conversation that I have with Democratic Party members of Congress about permitting reform negotiations is that they want to get to yes on an energy permitting reform deal.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And every once in a while you meet a member of Congress who has strong views on the merits of this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_04: But like the vast majority of them don't.
SPEAKER_04: And like they want to be for a bill that is an energy permitting reform bill.
SPEAKER_02: To make it easier to permit renewable energy mostly, but also they're okay with maybe a little bit of fossil fuels.
SPEAKER_04: Understanding that there will be some kind of deal, that it will facilitate renewables and will also do something for Republicans.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: But they want whatever the they don't care what the content of the deal is.
SPEAKER_04: They want at least some name-brand environmental groups to say that the deal is good.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Because they are not green fanatics who are like, I'll only do it if Greenpeace is for it.
SPEAKER_04: But they are not willing to buck the entirety of like EDF, NRDC, Sierra, et cetera.
SPEAKER_04: They need a split amongst the groups.
SPEAKER_04: But then they always tell me, you know, these groups are like they're way more reasonable than you think, Matt.
SPEAKER_04: Like they've cast aside all this, you know, cobwebs of the 1970s and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_04: And I just don't think that that is accurate.
SPEAKER_04: And like I don't mean to say that in a disparaging way, but I think this is a non-disparaging way to say you still have to.
SPEAKER_04: No, no, no, because what I'm trying to do in this is actually take seriously the claims of this movement and what its priorities are.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And it really is a movement, I think, that is about preserving nature from the encroachments of humanity.
SPEAKER_04: You know, she uses the term, this is outdated, she says man a lot, right?
SPEAKER_04: But but but man or humanity is an important concept, right?
SPEAKER_04: And this opposition between humanity and and nature is an important part of her schema.
SPEAKER_04: And the way that it arises, most specifically, I think, is not this stuff around suburbia has a, I think, an important technical aspect to it, right?
SPEAKER_04: And it's it's counterintuitive to people that your green lawn is like less eco-friendly than my row house block or or the apartment building that I grew up in.
SPEAKER_04: But it is really in the treatment of the third world, right?
SPEAKER_04: That climate change is real.
SPEAKER_04: This is real science.
SPEAKER_04: It is causing real harms to real human beings.
SPEAKER_04: Most of those harms are occurring in the tropics, both because it's hotter there already, so there's a bigger, like a baseline issue, and also because the people who live in the tropics are much poorer.
SPEAKER_04: So they have less air conditioning, they're more likely to be working outside, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_04: They can't build like Right.
SPEAKER_04: But uh the environmental movement is a million light years away from being a movement whose center value is about benefiting the human beings who live in the tropics.
SPEAKER_04: They're not like mixed on like housing stuff in the suburbs of Minneapolis, like conflicts, elements of hypocrisy, elements of coalitional dynamic, but on this like core question of like economic development in the third world, I think like there isn't a split, right?
SPEAKER_04: Like the view is that one of the worst things that has happened is that China and India have become less poor and that that has led to this acceleration of climate risk.
SPEAKER_04: And no, they don't frame it that way because that makes them sound terrible.
SPEAKER_04: But like they never, ever, ever say climate change is like the downside of a good thing.
SPEAKER_04: It's instead that's that's why there's all this apocalypticism.
SPEAKER_04: Like they want us to believe that it's like net, net worse that China has become richer than Nigeria.
SPEAKER_04: And like that's not true, but like but that's what they think.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, very authentically.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I am like half in agreement on what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02: And part of that is like you're reading this book, right?
SPEAKER_02: And this happens all the time with with environmentalists.
SPEAKER_02: Well, they're quote to you these studies about damages, they're like, wow, there's gonna be like$300 million in damages from wildfires.
SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be like 1 billion damages in flood insurance claims this year, or whatever, 3 trillion over the course of the next 10 years, whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Like these like massive, massive numbers.
SPEAKER_02: And I take that seriously.
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, let's do some cost-benefit analysis about stuff, right?
SPEAKER_02: Because if you are going to engage, and like Carson does this too in her book, where she points out like all the economic harm that can accrue to farmers or whoever if you allow this DDT to like destroy their crops or if they become like single crop farmers or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: And it's so clear to me that like the point of all of that is then to do like cost-benefit analysis about various policy interventions.
SPEAKER_02: Like, okay, so there are all these costs that come from, you know, allowing a coal plant to exist.
SPEAKER_02: And then there are all these c benefits that will accrue to the local community because in like sub-Saharan Africa, because they will now have energy.
SPEAKER_02: And like now, yeah, like let's figure out like which one of these things is bigger or smaller.
SPEAKER_02: And like it is also true that when you the the big question then becomes like, how are you discounting these things, right?
SPEAKER_02: Because yes, in right now today, it might be the case that like that coal plant is definitely higher benefits than costs.
SPEAKER_02: But then like, what about like the millions of people are gonna live in the future?
SPEAKER_02: And this is a big live debate under the Biden administration.
SPEAKER_02: They tried to um uh make the social cost of greenhouse gases uh uh large the change of formula such that it cared more about future people, um, and even like ourselves in the future.
SPEAKER_02: So, like us, like two years from now, like I should care about that person somewhat more than we do in our current in our exist pre-existing accounting.
SPEAKER_02: Um but like you're correct that like the modern environmental movement is not like a massive cost-benefit analysis movement.
SPEAKER_02: But I think that largely the reason for this is that they're a very local movement in vi like climate change is a global problem.
