Discussing His Book "Why Nothing Works," Being a Lonely Bengals Fan, and Today's Regulatory Landscape with Marc Dunkelman

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Marc Dunkelman, about why nothing works, being a lonely bengals fan, and todays regulatory landscape. Read his full bio below.

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Showtimes: 

• 1:22 - Power of Positive People
• 8:20 - Interview with Marc Dunkelman begins 
• 15:06 - How to navigate the regulatory landscape 
• 29:09 - Environmental Laws; how they came to be
• 42:27- How did the book come to be
• 46:53 - Field Notes with Marc!

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Chris Moyer at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismoyerecho/

Guest Bio:

Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a former fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. During more than a decade working in politics, he worked for Democratic members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation. The author of The Vanishing Neighbor, Dunkelman’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and Politico. 

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental enthusiasts, Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Kacie and I talk about the power of positive people. We interview Marc Dunkelman about his book Why Nothing Works. Being a lonely Bengals fan, and he lands a great punchline on a wonderful field notes story. And finally, speaking of Bengals, Bengal tigers are among the largest cats in the world, with males reaching at lengths of up to 10 ft long and weighing up to 560 pounds. They are excellent swimmers, have the longest canines of any cat, and since they hunt at dusk and dawn, their stripes help them hide in low sunlight. Which now makes way more sense to me, uh. So how about that?

 Hit that music. 

NAEP just completed a pop-up webinar titled Quick Hit Reactions to Supreme Court's rulings in Seven County Infrastructure, which was given by our very own Fred Wagner and Jeh Johnson on the Supreme Court ruling that just came out. If you missed it live, you can listen to it for free if you're an NAEP member. The court decision appears to shape the scope of NEPA compliance for years to come, so please check it out at www.NAEP.org. 

Let's get to our segment. Has any big things happened in the environmental world recently? Nothing good. Yeah, everything I need to talk about. I got an email about the most, like, whatever the new bill is called they're trying to pass like the actual name of it. About the private land. No, it's like the actual the big beautiful bill. Everything but the kitchen sink. Yeah, and it's also like, it's just, I know it's a long email that's gonna, the only thing it's going to do is depress me, so I'm not going to read it yet. I'm gonna wait till Monday, and then I'll read it. You really have to pick your time. I always find that I can read bad news, the best after lunch. It's not in this beginning of my day, when I would ruin my day. It's not before I go to bed when I'm rolling around in bed, sobbing in my pillow. Right in the middle. Yeah, in the middle of the day. There's no escape. Yeah, but I'm like fed so I'm not angry, and then I still have work to do after so I can distract myself. It's a good buffer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Try it out next time you want to read some terrible news. Yeah, there you go. There's a segment right there, bad news. Didn't we do one on how to receive that? Oh wait, no, we did. How can you get fired for a good reason, or can you quit? The art of giving and receiving bad news. Yeah, that's it. That's good, it's a good one and timely. I don't know what you're talking about. Everything is going so well that Yeah, if you live under a rock. Yeah. 

We want for the future, the power of positive people. One of my friends was talking about how she's been surrounded by such negativity lately and she's having a hard time and that made me like reflect about myself and I'm like, dang, I've been complaining about work and a bunch of things and it's just like, probably it does bring other people down. So. That's interesting. How that can affect others. It really, I mean, it's very true. I think people in general, and maybe this is the start of it. I mean, people in general, right, do reflect where they are, and sometimes you kind of forget that you have influence over others, and I think we kind of sometimes see ourselves in bubbles and kind of like Oh, I'm just saying a thing and it doesn't have an impact, but then you find that the more you meet people and the more influence you get in a company or, you know, at a job, you end up really impacting people. And it's true of family too, you know. If someone's in a bad mood, it can ruin everyone else's mood. I think we've all been there, but the opposite is true too, right? There's like unbridled joy. I saw my nephew win a baseball championship last weekend, and He was went 4 for 42 of those hits were like bombs for his age. He's 9 years old and he's just pumping his fists, running around the bases, you know, he's like, I did it. And even if they hadn't won, it was just such a wonderful thing. It was like, it's hard to be sad about any of that, you know, and he was just so happy and the team, they did end up winning, and it's such a wonderful thing. I think I was in a good mood for like 3 days. So I think there is real value in that, and I think sometimes it doesn't mean that like, you know, like positivity all the time also kind of ends up having an effect, right? 

It also ends up being wearing out like not everything's perfect, but there's times when it's good to vent and you need to be able to have someone you rely on that will listen to you, be like, you know, uh, work was tough, and then I had to Go read a thing for school, and it was like, why am I, you know, running through all these things? It's important to get that out, but it's also important to find people in your life that are really positive. And that is a really wonderful thing. People give you space to be yourself, right? I think everybody deserves that. And even in hard times, it can be a real challenge. So Even more important. It's easy to say, it's sometimes it's hard to do and hard to live, and sometimes you can be, I think we're all dynamic enough to be that for other people, and maybe we're not always that for individuals, but everybody has the capability of being kind and being patient and being positive and being that for other people is wonderful. It's a delight. I love doing that. Am I always good at it? No. But I think that's something to remember too, that we have a lot of power and influence in our own lives that really can impact others, and it's such a wonderful thing to think about going forward. I know there's days that are going to be really challenging. Some of them are here already, some of them are coming gone. Life is not static. It never ever is, but I love the idea of being a little positive. 

