Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I

Green Fantasy Island

It is the end of summer, and this is the last piece about the havoc the environmental movement hath wrought in the countryside. I am hoping you are in the country and have some lazy time. This is a fun read, but you will come out of it knowing a) why we have no real growth among anyone but the professional classes, and what our sociopathic overlords have planned for us and our children for 2030, 2050, and 2090. It won’t scare you or hurt. I promise. You will laugh. We can beat them. Knowledge is weapon. Trust me, their ideas all end in a snarl of confusion because they are based on lies, false science and above all, hatred for humanity. What follows is the 21st Century version of Luddism married to Lysenkoism, the latter of which arguably starved Russians for generations. This micro-culture is funny, and quirky and mind blowingly destructive.

I came to this story late and by accident. While working in London, instead of a flat or condo, I bought with a friend a thirty-acre forest a half-hour ferry ride from my parent’s retirement home, on an island in the Pacific Northwest.

I’d grown up in the country, in southern Quebec, twenty miles from the Vermont border, so by the time I came home, I was hungering for country life as I had for nothing else but children and the ability to write a decent sentence. I‘d lived in Toronto, New York, and London for twenty years as a full-on urbanist. But one day, ten years after I‘d bought the land, I found myself heading for a traffic island outside the Time Inc. building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. Even though it was November, I kicked off my heels and planted my stockinged feet on the wizened grass, feeling for just that moment less parched, less metallic. Traffic roared by, but what I was doing was so odd, so out of time, that no one seemed to notice me. A year later, as if that moment had been a rehearsal, I vanished from the grisaille world of painful shoes and persistent anxiety and found myself ankle-deep in grace.

The ostensible reason was that my father was dying and I moved home to help. But that summer, after I built a cottage at the top of my hill, I found myself helplessly in love with the island and resolved to stay. After we had clear-cut an acre, I found that I had the proverbial hundred-mile view, from the coastal range that brackets Vancouver to the anime cartoon that is Mount Baker near Seattle, Washington, slices of navy blue sea between.

The island, Salt Spring, was on the large side—seventy-four square miles—and had about ten thousand residents, a figure that ballooned to twenty thousand every summer. There were three villages, and in center of the largest, a lively and rightly famous market was staged every Saturday. The island had been identified by an overenthusiastic journalist as one of the top ten art towns in North America. Its legendary beauty had drawn people from the United Kingdom, France, Holland, Germany, Australia, South Africa, and every state in the Union, making for an interesting cultural life; many were here because regional politics are notoriously wacky. As Washington State representative Joel Kretz jokes, “Harry Truman used to refer to the “Soviet State of Washington,” and that would go double for us. Besides, living was easy; even addicts and the homeless migrated here from all over the continent for the weather and the famous handouts.

The island was also known for its ecofeminist witches, who celebrated the high holidays of Wicca in their circles, casting petals on the water during the full moon and calling pods of killer whales (it was said) with their chanting. So while remote by the standards of London or New York, Salt Spring was not without interest for a former sophisticate.

In my first month, my loan officer had introduced me to Emma, a sardonic Londoner who, at eighteen, had married a fellow theater-school student. Her new husband became a megafamous rock star shortly thereafter. Two children and a few years later, she was divorced and rich for life. Emma emigrated to the West Coast to raise those kids and then went on to Salt Spring, where she built herself—at the top of a forested mountain, on two hundred acres near a thousand-acre park—a house straight out of an Andrew Jackson Downing pattern book. It was, as Downing—the Martha Stewart of 1850—advised, vast and comfortable but embellished by all the cozy cottagey signifiers that nineteenth-century suburbanites loved.