SPEAKER_02: And like you have to care about this, like how much someone emits in like Topeka, Kansas is like not really relevant if like 20 more people, therefore, are emitting in like Illinois.
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02: Like, so just like you have to care about these things at a global scale.
SPEAKER_02: But the environmental movement itself, because of the nature of you're observing things happening around you and you're like, that thing is bad, I want to stop it, and that's the the cause of that is like this other broader thing, means that like they don't really mostly pay attention to what's happening outside of the country at all, except very small groups.
SPEAKER_02: And so I think that like what ends up happening is like I don't think there's actually a viewpoint of most environmental groups in the United States about development in China.
SPEAKER_02: There's like a small number of environmentalists who are involved in that sort of thing through, you know, the uh World Bank where they're like, well, we don't want to finance any fossil fuel industry.
SPEAKER_02: I just think that like it's a little bit unfair to say like these knock-on effects of this ideology have produced something really bad, which I agree with are bad, and then blame it on people who are like, hey, I just like to see like snail darters.
SPEAKER_04: So I've I've heard this, you know, localism, globalism kind of characterization of the situation.
SPEAKER_04: And I think I think David Roberts, who I used to um used to work with at Vox, has often framed it this way in trying to sort of push environmentalism out of he's like a big like green yimby, you know, in part for this reason.
SPEAKER_04: I have doubts though, because I mean one thing that I fight about all the time with people these days is natural gas, right?
SPEAKER_04: And part of the deal with natural gas is that it is somewhat lower emissions from a greenhouse gas standpoint than coal, you know, on a per megawatt basis.
SPEAKER_04: But on a particular megawatt?
SPEAKER_04: Uh megawatt.
SPEAKER_04: Um, but on a particulate air pollution basis, it's dramatically cleaner, right?
SPEAKER_04: So in a theoretical world, where you have people who are just like very, very concerned about localist uh environmental issues, you would just be really, really enthusiastic about natural gas.
SPEAKER_04: Um it's it's displacing coal plants, um, it's doing an incredible amount to clean up localized air pollution.
SPEAKER_04: And I could see myself, I could see a world where the environmental movement was like so gung ho about natural gas that I'm like, hey guys, like you gotta think about the impact this is having on Bangladesh.
SPEAKER_04: But that's not at all their viewpoint about natural gas.
SPEAKER_04: Like they what I I I feel like I feel like what's actually goes on is a kind of um argument in the alternative where when something is, you know, when somebody is says, well, we should build utility-scale uh solar power plant, then the local environmental harm of cutting down the trees is very, very salient.
SPEAKER_04: But if somebody says, like, well, we should build natural gas pipelines to sort of drive coal off the grid, then it's like, oh no, guys, like we gotta think about the climate change, right?
SPEAKER_04: And it's just that because what's actually happening is that you have a movement that does not value like the energy at all.
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, but I think that what you're describing, and again, like the thing that's interesting here is that you and I are like largely aligned about the environmental movement being like, you know, um oppositional to um uh economic progress.
SPEAKER_02: But like I think the thing that you're describing here is largely that movements create heuristics, right?
SPEAKER_02: They're often not doing this very like it's very difficult to imagine a movement being very, very good at like uh dislineating between specific policy areas in a very granular way.
SPEAKER_02: Instead, they they come up with things like, okay, in general, coal plants are bad.
SPEAKER_02: In general, fossil fuel is really, really bad.
SPEAKER_02: And like obviously, like the Industrial Revolution happened and and created modernity and like the possibility for billions of people to live on this planet and you know not die of uh you know being too hot in the summer.
SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, like the fact that the environmental movement has these kind of overly simplistic heuristics around fossil fuels, it's still like largely correct.
SPEAKER_02: Like you should be broadly for more uh less carbon-intensive forms of energy.
SPEAKER_02: Like that is just broadly true.
SPEAKER_02: Now, in the specifics, the fact that like then every single thing that could potentially use carbon emissions or byproducts is then vilified to the point of like kind of ridiculousness is bad.
SPEAKER_02: But I think that like if we're talking about the specific core of what environmentalism is, movements just themselves, especially ones that are this large, are just going to have these like disparate elements in them.
SPEAKER_02: And like I agree that like the base of the environment- American environmental movement in particular is largely kind of like an anti-growth suburban who kind of just likes green stuff around them and therefore is like unconcerned about like the large long s uh large-scale impacts on Bangladesh or whatever, or China or what's going on in Nigeria.
SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah, like that's true.
SPEAKER_02: That's true of all American politics.
SPEAKER_04: Like there's not a there's just no care about like Yes, yes, but but this is why I I keep bringing up the fact that but then they do invoke climate change as this Trump card, as if they do care.
SPEAKER_04: But they just I think these are different people.
SPEAKER_04: I don't think that's well, okay.
SPEAKER_04: I guess I am gonna give Rachel Carson her due, which is to say that even though I believe, I don't really think that people who I disagree with are being untrue to the values of this book, because she does invoke these Capital R romantic uh conversations.
SPEAKER_04: There is also within this text the seeds of, I think, like a much better set of ideas.
SPEAKER_04: Like her discussion of the screw worm is genuinely visionary.
SPEAKER_04: Like she's saying this is a good idea and is a little skeptical that like we will ever bring it to the adequate scale.
SPEAKER_04: And like we did, yeah, right.
SPEAKER_04: And we ought to bring it to even bigger scale.