Do you think it's even more important as a person, like with being a boss or in leadership roles? To be positive. Yeah, that affects your like staff and your workers. 0, 1000%. I think when you have employees that work for you and they look up to you whether you want them to or not, you're in a leadership role. And when you are in a leadership role, everyone will look to a leader. And one of the ways that I would say that we see that is you talk to any comedian about doing a corporate event, right? What they'll tell you is that you have to get the leadership to laugh. If they don't laugh, no one will. Because every employee is looking at their bosses, making sure it's OK. Did the joke he just told about the boss, is the boss laughing? I can laugh. OK, now we can enjoy, but there's like a natural tension to that, and I think in any case, there's also like the bosses have a really, really important job to be positive influences. It doesn't necessarily mean being positive all the time. And certain people need different motivation. Everybody's a little different. So any boss that treats everybody the same is probably doing a disservice to some, if not all of those people. But yeah, being positive goes a long way. I mean, I think not sugarcoating it is important too. Like, you don't want to be like, everything's great, and we're also closing in the next month because we didn't make our numbers, you know, that doesn't make sense, but encouraging people, guiding people, everybody pays attention to that. How do you get out of that negative spiral that sometimes we find ourselves in? I mean, some people actually, I have people in my life who will call me on it when I do. I mean, I remember even like at the Super Bowl, I was, I, I, you know, sometimes you just get in the mood and I'm watching the Super Bowl, and I'm like, this new logo for the Super Bowl is really lame and wow, this game is starting way later than I thought and my friends was like, do you wanna like watch the game or do you just want to complain about it the whole time, you know, so you need people to be like, oh yeah, right, I'm, I'm being negative. I'm bringing everybody down.

You need to kind of be aware of it yourself. You can't rely on other people all the time. And sometimes it's like, like I said before, it's OK to vent. You want to vent, and like, you need to, but you also have to realize that there's a time and place for it. And sometimes it's OK, and sometimes you need to put on a happy face. Even if you don't feel amazing, you still got to be there for people. And now, any more questions, Kacie? This is great. That's all I got. All she's got, so. Yeah, that's a great way to end and uh like I say, I look forward to the interview and let's get to it. 

Hello, and welcome back to EPR. 

Today we have Marc Dunkleman with us. Marc is a fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute and author of the new book Why Nothing Works. Mack, great to have you here. I'm thrilled to be on the podcast. Thank you, thank you. So you spent most of your career in fellowships at Brown, NYU, Clinton Foundation. What drew you to that kind of work? What drew me to fellowships in particular? I mean, I got out of college and I wanted to do good stuff. So the idea was how can I make a difference, you know, like I mean liberal arts degree, what else are you gonna do? but try to make the world better. Uh, and so I, I spent some time on Capitol Hill. I spent some time at various things. Thanks, but just in the world of ideas, trying to figure out why progressivism is less effective than it needs to be, and figure out some way to point people to, uh, more effective alternatives. Right? So that's been a lifelong pursuit of yours then, or is career-wise. Have you known that from the beginning, you're like, ah, this is the thing that I'm gonna focus on? Well, I know that. I mean, when I was a kid, my frustrations were always, why couldn't the government just fix this? Um, right? And so, I mean, I think that that sort of points you, you know, I mean, you, you can take that any number of directions, but for me, the point was, what can I do to fix it? And then, you know, I spent some time in government and some time sort of in this world of think tanks and At a certain point you begin to note patterns of why things are failing, and sometimes those patterns aren't what everyone's talking about, right? Everyone's talking about the influence of money in politics or the scourge of the jerry gerrymandering or the filibuster and like I've heard of those arguments a bunch of times and I was like, I don't know, maybe there's something else going on here. 

And so I, this is my second book and both of them are sort of designed to be eye openers for people who are frustrated with the fact that stuff isn't getting done. And it truly it is a really uh great look at that exact thing and I I enjoy like some of the history behind what you're talking about too. So how did we get to where we are now? It's a really big question, and I know it's gonna take you a minute to answer, but Well, the short answer is that there was a period over the course of the bulk of the 20th century, where if you wanted to do good stuff for the environment, and you wanted to preserve the country, what you wanted to do was put power in the hands of professional scientifically minded bureaucrats who are going to do the right. Saying they were going to preserve land, they were gonna set aside parks, they were gonna be wise stewards of the public domain. That was our notion as environmentalists. That was TR's notion, that was the abiding view was that the problem was that private enterprise was ruining the American landscape, was being abusive to our natural resources, and that you needed to have a strong centralized bureaucracy that would protect the public's interests. And then the establishment that we built up to do all of those things was revealed in the 60s and 70s to be actually bad. Um. Or like that's how people interpret it, right? Like, like it was big agriculture that had been given the permission to spray DDT on crops and cause all these horrific birth defects. But you know, it was the regulators who were supposed to keep people safe on the roads, who had allowed cars to be produced at Unsafe at Any Speed was the name of Ralph Nader's book. And then, you know, like the highway lobby turned out to be, you know, just Completely focused on reducing costs and were much happier to drive a new interstate through a park than they were to displace homes and businesses, which was generally the other alternative or to build mass transit, which might reduce the need for gas guzzling cars. 