Then she found herself some “work.”

all photos Howard Fry

Without the wives, daughters, and to a lesser extent, sons of the rich, the environmental movement would not be anywhere near the titanic force it is today. It is almost axiomatic that, just as the Hare Krishna or Sri Chinmoy cults used to scoop up every shucked and miserable rock wife in the 1960s and ’70s, on the courthouse steps today wait the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. What do they offer? A social life, for one thing, and a cause that will ease the pain of being thrown out of paradise. In fact, for the movement, nothing is more valuable than a woman with two, ten, or a hundred million dollars and animus to express. Just south of me, for instance, the heiresses to the KING 5 TV syndication fortune redesigned their parents’ Bullitt Foundation, and created a fierce environmental advocacy outfit, run by Denis Hayes, a cofounder of Earth Day. The original fortune was built logging the productive forests of the Pacific Northwest, but today Hayes funds every activist group in every forested community west of the Mississippi, the average grant of $10,000 in the hands of activists and ENGOs acting like a battering ram slamming into the economy of one county after another. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The night we met, Emma was, as Emma so often turned out to be, sullen. She scowled at me across the café table, fiddled with the menu, and declared she wasn’t hungry—her subtext being that I bored her, and “who the hell was I anyway?” I floundered, I needed friends, and besides, God help me, I found the sulking charming. Looking for something to please her, I finally hit upon a meeting taking place that evening that she’d mentioned earlier. Why didn‘t we go together? That earned me my first smile. Off we went to Fulford Hall, a giant feed barn long ago converted to a community hall.

We were late and crept in, shoes in hand. Immediately Emma squeezed herself into a line of chairs along the back wall and sat down between a large bearded man and a hippie chick without another glance at me. I crossed the hall, found a spot, and tried not to feel abandoned.

My hurt feelings lasted about thirty seconds as the show began to unfold. Apparently the eighties disco star Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis, upon the death of her elderly cousin/husband, had begun to divest herself of her vast tracts of forests in the New World. One of these forests was on Salt Spring. She needed to pay death taxes, so two thousand acres on the south end of the island, which had been managed for decades using old-fashioned, ultrasensitive German silviculture, had been sold to a logging company with a slash-and-burn reputation. Several hundred furious residents were here to stop any such thing.

War drums sounded under the rustles and snorts and chair scrapings of the audience. I tried running a count, but my concentration kept breaking on the faces and their expressions. Sixty-year-old men with long stringy ponytails sat interspersed with the kind of country folk I grew up among—strong faces and much-worn wool and corduroy. A clutch of once gorgeous folk dresses from every conceivable indigenous culture, worn by women who, while older, were still stunning. Hippie mothers with children spilling out of their laps. Handsome disheveled men in their twenties and thirties wearing drapery not dissimilar to that of the Taliban. Distinct smells to puzzle out: wood smoke, patchouli, jasmine, pot, sweat.

Up at the front, a large old-fashioned pull-down screen showed a map of the logging company’s holdings on the island. On a smaller illuminated screen, the company’s mission statement scrolled by: “sensitive,” “sustainable,” “patch cutting not clear cutting”—all the approved phrases. Three men stood up there, neatly dressed and brushed and washed, their expressions cycling between grim determination and smiling, unctuous flexibility. They, too, they hinted as they strutted about, working their equipment, pointing out certain areas they were going to “save” and “preserve,” had an iron fist. But they were jumpy, eager to please, and it seemed to me the crowd smelled that and were gleeful as they ran the developers through what must have been a carefully devised gauntlet.

The apparent sticking point was that the company was bent on cutting the dominant landscape on the island, ruining a view that everyone thought of as his own. The Fulford Valley was a configuration of mountain, rock face, fields, and forest that so perfectly represented a pastoral ideal that it defined the island for its visitors as they drove off the ferry. Not only did the company plan to shear giant patches of the forest on the mountains surrounding the valley, but on those patches, it planned to build post-and-beam trophy homes. I sank to my heels on the floor and watched, absorbed, as person after person stood up to make surprisingly sophisticated arguments against this scheme, managing to rebut or question every point the interlopers offered. Science mixed deliciously with emotion kept the developers off guard. Just when they had composed their faces for sympathy with the otters and waterbirds, someone stood up to cross-examine them angrily on their research on aquifers. Precisely which of “their” thirty-seven salmon creeks were they going to protect? Who was their riparian biologist, and what were his credentials? And his phone number would be nice.