SPEAKER_04: And like she was right to champion this early on, as well as being, I mean, she was just literally correct about insecticide resistance to DDT.
SPEAKER_04: She was right that like neurotoxins damage mammals and birds as well as insects.
SPEAKER_04: Like, this is all literally true.
SPEAKER_04: And the the aspect of this book that is about finding better ways to address the insect problem is, I mean, it's both like has helped people with like insects and human health.
SPEAKER_04: But I also think it's like a is a very good way to think about these questions that if we have a concern that is valid, but also there's downsides to the human activity, like we we should try to think of a better way to do it, right?
SPEAKER_04: And that's that's eco-modernism in a way.
SPEAKER_04: And you could they could they could try to claim her as a progenitor there too.
SPEAKER_02: Um one thing I did want to talk about though is about the uh, you know, we're in a book club now, Matt.
SPEAKER_02: This is our second book.
SPEAKER_02: Our first book, if folks didn't hear it, was a was uh uh Betty Fridan's The Feminine Mystique, um, which is largely a book written what what year did that come out?
SPEAKER_04: Same 62, right?
SPEAKER_02: Same book.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's what, yeah, yeah, Mystique.
SPEAKER_02: Um 63.
unknown: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: So it comes out like immediately after this.
SPEAKER_02: The feminine mystique is a book about uh, you know, how women basically need to go back into the workforce, they need to like go get degrees and jobs and that they need to return to the um the values and uh life trajectories of the women from like the 1930s.
SPEAKER_02: And what's interesting is like that book is literally just talking about Rachel Carson.
SPEAKER_02: Like Rachel Carson in the uh 1920s goes to college, she become gets a master's degree, she wants to get a PhD, but the Great Depression happens and she has to like make money for her family, so chance of not doing that.
SPEAKER_02: But she's like a lifelong like worker and like public intellectual.
SPEAKER_02: She's writing in The New Yorker and like various other places.
SPEAKER_04: She's also cool as she's working for the fisheries service of the federal government, but like also just doing takes.
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_04: We used to have a country.
SPEAKER_02: And it's it's incredible because it's not just about her life that like Betty Fridden is literally saying, like, women in the post-war, like you should be more like Rachel Carson, but the reaction to her is so gendered.
SPEAKER_02: It's like kind of wild.
SPEAKER_02: Like it's the kind of thing that like you would not really expect now.
SPEAKER_02: But very much like she's talked about as this like kind of crazy woman who like, I mean, she doesn't have kids or she doesn't get married.
SPEAKER_02: There's some suspicion that she was maybe a lesbian she had or she's attracted to women, she had like some like long-term, like potentially romantic relationship with this woman she lived near for some time.
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_04: Boston marriage, as we used to say.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Um and uh I did not know that term, but um Google it.
SPEAKER_02: I'll claude later.
SPEAKER_02: Um uh but the reaction to her from the chemical industry is very much this woman does not have a PhD, she has no standing to be having this conversation.
SPEAKER_02: She does this like lady science, obviously, biology.
SPEAKER_02: And at the same time, too, she's like, there's all these things about how like maybe she's a communist sympathizer, maybe and she like hates modernity, and like they try to commission this book about how like, you know, like everyone in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Would die and be overrun by insects if she had her way.
SPEAKER_02: And what's so interesting, and what this really like made me think of, is like both you and I have written about this sort of like progressive omnicos, right?
SPEAKER_02: This idea that if you are in favor of one progressive viewpoint around environmentalism, you also have to be in favor of really radical viewpoints or progressive viewpoints on race and gender and uh, you know, economic populism or whatever it is, and like all these kinds of groups sort of hold the line.
SPEAKER_02: And in many ways, I think we underrate how much this was created by, I think, conservative backlash.
SPEAKER_02: So, like what you are witnessing here in the reaction to her book is they are actually stitching together all of these things for her.
SPEAKER_02: Like, out of the reaction to her, the feminists really come out in her defense.
SPEAKER_02: And feminist environmentalism becomes much more of a thing, this idea that, like, I mean, A, breast cancer, which was largely understudied in many ways, uh, you know, there's a lot of critiques that it was because scientists cared less about this um uh illness that affected women.
SPEAKER_02: Um, and that and the cancer being linked to DDTs, like it really created this sense of like, oh, like this male establishment of scientists like hates women, they hate the environment.
SPEAKER_02: Um she herself is obviously talking in a very like um concerned way about the way that men dominate, quote unquote, the environment.
SPEAKER_02: Man, she says, but like also she's she's gendering it to herself.
SPEAKER_02: And it made me really just think about like how much like the reaction to specific progressive viewpoints really created this necessity for this coalition to develop because they're like calling her a communist for like saying like DDT has like some problems and we should look into them.
SPEAKER_02: And she is like cast as like, okay, you must be a communist, you're a feminist, you didn't have children, you're like a spinster lady, you're like I mean, like literally, like just they are projecting all this onto her.
SPEAKER_02: Some of it might be true.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know, not really clear.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I don't think she was a communist.
SPEAKER_02: I think she was like actually notably like not a feminist or something.
SPEAKER_02: Um, it was the 1930s, 60s.
SPEAKER_02: So like it's funny, actually.
SPEAKER_04: So it just comes from uh uh it was the former agriculture secretary, uh Ezra Benson, writes a letter to Eisenhower in which he says that um she's unmarried, uh, but she she was pretty.
