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The Strange Villainization of the Walkable City

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Friday, May 31, 2024

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city. It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way. Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.” Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom. The 15-minute city asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure. These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry. Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass. “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city.

It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.

Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way.

Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.

But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.”

Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”

In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.

There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.

Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”

Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.

In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure.

These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.

It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.

Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry.

Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass.

“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

Read the full story here.

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A Warning for the Modern Striver

A new biography of Peter Matthiessen chronicles his many paradoxical attempts to escape who the world expected him to be.

Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. We are a country of pilgrims, engaged in a lifelong search for what Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “original relation to the universe”—a unique understanding of the world that doesn’t rely on the traditions or teachings of past generations. Those who internalize this expectation will walk, trek, and seek—anything to shed an inherited skin and find an undiscovered self they can inhabit. If only skin, inherited or not, were so easy to shed. As Emerson wrote, “My giant goes with me wherever I go.”Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson in his new biography of Matthiessen, True Nature. Richardson portrays the peripatetic life of Matthiessen—a celebrated author, magazine editor, and undercover agent who died in 2014—not as an eclectic series of adventures but as a single, 86-year spiritual quest. As he writes, Matthiessen’s “inner journey determined the choices he made throughout his long life; it is the string on which the various beads of his career were strung.” Matthiessen fled his monied upbringing in a flawed yet fascinating attempt to escape the person the world expected him to be.The central project of Matthiessen’s existence was a relentless, often painful attempt to locate what, quoting Zen Buddhists, he called a “true nature”—an authentic core beneath the layers of identity that he had received or constructed. His life story provides a warning for today’s perpetually dissatisfied strivers: mainly members of the tech or business elite who have made a name for themselves, only to still feel empty and insecure. Many use their considerable resources to set out for other territories in search of something they’re unlikely to find.[Read: You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do]Like many pilgrimages, Matthiessen’s journey began with a foundational trauma. Born in 1927, he had a storybook childhood on New York’s Fishers Island that was ruptured one summer by an incident on his father’s boat. The young Matthiessen had been learning to swim, so his father took him out to the harbor and threw him overboard to see if the lessons had stuck. As Richardson writes, Matthiessen made the mistake of clinging to his father’s shirt as he was thrown and nearly broke his arm on the side of the boat. He would later call this humiliation “the opening skirmish in an absolutely pointless lifelong war” with his family, and his adulthood was a series of escapes from that original wound. He fled to Paris, the classic expatriate move, but did so under bizarre circumstances—co-founding The Paris Review while serving as an agent for the CIA. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to flee a society he saw as corrupt; Matthiessen, for his part, went to the center of the establishment’s undercover operations to fund and facilitate his own existential escape. Jill Krementz The only writer to ever win National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Matthiessen was an architect of the postwar intellectual world, a contemporary of giants such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Styron. His peers often waged their philosophical battles in the public squares of New York and Washington, but Matthiessen grew wary of the ego and performance required of the literary lion. Instead he traveled to the mountains of Nepal in search of snow leopards, and deep into China and Mongolia to catch a glimpse of the rarest cranes on Earth. But what he was really searching for was far more personal.Matthiessen’s pursuits weren’t solely internal; his work was also a very public counterpoint to the materialism and social conformity that he believed defined the second half of 20th-century America. His seminal book, Wildlife in America, published in 1959, was a meticulously researched history of the natural world and the devastating effects of human activity. Richardson rightly calls it “a landmark in nature writing,” which predated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Matthiessen’s search for a preindustrial Eden also drives The Snow Leopard, his best-known work. On its surface, the book is the account of his two-month trek into Nepal’s Himalayas with the naturalist George Schaller, in 1973. But it is also a record of what Matthiessen called “a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart” as he grieved the recent death of his wife. The hunt for the elusive, almost mythical snow leopard becomes a metaphor for the search for spiritual enlightenment, a release from the travails and humiliations of everyday human life.I first read The Snow Leopard when I was 20. It filled me with the misguided but tantalizing belief that a life of meaning was to be found elsewhere. It inspired my own pilgrimage to the Alps, retracing the trails that Friedrich Nietzsche hiked while writing his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; I sought the kind of authenticity that seemed impossible to find in a comfortable American suburb. The journey was enabled by a scholarship to a good school—a form of privilege that was almost entirely lost on me. Matthiessen’s profound and lonely meditations at 17,000 feet were, similarly, made possible by National Geographic funding, a name that opened doors, the very worldly security he was trying to transcend.Perhaps he understood, on some level, the irony. Richardson writes that in the Amazon, many years before his subject traveled to Nepal, Matthiessen had encountered a genuine wanderer, a French Canadian drifter named Johnny Gauvin, and felt a sudden, uncomfortable self-awareness. Displacement and its attendant poverty were Gauvin’s way of life. Matthiessen realized that he was no authentic man of the wilderness, but an affluent visitor. “It’s a disturbing quality, and one that induces a certain self-consciousness about one’s eyeglasses, say, or the gleam of one’s new khaki pants,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1961. Pilgrimages sometimes cause collateral damage too. In later life, he admitted that it may have been a mistake to leave his 8-year-old son so soon after the death of his wife to embark on the Himalayan expedition.Matthiessen’s example provides a powerful archetype for the modern day. The tech billionaire who flies to space seeking the “overview effect” is in search of something beyond the ken of the material world, which he has already conquered. The annual ritual of Burning Man sees wealthy people enact a temporary shedding of their consumerist skin, even if getting there requires enlarging one’s carbon footprint. The Silicon Valley executive who flies to Peru for an ayahuasca retreat is on a journey Matthiessen would have recognized intimately. Long before embarking on his formal Zen training, Matthiessen was an early psychonaut, experimenting with LSD in the 1960s. In search of mind-altering effects, he sought a chemical shortcut to the dissolution of the ego, a forced glimpse of the “true nature” that his privilege and ambition otherwise obscured. Matthiessen’s path from psychedelics to the rigorous discipline of Zen meditation shows what a genuine spiritual journey looks like: It is extremely difficult, deeply private, and never-ending. There is no shortcut. Jill Krementz [Read: A reality check for tech oligarchs]Did Matthiessen ever find what he was looking for? Richardson’s elegant and rigorous biography wisely leaves the question open. But what it does make clear is that “true nature” is not a stable or permanent destination. It is a process, an experience, a temporary vision, an opening caused by a sudden confrontation with the world beyond us. Later in life, as Richardson writes, Matthiessen compared it to a tiger jumping into a quiet room. Reflecting on his tiger moment—a vision of his dying wife experienced in a sesshin, an intense form of Buddhist meditation—Matthiessen noted that “for the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone, there was no separate ‘I.’ Wounds, anger, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart was the heart of all creation.” But this beautiful instant is, by definition, temporary.Matthiessen, ultimately, refused to fit into any tidy box. He was an environmental activist who hobnobbed with the jet set, a devoted Buddhist who wrestled with a titanic ego, a man who knew that all things ultimately return to nature but fought against death to the very end. Matthiessen embodied many ironies, but one might feel particularly evergreen: The conditions that make possible a search for existential fulfillment are often what make it so very difficult to find.