So by that point, what happened was that if you were for the environment. You took exactly the opposite view that your four parents in the environmental movement would have taken, which was to say, we don't want to empower these bureaucrats. The bureaucrats are the bad guys. What we need to do is put guardrails around them so they can't do bad things. Um, and so we created a system of checks, all designed to empower little people like you and me and any ordinary citizen to be able to gum up the work so that this bad project wouldn't move forward. And we created all sorts of laws and all sorts of judicial maneuvers and all sorts of expansions of standing. And what we ended up with was exactly what we wanted, theoretically, which It was like new mechanisms for people to be able to stand athwart environmental degradation and say stop. Um, it's worked so well that now even projects that have a net benefit also can't get done. Um, and so this is the ordinary, I mean, as I said earlier, like I'm trying to sort of poke holes in tropey kinds of understandings of the world and the trophy understanding that we have, still have is that environmental degradation is born from, you know, avaricious private enterprise, and that we can't get things done because big oil is or whatever it is, the logging industry or, you know, the private equity, like we've got all sorts of people that we want to attack, and I'm not saying that those people are always in the right, but what I am saying is that the system that we've created that most Environmental professionals probably find very frustrating today is one that progressives created for themselves, that they did this purposefully, not exactly understanding the implications, but with the notion that big bureaucracies were not our friends in the environmental world, certainly in the progressive world, and that we needed to put guardrails around. 

Yeah, and, and so today we are in a guardrail heavy environment and a lot of what, you know, strikes me as interesting about where we are now, it seems like there's a lot of frustration, there's a lot of, like you mentioned at the very beginning, you know, people being like, why can't we do stuff and There is a need absolutely for having in the environment be safe and pristine. Everybody, you ask somebody like, do you want clean water, clean air, uh, and beautiful landscapes? Everyone's gonna say yes, but that also kind of, I guess, conflicts with progress in some ways, in lots of ways. How do we, I guess, Sort through this regulatory landscape that we have now, and I know we're seeing some of it. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Southern County decision that just came out, but there's some of this stuff that we're starting to see push back a little bit on that regulatory landscape. How do we navigate the problem? How do we get to building things again? Yeah, so my view is that this is a question of balance. There's no single thing that we're going to do that's gonna fix all of this. You know, there are people in the world that we all inhabit that want to just repeal the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, which is the original piece of legislation signed by Richard Nixon that created environmental impact statements and grew into something that none of us expected it to be. But the truth is that I think the most helpful way to look at this is to look at the two. Streams and then try to navigate some sort of balance. One extreme was Robert Moses, who many of your listeners will know from the power broker, which was the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book by Robert Caro, about the guy who built all of New York, the anti-J Jane Jacobs, a guy who happily tore through neighborhoods, parks, you name it, in order to build highways. In and around the tri-state area and who had both the authority and the power to exercise enormous discretion. So here was a singular figure who was able to say, I'm going to build this bridge here, I'm going to build this sewage treatment plant here, I'm going to build this housing project here. 

And no matter what people around him said, or no matter what the mayor, the governor, the president or the community board or whomever it was said that said, I don't want you to do it, he could turn a deaf ear to them and therefore had this enormous, I really. I want to focus on the word discretion, because it, like, he chose. The other extreme is what we inherit today, which is the antithesis of that, which is the absence of discretion. We have process and procedure, and everyone has a role to play in that, which is good. Like, you don't want it to be like Robert Mo. Like, like, the reason the book was so popular was that because people were really sick of the establishment exercising that discretion in ways that they didn't like. Yeah. But the dream was, the dream at the time was that if you created a fair procedure, you would eventually get to a place where the answer was obvious. And what we're finding is that when you're choosing between keeping a forest pristine and using some portion of that forest to house a transmission line so that clean energy can traverse from the place that it's generated to the place where that load is going to be extended. Like that's a trade-off that we have to deal with, and the procedure and process don't obviate the need for us to actually choose which is more important. Either some trees are coming down, or we're going to continue to rely on whatever it is, gas fuel generators or coal, in worst case, or what whatever it is, but That's a choice we need to make. Robert Moses had the discretion. He might not have used his discretion in the way that we wanted him to, but now no one has the discretion. And so fundamentally, and I really this is the PG podcast, so I'm going to, I'm, I'm going to keep it PG and just say who is going to get to choose stuff, right? Like, like, what is the, what is the process we're going to use to choose the stuff that we're going to do? Let me just take sort of the guest privilege and say one thing because I think it's relevant to your listenership.