SPEAKER_04: And so he says, well, she's probably a communist.
SPEAKER_04: Um this is a more innocent time.
SPEAKER_04: And I think the the modern suspicion that she's probably a lesbian makes a little bit more sense um of the biographical facts.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, yes, that that is all true.
SPEAKER_04: Uh you see, you see, you see something of that.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm like, I'm I also think like don't take the bait, right?
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02: The thing that's like makes her so successful is that actually she was so specifically focused on this thing that was obviously true and was going to get well and was very persuasive about it.
SPEAKER_02: And like she wasn't super bombastic.
SPEAKER_02: She got on CBS and was like very like we'll play a clip of it or whatever, but she's like very muted and just discussing the fact.
SPEAKER_00: Now we know from experiments on animals that many of these chemicals accumulate in body tissues.
SPEAKER_00: We know that some are liver poisons, others are nerve poisons.
SPEAKER_00: And for still others, we have evidence that they produce mutations and in various other ways are exceedingly dangerous materials.
SPEAKER_04: Part of the breakdown that happens in the late 60s, right, is the institutional landscape is very different at the time that she's writing.
SPEAKER_04: You know, and so you have like the whole government is just organized in somewhat different ways back then.
SPEAKER_04: And it would have been possible in theory for the institutions that existed circa 1962 to say, you know what?
SPEAKER_04: Like a lot of information has come out over the past decade about the harms of insecticide spraying.
SPEAKER_04: And so we are going to pull back, right?
SPEAKER_04: We are going to because you you used to have, you know, these agriculture departments were essentially supervising like what you were allowed to do, like farm-wise.
SPEAKER_04: And they could have incorporated this critique into their practice, and they largely didn't, right?
SPEAKER_04: As as you're saying, there's this kind of uh massive resistance um coming from the industry, but also from the institutions that she was saying had been laxed.
SPEAKER_04: And so what happens is the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are coming together, is that like a different institutional setup is created.
SPEAKER_04: Instead of just saying the existing government departments that were supposed to be supervising this are gonna do a better job now.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we create these new departments that have this new mandate to kind of like swoop in, right?
SPEAKER_04: Like burst in like Kool-Aid Man style and say, like, you can't do that.
SPEAKER_04: And you also have mechanisms.
SPEAKER_04: There's a very brief discussion of this in the book, but I think it winds up being um really significant, where she's like, and who decided that we should be allowed to do this?
SPEAKER_04: And she phrases it a rhetorical question rather than like literally saying, like this one guy decided and that was a bad decision, and you should defeat him at the next election, and then a different guy will make a different decision, right?
SPEAKER_04: She puts forward the idea that letting the elected officials and their appointees make these decisions is like per se bad, and that there should be some kind of community veto power and like joint governance over this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_04: And and that's not like an idea that she elaborates on at great length or really thinks a lot about, but really was taken over, right?
SPEAKER_04: The the sort of first order legacy of this book is more restriction on chemical spraying, but the higher order uh restriction is a greatly expanded litigation frontier, right?
SPEAKER_04: Just like much more willingness to say I don't like the way the government officials came down on this, so I'm gonna go to court.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And I think that has been quite problematic for America, that we've become this vetoocracy in which everything, and including like, and and and this environmentalists are often being annoyed with that if you like want to put bike lanes on the street, now people can come sue you.
SPEAKER_04: And they'll say, Oh, you like didn't do enough Clean Air Act studies about whether bicycles are clearer than cars.
SPEAKER_04: And you'll show up and you'll be like, What the fuck are you talking about?
SPEAKER_04: Like it's a bicycle, but they'll be like, Oh, but if you make the road thinner, like the cars might idle more, so that might be more exact, you know, and it's like how how you could study these things to death, and nobody is empowered to just be like, you know what?
SPEAKER_04: Like I've read the research, I listened to people, I made my decision.
SPEAKER_04: If you don't like it, like beat me at the fucking election.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And like everyone's mad about this now.
SPEAKER_02: Um, but it is No, I mean, I do think this is the place where I'm the most like opposed to the parts of the book where she I mean, I couldn't find there's specific quotes in there about where she says something like, you know, um, who decided for all of us that this happened?
SPEAKER_02: Or she says, like, we were like never consulted.
SPEAKER_02: And it's like much more like a and there's even an anecdote about like an individual, like a homeowner who was never like notified or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: And like there's certain things which I think are true.
SPEAKER_02: Like I think if you're gonna do like mass spraying of something that could harm like dogs, like you should like tell everyone you're gonna do that thing, keep their dogs inside for the day.
SPEAKER_02: Like whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Like these things are like true that come out of this period about like put up public notification processes or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: But like you and I have been like railing against like public comment for like so long because like people hear that and they're like, oh yeah, like of course the people should get a chance to comment and be involved in the policy proceedings.
SPEAKER_02: And as like a principle, that's true.
SPEAKER_02: But then the question is like, how do you operationalize that, right?
SPEAKER_02: Because like, does that mean that like at any point when a congressperson is trying to like draft legislation that they're not allowed to do that without like inviting public comment into every single part of that process?
SPEAKER_02: Like, it would like literally make it impossible to do anything if we took that to like the most like extreme of the logic here, right?
SPEAKER_04: But like, also like I sincerely don't want to weigh in.
SPEAKER_04: I I don't want to research like which kind of insecticide treatments are appropriate and develop an informed opinion and weigh in.
SPEAKER_04: Right.