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Oil refinery closures leave workers searching for a job that ‘just doesn’t exist’

For the refinery workers being laid off — most of whom lack a college degree — it’s unlikely they’ll find another job that pays as well, despite recent efforts by the state to help.

In summary For the refinery workers being laid off — most of whom lack a college degree — it’s unlikely they’ll find another job that pays as well, despite recent efforts by the state to help. Wilfredo Cruz went to the doctor in October of last year to have his brain scanned because he was experiencing vertigo — a dangerous condition when you’re a refinery worker like Cruz and your job entails climbing 200-foot towers and fixing heavy machinery. While he waited at the doctor’s office, he picked up his phone and felt a moment of panic, seeing 100 unread text messages in the last hour. The Phillips 66 refinery complex in Los Angeles had just said that it was going to close, and Cruz learned in that moment that he would eventually lose his job, along with nearly 1,000 other employees and contractors. “It was a big shock, a gut punch,” said Cruz, who thinks his last day will be sometime in April. Workers say layoff notices will begin to go out in the next few months. It’s just one of a handful of refineries that have closed or that intend to close in the coming months. For the workers — most of whom lack a college degree — it’s unlikely they’ll find another job that pays as well, despite recent efforts by the state to help. Though the Trump administration signed legislation creating billions of dollars in tax cuts for oil and gas companies, it’s not going to save these jobs or offer the workers any money to train for new ones. “You have people earning between $80,000 to $200,000 a year, and almost everyone is a high school graduate and that’s it,” said Cruz. “To go out and look for another job that’s even somewhat comparable, it just doesn’t exist.” When he isn’t at the refinery, Cruz is wearing a plain black shirt, shorts, and New Balance sneakers — anything that’s easy to clean if his 2-year old son throws food at him, he said. His vertigo is better these days, almost a year after the refinery said it would close, but he now has to find a job so he can support his family and pay his mortgage. The best bet, he said, is to go back to school and start a new career in cybersecurity. Thousands of jobs lost California has about 100,000 workers in the fossil fuel industry, according to an August report by the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s about the population of a small city, such as Merced or Redding. As the state continues its transition to renewable energy, many of those jobs may disappear — and some already have. Refineries have been closing all across the U.S. in recent years, but California has been hit hard, especially in Contra Costa County, Solano County and parts of southern Los Angeles, near Long Beach. First it was the Marathon refinery in Contra Costa County in 2020, which put hundreds of people out of work before the plant converted to renewable fuels with a fraction of the former workforce. Then Phillips 66 began shifting one of its Contra Costa County refineries to renewables and closed an affiliated plant on the Central Coast. A Valero refinery in Solano County is also expected to close in the next few months, leading to more layoffs. Publicly, oil companies have given vague justifications for the closures, though oil industry advocates, such as the Western States Petroleum Association, blame the state’s increased regulation and its renewable energy transition. Environmental groups point to the decrease in oil demand as more Californians turn to electric vehicles. With thousands of jobs at stake, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-led state Legislature this summer tried to strike a deal with Valero to avoid the closure of its Solano County refinery. Those conversations are still “ongoing,” said Daniel Villaseñor, the deputy director of communications for the governor. What the state has offered so far is a $30 million pot of money, which refinery workers can use to train for new jobs. The money went out to four different workforce organizations last February, and they have until 2027 to distribute it to workers in various ways, such as through scholarships. First: Workers cross a street as smoke billows from a fire at the Martinez Refinery Company in Martinez in Contra Costa County on Feb. 1, 2025. Last: A worker stands atop a tank car that carries liquefied petroleum gas at the Marathon Martinez Refinery on April 27, 2020. Photos by Jose Carlos Fajardo, Bay Area News Group The United Steelworkers union, which represents many of the Phillips 66 refinery workers, received about a third of the money and recruited Cruz to help find eligible workers at his job. Some of his colleagues are trying to become truck drivers, emergency medical technicians, or radiologists, but the state money rarely covers all the training expenses, he said. In his spare time, Cruz is enrolled in an online, year-long certificate program in cybersecurity at UC San Diego and is using the state money to cover the $4,000 tuition. He said he wants a remote job, something that would allow him to spend more time with his son. The steelworkers union has pushed Newsom for much more, ideally “hundreds of millions of dollars per year” to help retrain the refinery workers it represents, said Mike Smith, the national bargaining chair for the union. The governor has yet to make any new promises. Six-figure salary, no degree required The average work day at a refinery might entail crawling into small spaces, withstanding searing heat, or operating heavy machinery with precision. And it can be dangerous: In 2006, the roof of a storage tank collapsed, killing one person and injuring four others at the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Los Angeles, which was then owned by an earlier iteration of the company. Twelve-hour shifts are the norm, including many night shifts, and overtime is common. Nearby residents complain that the Phillips 66 facilities have a foul smell and that they pump cancer-causing chemicals into the air, creating health risks for the entire community. Workers are required to wear full-body fire retardant uniforms each day because fires are a constant risk, such as last week, when an explosion rocked a Chevron refinery in El Segundo. There was no major damage. Flames and smoke from a large fire rises from the Chevron refinery in El Segundo on Oct. 2, 2025. Photo by Daniel Cole, Reuters Though the work can be physically demanding, the rewards are plentiful. Union workers at the Phillips 66 refinery complex make about $115,000 a year, plus a pension and an 8% match on 401k contributions, said Smith. Together, the Phillips 66 refineries in Los Angeles and the Valero refinery in Solano County produce about 17% of the state’s gas. Without these facilities, Californians could see higher prices at the pump, according to an independent analysis by the federal government. Laurie Wallace, a self-described artist, never wanted to work in oil and gas, but the money was a big draw, she said. For years, she was working as many as three different jobs, saving up money for punk and ska concerts while flipping burgers at In-N-Out, helping customers at Ace Hardware, or working shifts at a local cafe. Her husband at the time learned about a training program for refinery workers. He said he was going to apply and when she said she was interested, he told her she would never get in. “I took the test and got the better score,” Wallace said. “I don’t do well with people telling me not to do something.” In the nearly 18 years since that exam, she’s worked at