If you were a Moses man, namely, if you were one of the largely the men who worked for Robert Moses in New York City during that period. You had a lot of discretion, right? Like, ultimately it was Robert Moses, but like, if you were assigned building that bridge, or designing that park, or figuring out how to do this or that, like it was enormously satisfying for you to be able to design the park and see it built, and then be able to show your grandchildren what you had done, right? Like I made this improvement for this community. Nobody would be wanting to live here if it weren't for these beautiful jungle gyms, or nobody would be able to get to this place if it weren't for this footpath or whatever it was you did. Like, and I think that probably most environmental professionals today have the same desire. Like they would take some premium off their salary wherever they were. to work in a place where they're actually gonna get to build the solar farm or get the regulation done that's going to reduce carbon like they want that satisfaction. And the truth is they're not getting it today because of this system that we all these checks and balances make it so that if you are an environmental professional today, if you've gone into the workforce and you want to do good stuff, it's super hard to do. super dispiriting, super demoralizing. You want to get out and like by the end, you're like, maybe I just should have gone to private equity or whatever it is. Um, uh, and like that's the problem that I think we need to solve. We need to make it so that people who want to do good things, when they are put in positions where they might do good things, have that opportunity. You know, it's so funny you say that because the very first job I had. In environmental policy, my boss told me he was like, I hope you don't like seeing what you've done come to fruition. He was basically right away, he said, we're gonna finish a project and then 5 to 10 years from now we might see it done. And he, he actually this is in the DC area, he mentioned there was a a highway that connected east-west, I think it's a 70s spur or 270 Spur or something like that, and, and he was like, that one I built, so I, I actually did 10 to 15 years ago and I tell my kids, that's, that's what he says. 

You know, it's just so long ago, and there's so many other projects that we do this environmental review for, and then that's it. It's over. It's done. And in some ways, it just never gets done. It never gets built. It goes on the back burner or takes so long that a new thing is more important. And you know, like I said, so the seven county case yesterday was the, I guess the first ruling on NEPA in a long time from the Supreme Court, and they basically are saying agencies, there's a lot of deference to the agency in that decision. So it seems like there is at least a, and it was an ATO decision, so that you know, that everyone's agreeing on that case in particular, there's a need for change. And I don't know how exactly that's going to manifest itself. I'm hopeful that some of it will reduce this, that the need for us to wade through all this, but I don't know, and I'm not sure I can say how familiar you are with it, but I think that's the intent with that case. I think that's the idea is trying to hit at how do we fix the landscape that we're in today. And if that's not quite right, what is the, the, the next step? What can environmental professionals actually do? To help reshape this landscape we're in. Yeah, well, so I think I'm not a lawyer, I interpret that decision in the same way. It's remarkable to me that that decision does appear to be one that is designed to give more deference. To the bureaucrats who are trying to sort of hold a torch for a very project so that fewer people have the ability to say, no, no, no, this has some third ripple environmental impact and therefore shouldn't be done, because, you know, just a couple of years ago during the Biden administration, the same Supreme Court eliminated the Chevron deference, which seems to point to me as a non-lawyer in the other direction, namely giving More discretion to judges and or to Congress than to executive branch officials. And so I don't think we exactly know how these things are going to interact in real life, like or exactly what the Supreme Court means for us to understand, like, each decision seems to be slicing at someone's Power in the sort of the firmament of decision making, right? 

The, the Chevron deference sliced, the decision limiting Chevron deference, sliced at the discretion of the executive branch in favor of either judges weighing directly in on various projects, or else on Congress explicitly setting standards. Yeah. This seemed to slice at the opportunity for, you know, people who object to projects to be able to use the judicial system to stop them. How about all, I mean, I, I can't tell you exactly how that's going to play out. It does seem to me that the fact that it was an EO decision is remarkable in the sense that it suggests that the liberals and the conservatives both seem to agree. That like something needs to change. But like, you know, in my book, I, I talk about one of the stories I found most fascinating was the story of what's called 4F in your world, which is the provision of a law passed in 1966, which essentially was designed to say, if you are a highway engineer and you're planning to build a highway, and there is a an available route that doesn't go through a park, you should consider. Taking that route to preserve the green space. Um, I think when it was passed, like, it certainly wasn't a mandate. It was almost so weak as to suggest that if two engineers on the project were passing in the hall on the way to lunch, and one of them was like, Have you thought about the environmental impacts of that highway? And the other guy was like, yeah, I thought about it a little bit. And then they would just, you know, go on to have their hot dogs and then build the highway right through the park because it was. 

Cheaper and like, you know, fewer people would be displaced and they wouldn't have to pay as much to existing homeowners or business owners or whatnot. Like that's sort of like fig leaf kind of thing. And then in 1971, 1972, Thurgood Marshall writes a judicial decision Overton Park where he completely changes the interpretation of what the law was to mean that like, unless you have that there is no feasible and plausible, I think that's the there's a term of art, but it basically, basically makes it so that it's impossible to build, you couldn't build a new high-speed rail line through a public golf course, right? That's where liberal justices were in 1970, in the early 1970s. Now the liberal justice. are side on, are trying to rebalance that impulse. So like, that is a remarkable suggestion that things are moving in potentially a positive direction. Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that will be when one of your peers in the environmental community has a project that they want to do that is clearly good for the environment, net net. And someone comes in with some spurious, this is going to pollute our water spring. This is right, right, like something that doesn't actually rise to the level of actually being to a rational mind worth. The loss of whatever energy savings, environmental improvement, whatever the project would bring, when that thing gets thrown out and we can expoly do a project in like the early twenties version of you who was told like, don't ever expect. Uh, anything you work on to actually come to fruition, like, you actually see something come to fruition by the time they hit 30. 