SPEAKER_04: It's like I agree, like it seemed like they were making a bad call before.
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
SPEAKER_04: But I would like elected officials to have a bureaucracy that tries to evaluate this evidence and make a good decision.
SPEAKER_04: I don't want like me and my friends and my random neighbors to just all be like weighing in on this.
SPEAKER_02: But I think to me too, this is like actually this is a really important point because I think there are a lot of like people who are in kind of the Yimbi abundance camp who have really conceptualized the environmental movement as like, oh, you know, it was a reaction to the big government era and now we're having a necessary counterreaction.
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, no, like we could have reacted to all of this appropriately by saying, okay, we need to A, update the science.
SPEAKER_02: We need to like care, like elected officials need to like put more pressure on agencies to pressure test the claims by these chemists and to make sure that like if they are okaying certain kind of chemicals to be used for like normal spraying purposes, that those are not hurting the food supply or giving people cancer.
SPEAKER_02: And like you could do that without like restructuring all of democracy such that like random individual people or groups can block our ability to do whether it's bike lanes, whether it's apartment buildings, whether it's uh transmission lines, whether it's solar panels that are happening.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I literally have visited sites of like proposed solar panels where I'm being told by environmentalist groups that like, oh, we're concerned about like the knock-on effects of other people of building these solar plant panels.
SPEAKER_02: I'll like go to this place.
SPEAKER_02: It's like the middle of fucking there's like no way it's effective.
SPEAKER_04: But also, I mean, to give to give the environmentalists their due, like the other thing that will happen is like you've seen this in New England, which is that oil companies will use an environmental impact litigation to say you can't build this transmission line from Canada because there's no you can't write a law that like says, come on, you're an oil company.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Like this is obviously bad faith, right?
SPEAKER_04: Like because they're part of the public.
SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
SPEAKER_04: Well, and you know, it's a it's a system of law.
SPEAKER_04: So anybody who wants to, the evil chemical.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, there was one, there was one where like a literal competitor, like an they're both renewable energy companies, and a literal competitor was like using the public input process to destroy their competitor's ability to cite their new energy project.
SPEAKER_02: It's just like, and obviously, if you're if your claim is that we need a public process by which like there's no way for like an agency to go, you're being ridiculous as a discretionary matter.
SPEAKER_02: I've heard you out, I don't agree.
SPEAKER_02: If you dis if you think I've done something horrible, gin up an election and so someone will fire me.
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, you could do that, but instead we've created a system which I and again, like um part of what's going on in this time period, right, is that you have the education of a like way more college-educated people are lay people.
SPEAKER_02: Like there's like more college-educed people in general.
SPEAKER_02: And so, like, they're looking around and they're like, oh, like the person author uh authorizing all of this is not more educated than me.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm a lawyer, I'm a scientist, I'm a doctor, I can like go now read the like, you know, documents that are created or the scientific studies.
SPEAKER_02: I was just talking to someone in Montgomery County, Maryland, who was like incensed by the the re boundary reanalysis that they're doing over there.
SPEAKER_02: Um, and she herself is an economist, so she's like looking at their studies and she's just like, this is so badly done, this is terribly done, whatever.
SPEAKER_02: And like before it was sort of like, well, I can't really evaluate what the government's doing.
SPEAKER_02: Now I can.
SPEAKER_02: You find out that maybe you're smarter than them, maybe they have made some mistakes, and that reduces your faith, right, in the governmental process, which I think is like a rational and reasonable way to react to it.
SPEAKER_02: But then what happens is like, okay, well, sometimes your objection is not actually, I think that you have not accurately uh assessed the benefits and and costs and come to a conclusion that is like defensible.
SPEAKER_02: It is, I don't want an apartment building near me, so I'm going to use my acumen and my like legal training to go up this process forever.
SPEAKER_02: And I think that like it becomes like very, very difficult because right now, I mean, when you're reading this book, and I think anyone, I mean, most people are sort of just like, yeah, of course she was just totally correct.
SPEAKER_02: And that that ends up like validating this entire new system of like participatory democracy that actually difficult to become more environmentally conscious.
SPEAKER_04: There's a faux technical aspect to it.
SPEAKER_04: You know, so when when like school boundaries get redrawn in the District of Columbia, it's done sort of on the basis of technical considerations.
SPEAKER_04: Like they that's the the official document will like give some technical reasons about population growth and commuting logistics and blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_04: But there's just certain schools that people want their kids to be assigned to, yeah, and other schools that they don't want them to be assigned to.
SPEAKER_04: And if they don't get what they want, they complain.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And I always feel like it would be better to sort of admit that that's what is happening, and that the elected officials literally cannot make everybody happy because not everybody can be assigned to the one middle school that everybody wants to be assigned to.
SPEAKER_04: And so they are making a decision, and that they are in fact responsible for making the decision.
SPEAKER_04: That there's this bizarre school boundary gerrymandering to send uh people who live in Mount Pleasant uh to this one particular middle school west of Rock Creek Park, and it's just done that way because those people got access to that school a long time ago when the population was different and they don't want to give it up.
SPEAKER_04: And the city council is deferring to them out of status quo bias and like there is no reason.
SPEAKER_04: But instead, you have to go through a lot of uh BS around some of this stuff because sometimes you just face trade-offs like between the birds and the farmers.
SPEAKER_04: And sometimes there's a technical problem and the thing the farmers are trying to do won't work.