the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Los Angeles, handling the heavy machinery that transports California’s oil and gas. Wallace often earns over $100,000, especially with overtime, allowing her to achieve what many might consider the American Dream: a four-bedroom house in the Long Beach suburbs with an affordable mortgage and family vacations every year, including cruises to Mexico and trips to Las Vegas. She’ll likely see a pay cut in any future job. In a 2023 study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, UC Irvine professor Virginia Parks helped survey those who had been laid off by the Marathon oil refinery in Contra Costa County in 2020. She found that roughly a quarter were unemployed or no longer looking for work over a year after losing their jobs. Some workers found opportunities at other oil refineries, though they made less money because they lacked seniority or a union. Others found jobs at utility companies or chemical treatment plants, and a few started working in health care or retail. “I don’t think (refinery workers) need long training programs but they do need some sort of reskilling,” said Parks, who wants the state to provide workers more financial help. She’s especially interested in state grants that give workers income support while they search for a skilled job. “Otherwise they’re just going to find whatever (job) they can.” Her study found that workers who did find a job after getting laid off made about $38 an hour — $12 less than before. Lots of experience but few ways to prove it Since the layoffs at the Phillips 66 refinery complex will happen slowly over the next few months, Wallace still has a job for now. Her department is responsible for receiving and shipping the oil and gas that arrives at the Port of Los Angeles, work that is so essential that she thinks she’ll be one of the last people laid off, potentially in 2027. Over the years, she’s driven the trains that transport tons of oil and gas, operated cranes to carry pieces of pipelines and climbed on top of the massive fuel storage tanks that line the 110 Freeway. Often, she said she worked six or even seven days in a row. Laurie Wallace at the end of her overnight shift in front of the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington, Los Angeles, on Oct. 1, 2025. Photo by Stella Kalinina for CalMatters In April, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and got a modified schedule. Now she works night shifts and only two or three days in a row. After finishing her radiation therapy around 2 p.m., she changes out of her usual attire, a punk T-shirt and jeans, and gets into her work uniform. She then has to get through Los Angeles traffic, bypass the plant’s two layers of security, and travel across the refinery, which takes up multiple city blocks, or about 650 acres. Her shift begins at 4:30 p.m., where she spends 12 hours in a room, alone, under fluorescent lights, actively monitoring 16 different computer screens for changes in pressure or chemistry. After so many years, staying alert during a night shift is second nature, she said with a laugh. “I’m a little high strung. I have no problem staying awake.” The stakes are high. If she isn’t paying attention and a machine fails or a tank has the wrong pressure, fuel leaks can occur. In 2014, a hole burst in an underground pipeline near the refinery, pouring 1,200 gallons of oil into a residential street. Although Wallace has used many cranes over the years, she doesn’t have a crane operator’s license. In fact, all of the training that she’s done happens on-site, and her employer isn’t required to track it or give her any credential, such as a license or certificate, that could transfer to another job. After the Marathon refinery in Contra Costa County closed, former workers struggled to substantiate their skills when looking for new jobs, the UC Berkeley Labor survey found. Drawing directly on the study, and with support from the steelworkers union, longtime labor activist and state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat, proposed a bill this year that would require employers to provide their workers with proof of any on-the-job training or education. The governor has until Oct. 12 to sign or veto the bill. It’s only “a first step” though, said Parks, a co-author of the study. Long-term, she said refinery workers should have the option to acquire independent certificates or credentials, such as a crane operator license, that prove their skills and don’t rely on an employer at all. “It’s not ideal but it’s temporary” So far, only a fraction of the oil and gas workers who are eligible for state support have actually received it. “We just started enrolling members,” said Rosi Romo, who coordinates the grant program on behalf of the steelworkers union. Though the steelworkers union received the money last March, only about 100 people have participated so far, said Romo, most of them in Southern California. She said the program can fund 650 scholarships, offering up to $15,000 in tuition for each worker In Kern County, where the oil industry is a major employer, the local job centers received over $11 million from the state, which they’ve used to help nearly 370 former oil and gas workers retrain in new careers, including trucking and nursing. The job centers have enough money to serve around 750 people, said Danette Williams, who works in marketing for the centers, known as the Employers’ Training Resource. Unlike the steelworkers union, which is only giving out scholarships, Williams said the Employers’ Training Resource is also offering to reimburse 50% of wages during the first 480 hours of the workers’ new jobs. Romo said she wasn’t aware that was possible under the union’s contract with the state, but if it is, she said she’d try to offer the same benefit. The other organizations who received the grant money did not respond to CalMatters’ questions. The Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington, on Sept. 30, 2025. Photo by Stella Kalinina for CalMatters Romo, along with other representatives from the steelworkers union, said the work schedule at the Phillips 66 refinery complex is one reason why workers have yet to use most of the money. As of August, about a quarter of union employees have already left the facility for other opportunities, said Smith, the national bargaining chair for the union. The remaining employees are left working overtime. Once layoffs begin in the coming months, Romo and Smith said they expect an uptick in the number of workers taking advantage of the scholarship money. Phillips 66 did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its overtime policies or other ways it may be supporting workers’ job transitions. Cruz said he’s working six days a week now, 12 hours each day. To make progress on his cybersecurity course at UC San Diego, he tries to listen to lectures and audiobooks during his commute or while eating lunch or dinner during his two, 30-minute breaks. After he puts his son to sleep around 9 p.m., he has a few hours to study, though he has to wake up at 5 a.m. to make it to his shift on time. “It’s not ideal but it’s temporary,” he said. Wallace has a slight advantage, since she started taking online classes in 2020 to complete her associate degree. She’s still one class short, but she hasn’t had the time to finish it. Between her radiation therapy and the 12-hour night shifts, she said it’s unlikely she’ll be able to study for at least another year while she works with the skeleton crew that’s closing the refinery. If she had time, she said she would finish her associate degree and use the state training grant to help offset the cost of a bachelor’s degree. But because the state tuition grants expire in 2027, it’s quite possible she won’t be able to use the tuition money at all.