Yeah, and that would, that would be the dream, wouldn't it? That would be a pathetic. I know exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean in other real life terms that I've seen doing restoration, and I think Katherine Arlaka. was talking about this as well. There isn't a lot of differentiation between the types of projects. So if you are a habitat restoration person or you have a nonprofit that's just got a grant to do this project, your permitting requirements are exactly the same as someone who's doing gigantic development. So we used to see that all the time with someone coming and saying, I just wanted to like upgrade this little spot or do this good thing, good for good reason. And then there were so many hoops and so much money to spend and so much just to get past that hurdle that that would stop. You know, a lot of people from getting the good work for good sake, getting even started. Or even proposing it, right, at a certain point you just say like this is not worth me even trying because I know that, you know, someone's gonna throw a wrench in the works. It's also, I mean, in my world of progressive politics, you know, people have been talking since I got into this a quarter century ago, about the potential of public-private partnerships. And I think in many cases, like, like there's a good reason for the government not to be hiring directly the workers. Who are going to do the thing and instead to hire people who are expert in the private sector and do a contract and like they can do things more efficiently, but like that doesn't affect, in many cases, that doesn't affect the permitting, right, which is the big thing like just because a private company is gonna come in and do the project doesn't mean that that you don't have to do the review. Um, or the assessment or they like jump through whatever series of hoops are required for whether it's a big project or a small project. So that's sort of, again, there's a trophy thing where if you go out to the American public and ask them like what is the thing you think would fix the morass of frustration we all have and they say, well, I think government should be more like. The private sector and so then someone that's have a we're not where we don't have our finger on the pulse of what's actually the problem here. And so like, I, I just, I think more people should be paying attention to this problem. I think it's actually really neat to see too, like we've talked to a couple of other people about like the history of environmental law, and it's interesting to see. how things change over time. And I think one of my favorite parts about your book is the look back that you take. 

And so when you do look back at where we were, like, you know, we were in a place before where there was no authority, no regulations. We weren't a regulatory, the government wasn't a regulatory body. It is now, and seeing how that kind of came to be is really fascinating. So do you see anything in how we got here that can help us get out of it, so to speak? Yeah, I mean, the, the thing that I would say is that in every era of American politics, the next era seems impossible. Yeah, yeah. So that at the turn of the 20th century, like we were in a situation that was a little bit like it was, it is today, in the notion that like, There was a feeling that like the political machines and the trusts, and the robber barons, and these parochial politicians were never gonna be able to do the things that we wanted to improve the sewer system or to create a good education system or a transit system. I think they just weren't capable of it cause they were all so caught up and just, you know, graft or they were trying to get their brother-in-law a job at the local whatever, you know, like, doing big things seemed impossible at the turn of the 2. And you can read these books about progressives, you know, during the first decade of the 20th century, you know, sitting around just complaining to each other. The courts were standing in their way. The executive branch would never be as powerful as it needed to be. They're so frustrated and how do we get rid of the Lochter doctrine, which had, you know, allowed courts to get sort of their hands right in the middle of economic policy and da da da da da. That group of progressives would never have been able to imagine the progressives who existed. You during and after the New Deal, who were, as you say, just like there was a lot of them like, like the government could do almost anything you want like the Tennessee Valley Authority which was living in the 19th, like the Tennessee Valley was subject to sort of the laws of the 19th century where everyone else had electric washers and dryers and dishwashers and the farms were wired up and everything and like people were living in the in the 19th century in the Tennessee Valley and He gave this lawyer from Wisconsin, David Lienthal, like just the incredible fiat of power to basically remake a portion of the country the size of England. And he did it, right? Like he built dams, yeah, and he did it, right? The people at the turn of the 20th century couldn't have imagined like the David Lillenthal thing. And then you get to this point where, like, you know, David Lienthal is at the TVA in the 30s and then basically David Lienthal and Robert Moses are. In some ways, the same kind of public character, right? 

Enormously powerful, making decisions, not directly elected from the executive branch, etc. By the time you get to the 60s and 70s, people just can't imagine that there's ever going to be anyone who can speak up against the likes of a David Lowenthal, or a Richard Daley, or a Robert Moses, or like in the Foreign Policy or Robert McNamara, right? These Sort of these August celebrated publicly minded intellectuals who know the public interest better than anyone else, like, they are so powerful that the notion that anyone, any little pipsqueak would be able to file a complaint in the some court of law and say, I don't like what you're doing, and the thing would actually be heard and considered was completely beyond the realm of imagination. Now, like there are no Robert Moses out there. There are wannabe Robert Moses. There's a Andrew Cuomo out there who would love to do it. There's a right, right, there's a, uh, like you can name all sorts of people who would love to be Robert Moses, but like they're not powerful like that. They can't just get things done. I mean, you know, Cuomo got some things done on as governor, but like there are a lot of things he didn't get done, and Gavin Newsome, like, you, you, you name the person, it's almost a mass. Now for us to imagine a world in which there are powerful figures who can expeditiously drive a high-speed rail line or build a transmission line from one place to another, or you name the thing. And so, like, the question right now is like, can we ever, uh, get back to a place where we could do something? Um, right? Just something, just, just to. Anything like, like, is there any place where we could just like let habitat cook, you know, or whatever, whatever it is. And right now, the fun thing to do is just to sort of cavege and sort of say it's this is impossible. I see no way out of it. 