SPEAKER_04: But sometimes what the farmers want is just bad for the birds.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And what the Audubon Society wants is just bad for farmers.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And like that's why we have democracy.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's like a lot of trade-off denialism, I think, where I mean, this is part of what I think when I was um, you know, like, because uh, you know, when when I was like really in in uh involved in environmental activism before I became a journalist, just like there's a lot of messaging to make it seem like there's actually like no harm being accrued to anyone else.
SPEAKER_02: So like this idea that like, oh, renewables are cheaper, right?
SPEAKER_02: Which which I'm like very specific like metrics is like true.
SPEAKER_02: Like it is the the cost of solar panel now is really low.
SPEAKER_02: But like when you take a look at the totality, like, okay, if you just like killed all fossil fuels and like Yeah, making fossil fuels illegal is not cheaper.
SPEAKER_04: It's not cheaper for then allowing them to continue.
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
SPEAKER_02: But I'll be like again, like the way that some of these things are like used is like, okay, like there's no trade-offs.
SPEAKER_02: It can be cheaper, it'll be better for labor because there are all these jobs that'll be created.
SPEAKER_02: And there are a lot of jobs created by electrification.
SPEAKER_02: A lot of those jobs are not like jobs that are easily unionized in the same way these like, you know, uh, you know, coal plants or or whatever could be.
SPEAKER_02: Um and they're also like often worse in some ways or more transient.
SPEAKER_02: Like if you're like installing rooftop solar, like it's not like a job where you go to the same place every day, you're like going to different places and eventually like you tap out the market.
SPEAKER_02: And then like, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02: Like there's not there's not like a ton of so many roofs.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they're also like not really uh high paying in the same way.
SPEAKER_02: And it's just like uh that you would want this, like, but there's all these like messages about like, oh, you know, definitely like you can just have like high-paying, great green jobs.
SPEAKER_02: There's no uh uh con ta tension between labor and environmental things.
SPEAKER_02: Even like this thing called the blue-green alliance, which is like an attempt to like really forge these connections um across and like I think all of that stuff is is good, and I think it's good to have like a positive vision.
SPEAKER_02: But I think that like it can get to the point where you are just doing trade-off denialism and you can't actually just make tough calls and admit, like, oh, like you're losing, but I think this is more important.
SPEAKER_02: And then we can have like an actual debate over whether that's true.
SPEAKER_04: Speaking of trade-offs, time to talk about papers.
SPEAKER_04: Peer review.
SPEAKER_02: Peer review.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, peer review.
SPEAKER_02: This is a segment of of the podcast where Matt and I talk about a a new uh white paper that's out there in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so this is a paper called Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline?
SPEAKER_02: Um, evidence from labor market shocks.
SPEAKER_02: Does it?
SPEAKER_02: Uh uh yes, it does.
SPEAKER_02: It does.
SPEAKER_04: Um I hate these question titles in the papers.
SPEAKER_02: I love question title papers.
SPEAKER_02: You know, yeah, anyway.
SPEAKER_02: Um the authors are Noah Armin Kuchakinya, David Newmark, and Tim Bruckner.
SPEAKER_02: Um, this just came out in NBER uh last month.
SPEAKER_02: Um I mean the large finding here is that like when older people leave the workforce, they experience cognitive decline.
SPEAKER_02: Um effect is concentrated among like men, um, 51 to 64.
SPEAKER_02: Um who and and you know, one of the things that's like really difficult with stuff like this is people are like, okay, is it the fact that people who leave the labor force are um earlier are just like already experiencing cognitive decline, or is it that like staying in the labor force actually makes you more cognitively sharper or whatever?
SPEAKER_02: And they overcome this um by looking at uh it's like they they look at commuting zones, uh, which are the areas that people will commute in.
SPEAKER_02: Um and it's a zone.
unknown: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So they're basically they're looking at like average uh effects across entire commuting zones so that like you know the individual things that are going off with the person can like wash out.
SPEAKER_02: But I mean, I think this is like really relevant this whole paper in like I mean, I think people know the the research design, right, is that sometimes your whole area suffers a negative economic shock.
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
SPEAKER_04: And older people are just more likely to take early retirement when the local labor market deteriorates.
SPEAKER_02: So they look at places where there was that like negative shock and see compare those to places where there wasn't.
SPEAKER_02: And then they similarly, old people they can look at both of those areas and just go, So well, what happened?
SPEAKER_04: So instead of comparing like a real estate broker who retires early to his coworker in the same office who didn't, because then you get the endogeneity problem, they're just saying, well, if there's a downturn and in general, more people are retiring early, like what happens to the cognitive acuity of people who've suffered this geographical labor market shock.
SPEAKER_02: And it's not good.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this to me is like relevant in this moment right now where we're all talking about what happens if, like, you know, there's no more work in the age of artificial general intelligence.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and I mean, there's I think most people have experienced this in their own life, like, oh, like retirement early, it's not good for like old people in your lives.
SPEAKER_02: Like sometimes they don't have things to do, like, et cetera.
SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, too, like, it's also like the thing people are aiming for.
SPEAKER_02: Like, there's this whole community online called like fire where they're all trying to retire super early.
SPEAKER_02: Like, how do I save enough money and like put in index funds so I can retire like 35 or like 40 or like 50 or whatever?
SPEAKER_02: And um, like, I mean, like, I'm like of two minds about this.