Activism

Chemicals

Education

Why Concord?

The geological origins of the American Revolution

Photographs by Amani WillettEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Concord, Massachusetts, 18 miles northwest of Boston, was the starting point for the War of Independence. On April 19, 1775, militia and minutemen from Concord and neighboring towns clashed with British regulars at the Old North Bridge and forced a bloody retreat by the King’s men back to safety in Boston. Some 4,000 provincials from 30 towns answered the call to arms. Concord claimed precedence as the site of THE FIRST FORCIBLE RESISTANCE TO BRITISH AGGRESSION, the words inscribed on the town’s 1836 monument to the battle (to the enduring resentment of nearby Lexington, which actually suffered the first American deaths that day). Concord’s boast took hold thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1837 portrayed the brief skirmish at the bridge as “the shot heard round the world.” That moment has been a key to local identity ever since.Concord is widely known for another aspect of its history: It is intimately associated with the Transcendentalist movement in the quarter century before the Civil War. That distinction, too, it owes to Emerson. Born and raised in Boston, the most prominent public intellectual of Civil War America was the scion of six generations of New England divines, going back to Concord’s founding minister. In 1835, at age 32, Emerson returned to “the quiet fields of my fathers,” and from that ancestral base forged his career as a lecturer in Boston and beyond. He quickly became known as an eloquent voice for a new philosophy—calling on Americans to shed outmoded ways of thinking rooted in the colonial and British past and to put their trust in nature and in themselves. Partaking, as he saw it, of a divinity running through all Creation, Americans had an unprecedented opportunity to build an original culture on the principles of democracy, equality, and individual freedom. Emerson’s project was to unleash this infinite force.In Concord, Emerson attracted a coterie of sympathetic souls who shared his vision, including Henry David Thoreau, who, as the author of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” would ultimately surpass Emerson in renown. As the town gained literary stature, Concord became a byword for the philosophical movement it hosted. Henry Adams called Transcendentalism “the Concord Church.” Emerson projected his influence by means of books and lectures. He was among the founders of The Atlantic, calling in its pages for the abolition of slavery (and, a few months later, mourning the death of Thoreau). Concord itself emerged, in the words of Henry James, as “the biggest little place in America.”Why Concord? How did a small town of some 2,200 inhabitants in 1860 become a cradle of not one but two revolutions? The best-known explanations distort the town’s history while inflating its self-regard. One view, popularized by Van Wyck Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Flowering of New England (1936), emphasizes Concord’s bucolic beauty, agricultural economy, and limited industrial development. It was a place fit for poets and philosophers, where nature and man came together in rare harmony. A second view, advanced by the Yale historian Ralph Henry Gabriel in 1940, holds that the Transcendentalists were the intellectual heirs of the minutemen. By challenging the materialism of business and politics and by insisting on the ideals of a democratic faith, Gabriel argued, Emerson and Thoreau were “carrying on the fight which had been started by farmers at the bridge.”It’s no wonder that locals and tourists alike continue to indulge such explanations. An attractive civic identity can brand a town and bring in business; ironically, Concord’s reputation as a place of principle, carrying the torch of democratic ideals, serves just this purpose. Still, as history, the public image of the Transcendentalists as heirs of the minutemen has little foundation. The minutemen had fought for collective liberty, the communal right to govern themselves and uphold a way of life going back to the Puritan founders. Transcendentalists, by contrast, stressed individual rights in a break with tradition. Forsake inherited institutions and involuntary associations, Emerson urged. “Trust thyself” was his strategy for changing times. A reconstruction of Concord’s Old North Bridge, where militia and minutemen forced British soldiers to retreat on April 19, 1775. (Amani Willett for The Atlantic) The town of Concord was not some sheltered enclave, slumbering through the revolutions of the age. In the Transcendentalist era, the community was economically dynamic, religiously diverse, racially heterogeneous, class-stratified, politically divided, and receptive to social and political reform. It stood in the mainstream of antebellum America. It offered no asylum from change.It’s easy to overstate the uniqueness of Concord in politics as well as culture. Why was the town at the forefront of the Revolution? Not because it was more militant than most. In the opposition to British taxes and “tyranny,” it took its time, reluctant to unsettle authority and break with the Crown. Then again, so did most towns in Massachusetts, until Britain revoked the colony’s provincial charter and assailed local self-government. Moderation made Concord a safe place to store military supplies; its leaders were unlikely to act rashly and precipitate a war. So did its distance from Boston and its pivotal place on the Massachusetts road network. The town was a market center, a seat of courts, and a staging ground for military expeditions—such as the march to Boston in 1689 to overthrow the authoritarian royal governor, Edmund Andros. But other towns, such as Weston and Worcester, could have performed a similar service in 1775.As for Concord’s status as the center of Transcendentalism, the claim is inflated. The movement drew support across the Boston area. Transcendentalists preached from Unitarian pulpits not only in Boston but also in nearby towns such as Watertown, Arlington, and Lexington. So Concord was not alone: Its citizens experienced the same forces unsettling life all over Massachusetts. Its writers just happened to address that social transformation with a vision of nature and the self so compelling that Concord became the symbolic rather than literal center of Transcendentalism.[From the December 2021 issue: Emerson didn’t practice the self-reliance he preached]In one key respect, though, Concord truly was unique. In 1635, when the Massachusetts General Court authorized the founding of the town, it possessed a natural setting with distinct advantages replicated nowhere else in New England. Over millennia, the forces of geology had fashioned a physical landscape that the Native inhabitants had improved to sustain their way of life, and had unwittingly made ready for appropriation by the newcomers from across the sea. These resources drew pioneers into the interior, well beyond the seaboard, for the first time, and enabled the creation of new social and intellectual landscapes. Nature blessed Concord from the start. Emerson rightly invoked the universal currents of being, whose natural laws, as he saw it, were the same in his era as at the beginning of time.The Concord River runs north, rather than southeasterly down the regional slope toward the sea. When the edge of the great ice sheet began to retreat from the area about 17,000 years ago, the Concord River was dammed up by the ice to create a ribbon-shaped glacial lake with a muddy bottom. Eventually the lake drained away, allowing the Concord River to cut an inner