There is a way out of it. Like we are going to correct for this, whether, you know, this recent Supreme Court decision suggests like pointing away that way, there could be, you know, there was permitting reform legislation. It seemed almost to be able to get across the line at the end of the last congress, which I'm sure is controversial among many of your listeners, some of who were probably for it, some of whom are against it. But, but like that's in the ether. There is this growing abundance movement after Ezra Prine and, and Derek Thompson came out with his book and the same housing where Yoni Alebo came out with his book and in the world of digitization where Jennifer Park came out with her book. I mean like there's a growth. So, there's a whole literature of people who want who want government to work again on the left. And that's a sea change and like, my view, it's, you know, I think it's now a quote from a very conservative figure, but my view is that politics is downstream of culture and the culture in probably the community that listens to this podcast, I think is changing and that that will eventually work its way into policy. Yeah, and it's interesting. I like that you talk about change because I think that is something I've seen, even, like I say, um, in my career and the things that I've done, when you do get to a point, like when you first, you know, my first boss, I'm like, I don't even understand what he's saying when he's telling me, I won't see this thing get done. And now I'm at this point where like, I can understand enough to go, we need to do something differently. And I think that shift in mentality, kind of like, well, I'm just doing what I'm told to. OK, how can I change this? It's really neat and interesting thing, and I've, I've seen that. 

As well, I think it's a very good point that in the community, in the environmental community, it sounds like, no, it's like, OK, we need to do something different. I don't know what that is yet, but we need to do something different and starting to inch forward somewhere. You need the idea first, I guess, before you can even start to talk through that. So yeah, I mean, it's not really a question for you, but I think that's kind of neat how we are kind of in a, in a way, in an inflection point. And I don't know if you have an idea on exactly where we'll go, cause it's hard to say, but it's really cool to see the history of Well, we've been in places like this before, things changed so drastically. I think even looking back at like where Reagan was in the 80s to where we are now, a lot of that is fascinating how it's changed. And right now we're the environmental space is very much a back and forth, right? We seem to be going pendulum swings every administration really hard, and that's challenging. And I don't know how politics is gonna navigate through that. Is it simply just waiting? Do we have to wait for politics to catch up with the folks themselves, or Is there something more proactive we can do? I sort of agree with that and sort of don't, in the sense that you're right that the Republicans seem to be very anti-environmental and they put in oil lobbyists and important jobs or whatever they do, and then Democrats come in and they, you know, Announced that everything's gonna be a national monument or we're ready we sort of go back and forth between again sort of tropey notions among all of this, like the process has become increasingly coagulated with these veto points. 

Um, whether both the Republicans don't care about the environment and then the Democrats who seem to think that the, the way to protect the environment is to make it harder for things to get done, right? Like, like, like, like, like, like sort of you can't win for losing, you can't win for exactly. Mental question, I think that people who want to fix this need to be asking and beginning to talk amongst themselves about and then to be sketching out processes. is asking this question, who do we want to decide? Frequently when I asked to talk about the book, I start with this anecdote about my family, you know, I, I'm married and I have two daughters. And when my daughters were 8 and 11, and my wife was working and it'd be Friday night, and my mother would get home and like neither of us wanted to cook dinner, and like, we needed to figure out, like, one of us would say she would go out to eat and like everyone would be like, yeah, let's go out to eat. And then like the question was, like, one's 8, one's 11, you know, like we're middle aged. We have wildly different opinions about where we should go out to eat. Um, and like you can get hairy pretty fast, you know, with like one child like you. Insisting on Shake Shack, you know, one child, the younger child insisting on like, I want doughnuts and sushi tonight. Like, you know, there's no that doesn't exist. You know, like my wife, who like had just read an article in Rhode Island Monthly about a place that sells unseasoned quinoa, and like the three of us were like, oh my God, is she gonna have us eating, you know. So then you've got this, you've got 4 people with wildly different tastes all trying. Figure out a place that they can go together. What is the process you're going to use to decide where you're gonna eat? Is it that everyone gets a Friday night and then changes each success? 

So like, you know, every 4th Friday night we're eating unseasoned quinoa. Is it that in every case, the dad decides, like, obviously I liked this solution. Um, is it that everyone gets to throw out an idea and someone gets to veto it, so that you've got an endless number of vetoes until someone finally just Gives up. I mean, in cases like the, the 8th, right, the 8 year old just gonna veto everything that isn't doughnuts or sushi, right? Like, like, like, and I think most people can relate to this. They've been in some situation like this where you've got a bunch of people with different ideas that we have created a system to this point where anyone who doesn't like whatever is going to be proposed can veto it. Like that's the system that we've created. It went from a system in which daddy always got. to decide, right? Robert Moses, David Lienthal, both of these have advantages, right? And disadvantages. The disadvantages are pretty massive with Robert Moses, you know, plowing through the Upper West Side or today with like, we're on the verge of starving here, right? Like the climate catastrophe is, the meteor is heading towards Earth, like, and we're not doing anything about it. There's got to be some other process. So what is the process that you think would be fake? To decide, should habitat get to be able to build this house? Should this rail company be able to claim this new right of way for a high-speed train, given all the, like, if people can have wildly different, like it's fine for people to not want the habitat for humanity houses near them because they're afraid that these people are going to move in and it's gonna change the value. Like people have their opinions, they have their preferences. They don't want their View of the, of the beach blocked by this new development. They think that it's ugly to have a wind turbine off the coast, and they want their pristine view out onto the, you know, vineyard Sound. Like what that people can have their opinions. The question is, who in the end, what process are we going to have to decide whether the environmental benefits are worth the inconveniences to these individual people. 