SPEAKER_02: Like, work as desirable for like purpose and like giving your brain something to do is like good and true, but like at the same time, I do think we get to a very big like make work kind of um attitude about things when we when we take it to its like logical extent.
SPEAKER_04: Well, so there's a couple debates that this is relevant to, right?
SPEAKER_04: One is this kind of, you know, AI, lay market displacement.
SPEAKER_04: The other is just straightforward entitlement type stuff, right?
SPEAKER_04: Because I mean, a perennial tension in American politics is that we are spending more and more money on Social Security and Medicare, um, the population has become older.
SPEAKER_04: One of the most fiscally straightforward ways to address this is to raise the retirement age and get people to work longer.
SPEAKER_04: This is politically challenged, it's like one of the most unpopular things you can do because people um have positive feelings about the elderly.
SPEAKER_04: So if you can marshal evidence that it's like actually low-key bad for people to be retiring earlier, that would like unwind this political knot, right?
SPEAKER_04: And help, you know, like budget wonks solve a big problem that they have.
SPEAKER_04: And so I think that's one reason that there's, you know, interest in.
SPEAKER_04: I've heard about this literature from a lot of people who are like professional deficit hawks.
SPEAKER_04: A question about this is this is a clever research design, but are you now researching the wrong thing?
SPEAKER_04: Right?
SPEAKER_04: Like you talked about the early retirement people.
SPEAKER_04: And I think it's possible that there's like a systematic difference between someone who has deliberately structured their whole life around the idea of amassing savings, being frugal, planning for early retirement, and has presumably come up with something they want to do with their early retirement.
SPEAKER_04: And somebody who is bopping along and is like, I'll try to work till I'm 67 when I can collect the full value of my social security benefits, but then you lose your job at 60 and you're like, you know what?
SPEAKER_04: Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna master a new career, right, in my mid-60s.
SPEAKER_04: I'm just gonna put in for early retirement and sort of peace out, right?
SPEAKER_04: And you can see why that, you know, could put you on a bad trajectory in life, because precisely because you're identifying people based on an external shock, it's like not what they wanted to do.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Right.
SPEAKER_04: Like there was a if people had been saying, like, hey Matt, like we we love your wisdom as like an old man pundit.
SPEAKER_04: Like, please like come on my podcasts, like tell the kids what they're doing wrong, like that would be awesome.
SPEAKER_04: Whereas if it's like, uh, I have no subscribers, nobody gives a shit about me, and I'm like, well, I guess I'm retired now.
SPEAKER_04: Like, that's kind of a bummer.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think obviously there's like a there's a selection issue in like I mean they've fixed one selection issue, but they they've created a different thing.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, but even in like from a policy perspective of like when you're trying to think about there's some people for whom retiring is probably not going to create these probably harms.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, like one thing, I mean, there was a paper recently that I saw that I was just looking for right now while you while you were talking about how um playing with or like grandparents taking care of their grandchildren um staves off certain kinds of cognitive decline.
SPEAKER_02: Um I'm yeah, it's called Grandparents Cognition and Caregiving for Grandchildren, um, published in Psychology and Aging in January of this year.
SPEAKER_04: That's right.
SPEAKER_04: Visit your kids.
SPEAKER_04: Give them babysit, give them a night out.
SPEAKER_02: But like one thing they find is that it like so grandmothers experienced much slower decline than grandfathers did when Looking longitudinally over their lives if they play and interact and take care of their grandkids.
SPEAKER_02: And like the hypo they don't know this to be the case.
SPEAKER_02: The hypothesis is like the way that grandmothers versus grandfathers are interacting with their kids.
SPEAKER_02: So grandmothers might be like, let me think about how I can help Timmy like practice with his like blocks and like think about.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what children do, but like tummy time and like let's look at the what is that black and white card that they show children?
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what that's for.
SPEAKER_02: Is that to make sure they're not like colorblind?
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_02: You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_02: I have a lot of kids with like one I'm friends with like one-year-olds and they're all like showing them these like black and white cards.
SPEAKER_02: Like, you've never heard of this?
SPEAKER_04: I didn't do that.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, well, maybe Joseph.
SPEAKER_04: Maybe as a man, I'm just completely detached from the black and white car.
SPEAKER_04: Um I remember tummy time.
SPEAKER_02: Um, like I there's like there's this question, like, right, because there are obviously a lot of women who like are way less in the workforce than men are, um, either because they left it entirely um to stay at home with their kids or were part-time for part of their lives in order to like take care of their children or whatever, or take care of their elderly parents, or to do caregiving of of whatever variety.
SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, that is obviously like cognitive it can be like cognitively demanding work.
SPEAKER_02: And like there are ways in which I mean there's a concentration that this paper shows of the benefit to working in in men, way more so than they find in women.
SPEAKER_02: And that to me is like indicates something about like our is like part of the problem here that we're not teaching or like men are not gonna be given ways to like engage their cognitive faculties outside of their jobs.
SPEAKER_04: So I mean, I I think especially if you think about boomers.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Um, you have a more a sharper gendered division of labor in which men are doing uh the preponderance of market work and women are doing a vast preponderance of home-based production.
SPEAKER_04: People don't retire from home-based production unless they are physically incapacitated.
SPEAKER_04: People continue to clean their houses, cook meals, and then plan Thanksgiving, like whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: And then whether you continue to do childcare is a question of your relationship with your kids and your grandkids.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: But the option is a like everybody would like grandma to come visit and babysit.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, more or less.