valley beneath a moist and fertile lowland.This process set the stage for the creation of what the Indigenous Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket peoples called Musketaquid, meaning “grass-ground river,” a marsh about 20 miles long and so flat and so uninterrupted that Thoreau skated the entire round-trip distance one freezing day—January 31, 1855. The languid stream passed through broad meadows to create a northern version of the Everglades (without the alligators). Nathaniel Hawthorne lived along the bank for three weeks before he discerned which way the river flowed.This riparian ecology attracted colonists: Concord became the first English town in North America above tidewater, beyond the sight and scent of the sea. Here the lush growth of freshwater hay would undergird a system of English husbandry dependent on livestock. Here migrating shad, herring, and salmon thrived in the aquatic richness, furnishing plentiful protein sources, vitamins, and minerals. Here the firm, muddy banks made an ideal habitat for the freshwater mussels on which other animals depended: muskrat, otters, turtles, human beings. On July 3, 1852, Thoreau estimated that more than 16,335 freshwater clams lay along 330 feet of the riverbank. Migrating waterfowl followed the meadows. Songbirds nested along their edges.Transplanting Old World methods, the founders of Concord harvested natural hay in its Great Meadow, which was annually enriched with nutrients by flooding. Thoreau gazed at the scene and imagined a river as fertile and ancient as the Nile. “It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here,” he predicted in the opening lines of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Above the meadow stood the Great Field, an unusually flat, loamy, well-drained terrace that the Native people had long cleared for cultivation, using fish for fertilizer. For the colonists, this was a place to grow cereal grains, including the novel crop of Indian corn, fertilized by manure from cattle fed on hay from the Great Meadow. Above the Great Field was a broad expanse of fairly level habitable land covered by old-growth forest. This extensive lowland gave inhabitants room to spread out on mostly stone-free soils, unlike so much of New England, and create productive farms.Concord lies at the midpoint of Musketaquid, a place where the Assabet River, a typical midsize New England stream, enters from the west to bisect the ribbon of meadowland, creating the Sudbury River to the south and the Concord River to the north. It’s no accident that Concord village was settled in this strategic spot, where three rivers touch—the axis mundi of a most unusual valley.Eighteen miles. That’s the distance from Boston Harbor to Concord village. A regiment of British soldiers walked it on their ill-fated expedition. In October 1833, Thoreau hiked the route to Concord from his Harvard dormitory in Cambridge, blistering his feet in the process. Eighteen miles was far enough from the capital to serve as the primary depot of provincial military stores; it made for a long march in the dead of night through hostile countryside, as the British regulars learned to their sorrow. In times of peace, Concord could take advantage of its favorable location—far enough from more urban coastal settlements to cultivate a rural identity centered on agriculture, but close enough to enjoy proximity to educational institutions, literary culture, markets and wharves, and the statehouse. Concord became a right-size county seat, its central village of shops, taverns, courthouse, and meetinghouse surrounded by farms no more than a few minutes’ walk in any direction.The physical separation between Boston and Concord involves more than the linear distance between two points. The population centers occupy different watersheds—the Charles River watershed to the east and the Concord River watershed to the west. In fact, they lie on different bedrock terranes that originated in different places in different eras. The terrane boundary coincides with the Bloody Bluff fault, named for a rocky notch where British troops were trapped by ferocious provincial fire. Here the land leans toward the security of the sea. To the west, it leans toward a hinterland where pioneering residents looked to one another for community support. Without the Lexington Road and its regular stagecoach traffic, 18th-century Concord would have remained an agricultural village. Instead, it became a prominent node in an expanding trade network. The significance of the watershed divide between country and city diminished only after the Fitchburg Railroad reached Concord in 1844. Top: The woods surrounding Walden Pond. Bottom: Concord’s Great Meadow. The construction of a railroad in 1844 made the town a day-trip destination for middle-class urbanites. (Amani Willett for The Atlantic) Before steam power and the internal combustion engine, the main source of mechanical power in Concord derived from flowing water. Harnessing hydropower required the construction of a dam, behind which a reservoir filled up with streamflow. For much of its history, Concord village was defined by a man-made pond, the filling of which was the counterpart to our putting fuel in a tank or recharging a battery.At Concord’s beginning, in the 1630s, its settlers clustered in a central village to take advantage of the waterpower of Mill Brook. A dam was built on the stream in a constricted space—the site of an abandoned fishing weir put in place by Indigenous occupants to capture the seasonal runs of shad and salmon coming upstream to spawn. The mill dam was sufficient for two centuries to power a diversity of small-scale manufacturing enterprises, including grist- and sawmills and blacksmith shops, but it was not enough to expand and compete even with the small factory cities west of Musketaquid, such as nearby Maynard and Stow, not to mention the industrial behemoths Lowell and Lawrence to the north. The enduring legacy of Mill Brook was to foster the growth of a central village in a colony where dispersed residences became the norm. Together with the Great Field and Great Meadow, the nucleated village of Concord, where people settled thickly under the watchful eyes of neighbors, manifested the Puritan ideal of community on the ground.Above the marshy meadows of Musketaquid, but below the fairly level wooded land over which Concord center sprawled, is a discrete alluvial floodplain dominated by river-transported silt and sand. And where this alluvium is absent, the meadows have low, natural-edging levees, high and dry enough to provide a habitat for a beautiful “gallery” forest fringing all three rivers on both sides. This extensive strip of trees constituted a buffer zone between the deforested open landscape of farms, fields, and pastures and the never-forested wetland of meadows and streams. As Thoreau floated down the rivers and walked along their banks, he delighted in this woodland composed not of tall pine and hickory, but of willow, alder, birch, red maple, and other species. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home in Concord, and the nature reflected in its window (Amani Willett for The Atlantic) While drafting Nature from his second-floor study in the Old Manse—the house near Old North Bridge later occupied by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne—Emerson would look out over a field and stone walls toward a gallery forest on both sides of the Concord River. Thoreau’s views, when he traveled the river by boat, skates, or snowshoes, were flanked by woods on both sides. Owing to its hydrology, Concord’s gallery forest persisted, even during the peak deforestation of the mid-19th century, when forest cover was reduced to about 10 percent of the town’s land area.Along the southern edge of Concord lies an elevated tract of droughty, infertile, and often bumpy land that remained unfit for development well into the 20th century. The uphill climb to that tract, known as Brister’s Hill for a once-enslaved Black man who made his residence there as a free man, is the north-facing escarpment of a forested plateau known as Walden Woods. Composed mainly of river gravel and sand, this upland is an ancient glacial delta that built outward over buried blocks of stagnant glacial ice. When those blocks later melted underground, the result was a chain of sinkhole lakes and ponds called kettles. The largest and purest of these is Walden Pond, the deepest lake in Massachusetts.For the Transcendentalists of the 1830s and ’40s, Walden Pond served as a source of inspiration within an easy walk of Emerson’s parlor. When Thoreau lived there in the mid-1840s, the lake became the imagined interlocutor for his philosophical musings—“Walden, is it you?”—and a powerful symbol of the unity of nature. Though the still-beautiful Concord River had been greatly changed by this time, Walden Pond, “earth’s eye,” became Thoreau’s exemplar of purity and eternity in a landscape denuded of trees and drained of its wetlands.But the commercialism and superficial mass culture that dismayed Emerson and outraged Thoreau intruded even here. An entrepreneurial agent for the Fitchburg Railroad built an amusement park at “Lake Walden.” In the Gilded Age, it became a day trip by train for middle-class urbanites and poor children from the Boston tenements. Eventually, the Emerson family acquired the bulk of the woodland surrounding the pond and donated it for public use.Concord is not unique in having one or more beautiful lakes within its borders. What makes it singular is that Thoreau’s book of the place made the place of the book world-famous. Walden became the foundational text for the aesthetic strand of the American environmental movement. Its emphasis on nature’s beauty and the spiritual inspiration that could be enjoyed at a humble kettle pond presented a pointed contrast to the utilitarian strand of the movement pioneered by George Perkins Marsh, the author of Man and Nature (1864), who sought to conserve nature for economic purposes. Of course, unwittingly, Thoreau’s classic also enhanced the tourist trade.In the 20th century, Concord, a town whose motto at times could be “Resisting change since 1775,” became a progressive leader on environmental and sustainability issues. Its otherwise inauspicious lake is now a global symbol and a destination for admirers of Thoreau. The more than 160,000 international pilgrims who come to visit every year, together with the attentions of nearby residents, threaten to love the pond and woods to death. It has been an ongoing political struggle to preserve Walden as it was in Thoreau’s day—an admittedly impossible task. Attempting to live up to that responsibility earned Concord acclaim across the world, notwithstanding the town’s decision in 1958 to site the town landfill within 800 feet of the lake—a choice considered temporary at the time and that local activists are now seeking to mitigate.Not everyone has appreciated the distinct landscape created by Concord’s geological history. In 1844, Margaret Fuller accused Emerson of settling for a placid suburban existence. A noble soul like his, she believed, required a sublime setting—dazzling waterfalls and mountain peaks—rather than the “poor cold low life” of Concord. Defensively, the country gentleman counted his blessings. If the town lacked “the thickets of the forest and the fatigues of mountains,” it was easy to reach and traverse. It was close enough to the city to attract big-name lecturers and performers, and yet distant enough to possess “the grand features of nature.” More than 160,000 pilgrims from around the globe visit Walden Pond each year. (Amani Willett for The Atlantic) Thoreau put the matter succinctly: Wildness lies all around us, and in it is “the preservation of the world.” Could not every town, he proposed, create a park “or rather a primitive forest of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel,” but be “a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation”? His neighbors took the suggestion to heart. In the 160-plus years since his death, they preserved a sizable portion of the town’s farms, forests, and wetlands from economic development. Of Concord’s nearly 16,200 acres of land, roughly 6,120 acres, or 38 percent, are now “permanently protected open space,” according to a 2015 town plan. Thoreau’s own close studies of natural phenomena, including his phenological notes on seasonal events—when plants leaf, for example, and when birds migrate, and when the river ice breaks up—are now indispensable records with which scientists assess the advance and toll of climate change today.Yet the challenge to care for that environmental heritage is ongoing. Concord is not frozen in time. It is an active, changing community facing unrelenting pressures for economic development—for instance, controversial proposals for a cell tower in Walden Woods and for expanded private-jet flights from nearby Hanscom Field. Thoreau witnessed the same root conflict. With geology emerging as a science in his time, he intuited that nature was as subject to change as human society; it was no fixed backdrop.For all our extraordinary human achievements, we remain earthlings. Rocks and minerals give rise to ecosystems, upon which human cultures are dependent. That’s the direction of human history in deep time: up from the ground. In our unprecedented modern geological epoch, the aptly named Anthropocene, human beings have become the dominant geological agents, thanks to the power of fossil fuels—also up from the ground, but exhaustible and not enduring. That change has its origins in the Industrial Revolution, against whose excesses the Transcendentalists warned.On April 19, 2025, some 70,000 people converged on Concord to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the battle that started it all. Marching in the parade were representatives from some of the 97 communities in the United States that take their name from the birthplace of the Revolution. The celebrations proved to be patriotic as well as inclusive, paying tribute to the heritage of liberty and self-government that is the legacy of the New England town. They were also surprisingly cheerful for our polarized time, though a good many participants did carry signs inspired by the minutemen: NO KING THEN, NO KING NOW.Every place is unique because every place is the contingent outcome of its own inescapable cascade of events—from rock to ecosystem to culture. Concord was lucky in its location, inheriting advantages from natural landscape and history on which its inhabitants could build a sense of place and community. It was a fierce determination to defend that community, with its tradition of town-meeting government, that inspired the resistance to the British regulars. The location of the Old North Bridge at a bedrock-anchored narrows between two large meadows made a logical place for the shot heard round the world. The Battle Road that led to it was flanked by stone walls and trees lining the edges of fields, at times narrowing to pass over streams or curving sharply to follow landforms. The character of the Concord fight owed much to geology. It helps explain the rout of the redcoats—and the ensuing popular confidence in the possibility of a military victory that lay eight years ahead.This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Why Concord?”