And it feels to me like there should be. Of ramps, where if enough people say, I really don't want this, or like the benefits are do not actually like you're actually not gonna make a dent in housing supply by doing this thing that is really deleterious to the people who already live in that community that there should be. Some way for them to have some influence. But right now they have all the influence. And so people in your world, it feels to me, need to be thinking sort of fundamentally like here would be a process where we could figure out whether things are going to be green lit or not, that would give people who don't win, end of that process, at least some notion that they were heard, and even though they're disappointed in the outcome, they accept that that's the way we're gonna go. Um, and we just don't have that right now. We have that sort of in, in the world like theoretically that's what a trial is, right? Uh, in criminal law, but ultimately the judge decides. People should be able to say, I oppose this project. They also need to be able to say this would be a process whereby all of our concerns could be thrown into the cauldron and someone would come out with a final decision. Yeah, like I say, it's a The dream, yeah. I love that analogy, but I want to see everybody submitting their proposals for dinner with a budget and a tie to the mission vision values of the family, and I want to see, you know, who's gonna fund this project, who's going out for doughnuts and unicorn their ice cream. Yeah, yeah, my 8 year old is not gonna fund the project, but, but she's gonna insist, she's gonna insist on the sprinkles for sure, for sure, yeah. You know, because that's the same as here's a nonprofit that comes out. I want to do this project, who's gonna fund it? I don't know, but I want it. Is on it. Yeah, the sprinkles, let's be clear. 

Don't you want this too? Everybody wants this. So that's great, but you know the book is called Why Nothing Works, and that analogy describes it perfectly, so I think that's great. And the tagline, who killed Progress and how to bring it back. I think that's the reason to read it, right? We've got all the reasons why progress stopped, but what we do next? So tell us a little bit. We've been talking, we've been rounding circling the book, but how did it come to be? The book came to be because I was taking the train from Washington. And then what if we move to Providence from Providence to New York. And for years, many of your listeners will know if you take the train from New England or from the Atlantic into New York, you come into Penn Station generally, and Penn Station, which was once a, you know, the world's most spectacular train station until 1963 when it was demolished, is today, like an underground warren of, it's, it's better than it used to be, but it is sort of an underground rat rat's warren. And that was, you know, 1012 years ago, and I had remembered when I was doing that, reading articles in like the 1990s in the New York Times about how they were gonna redo the Penn Station, and it was gonna be this big beautiful station with light and air and reclaiming this lost. Architectural gem. And here we were like 20 years later, and nothing had happened. And then I'm reading the Power Broker, which we referenced earlier about Robert Moses, and the most famous chapter of that book is called One Mile, and it's his decision to construct the Crossrocks Expressway, destroy these working class neighborhoods. Everyone was screaming no, the mayor, the governor, local community boards, the nonprofits, everybody was saying no, and he didn't care. He just did it. And yet here we were with our project, Penn Station, which almost no one objected to theoretically, right? Like it was everyone wanted a better Penn Station, and Penn Station is the 2nd most heavily trafficked transit hub on the face of the earth. More people go through Penn Station every day than go through Newark, Kennedy, and. combined, like half a million people go through. And like, why couldn't we get it done?

The genesis of this was what had happened between the moment where Robert Moses did the Cross Expressway with everyone screaming no. And now to this point where we can't get the yes on a project everyone agrees on. Um, I didn't know at the time. Like I, I thought that I was gonna end up with, you know, sort of a research project that ended up with the fact that the Madison Square Garden now sits atop the Penn Station, and that the people that own Penn Station own Madison Square Garden were saying no, they didn't want to move and that that goal. Family was and that turned out not to be true. Like, like the Dolans were willing to do a deal to move there. It was that everyone had like a little objection, so they couldn't go with the, with any single product. Everyone was for it theoretically, but you couldn't get there from here. And I wrote that everybody wants dinner, but nobody knows what to eat. That's exactly what he said. Well, you're right, or you can't pick which restaurant to go to, um, and the family would starve, right? Like, like the point you make a decision in this case, like it just like, you know, the thing that had just wallowed for 20 years. So I did that and then in the course of doing my research on Penn Station, I was like, I wonder if this same phenomenon of going from like Robert Moses doing anything he wants to, to nobody being able to do anything. Anything exists in other realms of American political life. And what I found was that it is absolutely everyone. This was not a Penn Station thing. It was not a New York thing. It was not a trains thing or a transportation thing. It was everywhere. It was about housing, it was on electrical infrastructure. It was in high-speed rail. Like, it was in sort of every realm of American life. 