SPEAKER_04: Um and so to the extent that women, particularly older women, uh are more skilled at and like emotionally and psychologically invested in that home-based production, they're insulated from the cognitive impacts of leaving market-based work.
SPEAKER_04: We don't, you know, so uh millennial men such as myself are more involved in parenting uh than our fathers and uncles and grandfathers had been.
SPEAKER_04: It will be interesting to see if that, you know, pans out in the future.
SPEAKER_04: Because then there is, there's also questions about identity, right?
SPEAKER_04: I mean, men's uh psychological identity tends to be more tied up in their work and their career on average than women, which is different from the pure time use aspects of it.
SPEAKER_04: Um also, people have many fewer grandchildren.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't know if this is true.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, like obviously, like um if you were to take like a 30-year-old man out at like with AI, like right, like he could no longer work anymore because um AI is like, you know, taken over the years.
SPEAKER_02: I can't talk about zoomers.
SPEAKER_04: I'm talking about boomers and millennials.
SPEAKER_04: I don't I don't know what's going on with.
SPEAKER_02: 30-year-olds are not zoomers.
SPEAKER_02: 30-year-olds are we uh are millennials still.
SPEAKER_02: What?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's I'm I'm I'm 95.
SPEAKER_02: I'm I just turned 31.
SPEAKER_02: That's I'm still a millennial.
SPEAKER_02: Jeez.
SPEAKER_02: That's uh that's a millennial, buddy.
SPEAKER_02: I'm like the youngest millennial.
SPEAKER_02: I call myself the last millennial.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I'm the first.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great.
SPEAKER_02: We'll change the name of this ep this podcast to be the first and last millennial.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: Just chat.
SPEAKER_02: Um uh the last great generation millennials.
SPEAKER_02: Um but I I think that there's like uh what was I even talking about?
SPEAKER_02: What was the name before?
SPEAKER_04: Young men and why they're such losers.
SPEAKER_04: That's gonna be that's gonna be.
SPEAKER_04: We've got that for a future podcast topic.
SPEAKER_02: That's not what I was saying.
SPEAKER_02: I was saying uh job.
SPEAKER_02: No, wait.
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So if you're losing your job, but like in your 30s or something like that, that's like a very different psychologically for your identity than like you know, you can retire early at like 64 or or 60, what's retirement?
SPEAKER_02: 65 eternity, right?
SPEAKER_02: So retirement early at like 60 or whatever, right?
SPEAKER_02: And um because like not working is not like quote unquote embarrassing when you're like old, right?
SPEAKER_02: Like that's like expected or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: But I think the problem is often like people were just dying sooner before.
SPEAKER_02: And like now they're like continues to die.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: And so like retirement now is like instead of being like, oh, you have like a couple years, you have 10 years, you have like 15 years now, it's like you could have like 30 years where you have like no job.
SPEAKER_02: Like you could be like, like you would spend 30 years of your life working formally after like being in college, and then like 30 years after that, like not working at all and having like nothing, quote unquote nothing to do.
SPEAKER_02: And I think there's just like this question of like as we get richer as a society, obviously the goal is people have to work less in order to afford to live.
SPEAKER_02: Like that's like a that's like a positive development of society.
SPEAKER_02: Like we get weekends, we get like fewer work hours, we get to like dick around on our work hours, like scrolling on Twitter or whatever, rather than like actually like really locking in for eight hours a day or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Um but like if we don't like replace that work time with something that people actually find meaningful, like people are, you know, like hanging out with their friends and family or making pottery or like reading the great books of history.
SPEAKER_02: The classics of history.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, that to me is what's concerning.
SPEAKER_02: And I I do worry like right now, I feel like so much of the conversation about like AI disempowerment is like obviously okay, we just gotta get people into like make work jobs.
SPEAKER_02: Like, we need to like have job creation programs where we're like redoing the WPA and like, I don't know, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't people aren't very specific about the jobs they want to create from the government.
SPEAKER_02: And to me, it's like Insecticide spray.
SPEAKER_04: Insecticide spray.
SPEAKER_04: Get a get a low-flying plane.
SPEAKER_02: We gotta get them building dams again.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02: That's what we gotta do.
SPEAKER_02: But I just some sort of like, I don't know, like there are ways for us to like construct meaning that are not like you need to be doing physical labor.
SPEAKER_02: And I just would like us to explore that.
SPEAKER_02: I enjoy not doing physical labor, is my point.
SPEAKER_04: Interesting.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but you're a woman, so you're protected from this cognitive decline.
SPEAKER_04: This is my problem.
SPEAKER_04: But I have a huge investment in my career, so maybe I'm not.
SPEAKER_04: Maybe no, I don't know.
SPEAKER_04: I just think you, I don't know, you care about people or something.
SPEAKER_04: And you don't care about it.
SPEAKER_04: You already had it out there.
SPEAKER_04: No, I do.
SPEAKER_04: I do care.
SPEAKER_04: Um, I think that to prevent cognitive decline in the post-work future, people are gonna need to engage more with high-quality podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: That's a great point.
SPEAKER_04: Um, so I think if you like this show, you know, you should you should subscribe, you should like, you should tell your friends that they need to stave off cognitive decline.
SPEAKER_04: By listening to the argument.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, you need you know, you need savings, you want to escape the permanent underclass, but you also want to escape the cognitive underclass by getting into some good shit where we're like talking about things that matter.
SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
SPEAKER_02: All right, see you guys next week.
SPEAKER_02: All right.