Activism

Agriculture

Animals

Exxon delays planned plastics plant on Texas coast

The announcement comes six weeks after a judge struck down the local school district’s decision to give Exxon a tax break for the $10 billion plant in Calhoun County.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here. Exxon Mobil will postpone its plans for a large new plastics production plant on the Gulf coast, according to the company. Construction was initially planned to begin next year on the $10 billion facility in rural Calhoun County. “Based on current market conditions, we are going to slow the pace of our development for the Coastal Plain Venture,” Exxon said in an emailed statement. “We’re confident in our growth strategy, and we remain interested in a potential project along the US Gulf Coast and in other regions around the world.” Six weeks prior, a county district court judge invalidated the local school board’s decision to negotiate a tax break agreement with Exxon, following a lawsuit from Diane Wilson, 77, and her group, San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper. On Aug. 19 the judge ordered the school board to redo its public hearing on Exxon’s tax break after Wilson alleged the district provided inadequate notice of the meeting in “a deliberate attempt to avoid public opposition.” Wilson, an internationally known environmental advocate, promised to bring a large audience for the repeat hearing. “I think it definitely played into it,” Wilson said of Exxon’s pause. “I think if everybody had just rolled over for them, if they got exactly what they wanted and there wasn’t a big fight, there would be no delay.” Exxon, which reported nearly $34 billion in profits in 2024, was seeking a 50% reduction in its property taxes to the rural Calhoun County Independent School District for 10 years, beginning in 2031, when the project would come online. The world-scale plastics plant was planned to produce up to 3 million tons per year of polyethylene pellets for export, primarily to Asia, according to Exxon’s December 2024 tax abatement application. John Titas, president of the Victoria Economic Development Corporation in nearby Victoria, said he didn’t think Exxon’s decision was related to the tax break fight. “I think they’ve been very thankful for the support they received in the community,” he said. “It’s economics. To justify an investment of that magnitude, you’ve got to make sure the market will provide a return.” In Exxon’s latest statement, first reported last week by Independent Commodity Intelligence Services, an industry news service, the company maintained the possibility of resuming the project in the future. “We’re maintaining good relationships with community leaders and contractors, so we are ready to reevaluate the project’s status when market conditions improve,” it said. Exxon didn’t specify which market conditions would need to change. Most projections forecast strong growth in plastics demand over coming years. The economic intelligence firm Precedence Research expects markets for polyethylene, which the Exxon plant would produce, to grow 64% between 2024 and 2034, according to a June 2025 assessment. Another firm, Expert Market Research, expects overall plastics markets to grow 51% in that time. According to the Plastics Industry Association, “The global plastics industry continues to accelerate, backed by strong demand.” Wilson said the project’s delay marked the best news she’d heard since 2019, when she found out that her lawsuit against another nearby petrochemical giant, Formosa Plastics, would end with a settlement worth more than $100 million in penalty payouts, facility upgrades and cleanup projects. Credit: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News A retired shrimper and mother of five, Wilson learned her tactics of resistance over decades of radical activism in defense of Texas’ coastal bays, where four generations of her family have fished for a living. In 2023 she received the Goldman Environmental Prize, the leading global award for environmental activism. As soon as she heard about the new Exxon project, in December 2024, she said she leaped into action, involving herself in the various public processes she’s come to know about, including the school district tax break agreements. “How a community reacts is extremely important and it’s extremely important that you do it in the beginning,” she said. “Move fast and don’t let up.” Disclosure: The Victoria Economic Development Corporation has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. The wait is over! The full TribFest program is here. Join us Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin and hear from 300+ thinkers, leaders and change-makers shaping Texas’ future. TribFest gives you a front-row seat to what’s next, with 100+ sessions covering education, the economy, policy, culture and more. Explore the program. TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.

Activism

Chemicals

Climate

Goodall's Influence Spread Far and Wide. Those Who Felt It Are Pledging to Continue Her Work

In the wake of Jane Goodall's death, the many scientists and others influenced by her are promising to do their best to carry on her legacy