We've gone from a place where powerful people could make decisions to one where all Almost no one could push anything anywhere. And so I didn't understand why that had happened. People still, you know, there's sort of a joke now, that like, if you're a New York City politician, you're supposed to have a copy of the power broker over your shoulder when you're doing like a, an interview on MSNBC. People say, like, if you want to understand power in New York, you need to read this book. This is not the podcast where I tell you that the Power Broker isn't a great book. I think the Power is an amazing book, but like, it certainly D\doesn't describe the architecture of power in New York today. The architecture of power of the Robert Moses era is completely been demolished in part because of the power broker, and now we have a completely different set. So I would never pretend to be trying to write the next power broker, but what I am trying to do is provide some context for people to understand how we got from a place where government was oppressive, coercive, too powerful, without checks to one where it's exactly the opposite. Yeah. Well, it sounds like a great read and um we're getting towards the end of our episode here. So we have a segment called Field Notes. It's a part of our show where we talk to our guests about their memorable moments during the work and sometimes it's fields, sometimes it's book readings, it might be a podcast for you something. Did you have any funny, scary, awkward stories about being a fellow or being an author? Funny, scary, awkward stories. Or there's or in there. 

Yeah, doesn't have to be everything at once. Well, I guess, sure. It turns out that William O. Douglas, the famous Supreme Court justice, who was by some means, the original environmentalist, maybe familiar to many of you, began writing like it may have been, he's one among the longest serving Supreme Court justices appointed by Franklin Roosevelt and lasted for decades. He loved a walkway somewhere, I think in Maryland, that was. Being considered for a highway. So he became, as a Supreme Court justice, an advocate against this plan to build a highway, you know, I think through the eastern mountains. I'll have to look exactly where it was, maybe something we can go back to. In the course of his work as a Supreme Court justice, and now his extracurricular work lobbying against this highway expansion plan, he decided to write about it in Playboy. So I had the awkward interaction of walking down to the Brown University Rockefeller library and asking for some issue of Playboy from the 1960s, and you know, like. Had to explain that I wanted to read it for the articles, uh oh my gosh, I know for real, yeah, really, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's not that I didn't even know. I don't even know who had the centerfold spread in that particular issue. I just, I just need to know this thing about, about highway construction. That's why I'm getting this Playboy. Uh, I didn't even get that at a library. wow. Yeah, I gotta say for a second I was like, where is this going? Ah, oh yeah, you asked for awkward. Oh yeah, no, that was great, perfect. You nailed that nailed it. Uh, we also like to talk to our guests about things they do for fun, you know, when they're not environmental saving the world and writing books, but you mentioned that you are one of 17 Bengals fans in the world. Yeah, not very many of us. My uncle's a Browns fan. I think there's 4 of them. I don't know I think they're more than 4. They're all more, but are they more miserable than the Bengals? I don't know. I mean, this is my, the Browns have a like a, you know, just a historic following in a blue collar community of Cleveland. Cincinnati is sort of come see come sound the Bengals and like I don't even live there. And so like, you know, like there are a few podcasts around the Bengals and like I'm pretty sure that I'm the only listener, uh. 

For some stuff, uh, yeah, I kind of agree with you. I, uh, yeah, I hate to say it is the truth. It is, yeah, where did it come from? Why Cincinnati? Well, I was born in Cincinnati. We moved to Buffalo when I was 4, and you may be too young to remember this, but there was an AFC championship game between the Bengals and the Bills, I think in 1989 or 1990. And I was living in Buffalo, so I was the only kid in Orange at my elementary school. And like, like you're searching during those years for like something that distinguishes you from your peers, like, you know, we all like kickball, right? And we all hate math, but I was a Bengals fan in Orange, and they were all Bills fans and blue and red and so. I don't know, like you, you like it's a formative moment like that. Then the Bengals won that game. And so like, yeah, so, so I was able to lord that over all of my peers. So I didn't have any friends for the rest of my, you know, yeah, that was it for me, but it, but it was worth it, man. It was worth it. I think the trajectory of your life could have been different if they lost that game. Yeah, it's a sliding doors moment for sure. That's too funny. I mean, it's, you know, it's funny. It's like the reason I'm a Steelers fan is because my dad was basically like, Well, you're a Steelers fan or you live outside. Those are your choices. And uh it's just kind of funny. It's just kind of funny how that works. It's just stuck, you know, I've never lived in Pittsburgh, ever, you know, I grew up in Virginia, so it's just, but that's it. That's how it comes to be and, and now I'm stuck with it. So, um, yeah, your team's at least more fun these days, it seems. 

So a few weeks ago, you picked up a pretty good quarterback, I hear. Yeah, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. Uh, yeah, we'll see. But anyway, I know that, that we're actually we're out of time, really, really appreciate you being here, but is there anything else you'd like to leave us with before we let you go? No, keep on the fight. The world of environmental, environmental professionals is going to improve, and I think that people should stick with it. Keep asking this question of who should decide, and I think that that's a way into people's hearts who will be able to say, you're right, maybe I'm not gonna get everything that I want, but there needs to be some process by which we're able to weigh trade-offs and then come to a conclusion and move forward. And that's just how, that's how life works in every other room, and it should work in this one as well. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Last but not least, where can people get in touch with you if they'd like to reach out? I'm on the Brown website. I sit here at Brown University. It's Marc M A R C_ Dunkelman, D U N K E L M A N at brown.edu and I very frequently respond. So, uh I can't guarantee it, but I, I try to keep up. Very cool. Thank you, Marc, so much. Appreciate it. Glad to be on. Thanks for having me. And then that's our show. Thank you, Marc, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. See you, everybody.