In her 91 years, Jane Goodall transformed science and humanity's understanding of our closest living relatives on the planet — chimpanzees and other great apes. Her patient fieldwork and tireless advocacy for conservation inspired generations of future researchers and activists, especially women and young people, around the world.Her death on Wednesday set off a torrent of tributes for the famed primate researcher, with many people sharing stories of how Goodall and her work inspired their own careers. The tributes also included pledges to honor Goodall’s memory by redoubling efforts to safeguard a planet that sorely needs it. Making space in science for animal minds and emotions “Jane Goodall is an icon – because she was the start of so much,” said Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France. She recalled how many years ago Goodall answered a letter from a young aspiring researcher. “I wrote her a letter asking how to become a primatologist. She sent back a handwritten letter and told me it will be hard, but I should try,” Crockford said. “For me, she gave me my career.”Goodall was one of three pioneering young women studying great apes in the 1960s and 1970s who began to revolutionize the way people understood just what was -- and wasn’t -- unique about our own species. Sometimes called the “Tri-mates,” Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas spent years documenting the intimate lives of chimpanzees in Tanzania, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and orangutans in Indonesia, respectively.The projects they began have produced some of the long-running studies about animal behavior in the world that are crucial to understanding such long-lived species. “These animals are like us, slow to mature and reproduce, and living for decades. We are still learning new things about them,” said Tara Stoinski, a primatologist and president of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. “Jane and Dian knew each other and learned from each other, and the scientists who continued their work continue to collaborate today.”Goodall studied chimpanzees — as a species and as individuals. And she named them: David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi, Goliath. That was highly unconventional at the time, but Goodall’s attention to individuals created space for scientists to observe and record differences in individual behaviors, preferences and even emotions.Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at St. Andrews University who was inspired by Goodall, recalled how Goodall carefully combined empathy and objectivity. Goodall liked to use a particular phrase, “If they were human, we would describe them as happy,” or “If they were human, we would describe them as friends –- these two individuals together,” Hobaiter said. Goodall didn’t project precise feelings onto the chimpanzees, but nor did she deny the capacity of animals besides humans to have emotional lives.Goodall and her frequent collaborator, evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, had just finished the text of a forthcoming children's book, called “Every Elephant Has a Name,” which will be published around early 2027. Inspiring scientists and advocates for nature around the world From the late 1980s until her death, Goodall spent less time in the field and more time on the road talking to students, teachers, diplomats, park rangers, presidents and many others around the world. She inspired countless others through her books. Her mission was to inspire action to protect the natural world.In 1991, she founded an organization called Roots & Shoots that grew to include chapters of young people in dozens of countries.Stuart Pimm, a Duke University ecologist and founder of the nonprofit Saving Nature, recalled when he and Goodall were invited to speak to a congressional hearing about deforestation and extinction. Down the marble halls of the government building, “there was a huge line of teenage girls and their mothers just waiting to get inside the room to hear Jane speak,” Pimm said Thursday. “She was mobbed everywhere she went -- she was just this incredible inspiration to people in general, particularly to young women.”Goodall wanted everyone to find their voice, no matter their age or station, said Zanagee Artis, co-founder of the youth climate movement Zero Hour. “I really appreciated how much Jane valued young people being in the room -- she really fostered intergenerational movement building,” said Artis, who now works for the Natural Resources Defense Council.And she did it around the world. Roots & Shoots has a chapter in China, which Goodall visited multiple times.“My sense was that Jane Goodall was highly respected in China and that her organization was successful in China because it focused on topics like environmental and conservation education for youth that had broad appeal without touching on political sensitivities,” said Alex Wang, a University of California, Los Angeles expert on China and the environment, who previously worked in Beijing.What is left now that Goodall is gone is her unending hope, perhaps her greatest legacy.“She believed hope was not simply a feeling, but a tool,” Rhett Butler, founder of the nonprofit conservation-news site Mongabay, wrote in his Substack newsletter. “Hope, she would tell me, creates agency.” Carrying forward her legacy Goodall’s legacy and life’s work will continue through her family, scientists, her institute and legions of young people around the globe who are working to bridge conservation and humanitarian needs in their own communities, her longtime assistant said Thursday.That includes Goodall’s son and three grandchildren, who are an important part of the work of the Jane Goodall Institute and in their own endeavors, said Mary Lewis, a vice president at the institute who began working with the famed primatologist in 1990.Goodall’s son, Hugo van Lawick, works on sustainable housing. He is currently in Rwanda. Grandson Merlin and granddaughter Angelo work with the institute, while grandson Nick is a photographer and filmmaker, Lewis said. “She has her own family legacy as well as the legacy through her institutes around the world,” said Lewis.In addition to her famed research center in Tanzania and chimpanzee sanctuaries in other countries, including the Republic of Congo and South Africa, a new cultural center is expected to open in Tanzania late next year. There also are Jane Goodall Institutes in 26 countries, and communities are leading conservation projects in several countries, including an effort in Senegal to save critically endangered Western chimpanzees.But it is the institute’s youth-led education program called Roots & Shoots that Goodall regarded as her enduring legacy because it is “empowering new generations,” Lewis said.The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP’s climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

Activism

Animals

Climate

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L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life): From Standing Rock To The Swamp

On the banks of Louisiana, fierce Indigenous women are ready to fight—to stop the corporate blacksnake and preserve their way of life. They are risking everything to protect Mother Earth from the predatory fossil fuel companies that seek to poison it. The film follows water protector Cherri Foytlin in the swamps of Louisiana as she leads us on a no-nonsense journey of indigenous resistance to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP), which is an extension of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The pipelines are part of an ongoing legacy of colonization and slow genocide. At the heart of the struggle is a battle between people and profit.

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Dry Wells of the Paso Basin: A Tragedy of the Commons

In the early 1990s, agricultural corporations and other investors began buying thousands of acres of cultivated and uncultivated land with water rights in the scenic wine country of San Luis Obispo County, California. They planted more vineyards and sank dozens of deep, powerful wells for irrigation that have over-drafted the already depleted Paso Robles Basin aquifer. Around 2010, the shallower wells of hundreds of country homes and small farms and ranches began failing. This documentary tells that story through the voices of three small landowners who lost their livelihoods and hopes for their futures when their wells went dry. The film then follows how they and their supporters organize social force to participate in local political processes to assert their water rights and their concerns for the environmental health of the Paso Basin.

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Carbon Men Salvation: The Senator's Dilemma

Climate change is heating up the world at an accelerating rate, but Congress is frozen to action. Humanity is heading towards devastation; there is only one chance to change the future by traveling into the past. Brilliant climatologist student Anna Jones is researching a massive glacier in Antarctica that is on the verge of collapse. This disaster will drown coastal cities, trigger unprecedented climate refugee numbers and loss of life, while inciting wars. Anna’s father, Dan Jones, the newly elected Senator from New Jersey, is pivotal to the success or failure of a key climate bill. The vote is imminent. Powerful climate denier factions work against the necessary climate actions, even as the planet teeters on the prime tipping point where human behavior, science and legislation collide. Only Noah Poem, a time traveling scientist from the future, can help Anna Jones convince her climate doubting father to do the right thing. But time is running out as science fiction meets science fact. The fate of the human race hangs in the balance. One vote could save humanity.

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Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

The Strange Villainization of the Walkable City

Related News

A Warning for the Modern Striver

Oil refinery closures leave workers searching for a job that ‘just doesn’t exist’

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Suggested Viewing

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L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life): From Standing Rock To The Swamp

Dry Wells of the Paso Basin: A Tragedy of the Commons

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Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future