Just as we were growing weary with this game, a young woman stood up at the back of the hall. She was tall, lithe, utterly beautiful, and looked at least part native, with long, dead-straight black hair, a weathered suede jacket that nonetheless draped gracefully on her frame, and a wide-brimmed, black felt hat with a band bejeweled in turquoise.

The loggers froze. The residents turned and craned their necks and, from the questioning murmur that arose, I guessed few knew who she was.

“Many people all over the world . . . ,” she paused and repeated herself, her voice clear and strong. “Many people all over the world treasure this place and hold it sacred. Here and now I warn you. If you do what you are planning to do, you will stir up opposition that will cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. People will come here from all over and camp in your forests—thousands of them—until you leave. You will suffer. Your shareholders will suffer. Your company will not recover. So I tell you again. Leave now.”

If you thought it impossible for predatory capitalists who clear-cut forests to turn pale, you’d be wrong.

People leaped to their feet and moved toward the three microphones set up for the audience’s use, like excited shoals of fish. Shoulders slumped at the head of the room, the buzz became triumphant, and I had found something more interesting than city life.

I caught up with Emma as she left the hall, and she was just as exhilarated. The cause seemed just, the forest irreplaceable, and the land saveable. Over the following year, parties and dances and sit-ins proliferated, the latter consisting mostly of whimsically dressed middle-aged islanders standing around on a dirt road in the middle of the day, fulminating. Fund-raising drives took place at every one of the many, many clubs and organizations on the island. I wrote columns about the fight for the national newspaper, The Globe and Mail until my editor said he would neither publish nor pay for another.

Emma stickhandled the production of a calendar of nude island women to publicize the loggers’ crimes against the forest and used her ex-husband’s name to promote it. The island and the fight to save its forest popped up in newspapers all over the world. Protests and direct actions plagued the company until finally, a year to the day they arrived on the island, they gave up and sold the land to the government for considerably less than they had planned to make. The islanders had, despite the wool and patchouli and wood smoke, managed to raise more than $20 million—out of bloody thin air, as far as I could determine. And the loggers vanished, leaving, like chastened children, sprigs of planted trees in those sections they had managed to cut before hell rained down upon them.

Salt Spring and its four hundred sister islands big and small are run, for the most part, by a land-use outfit called the Islands Trust, the much-quoted mandate of which is “to preserve and protect.” Founded in a summer graduate seminar at a local university in 1974 out of a fear that the pastoral islands scattered between Vancouver and Vancouver Island were about to be overrun by developers, the proposal for it was rushed through a session of the provincial legislature and its structure codified. The trust practices what is called fortress conservation, the typical form of conservation everywhere, which involves locking down as much land as possible and practicing “natural regulation,” meaning no one touches it. Ever. Even “disturbing vegetation” is disallowed. For most of recorded history, humans have practiced adaptive management of resources—when a problem crops up, we solve it. If we want a landscape, we create one; a working forest, ditto. Rangeland, farmland, townscapes—all can be managed for bounty and health of resources and people. Natural regulation cropped up in the 1960s in almost all land-use agencies in the world and swiftly became the preferred method by which all resources and land were to be managed. Over the past five decades, natural regulation has been adopted all over the world. Nature knows best. Man is a virus and a despoiler and must be controlled.

The Islands Trust went on to serve as a template for many similar organizations all over the world, including the California Coastal Commission and the Cape Cod Commission. The trust claims it is unique, but it is not, at least not anymore, and like its fellows, it differs from typical democratic government principally by subverting the normal processes of democracy in the name of good green land use.

There are thirteen larger islands in the trust area, to which the smaller ones are attached for administrative purposes, and those larger islands elect two trustees each. When I say big, it’s relative. Most of the twelve other islands have a population between four hundred and one thousand, but they each have two trustees. An off-island trustee comes in for the monthly town meeting to vote, breaking any tie. All land-use decisions are first voted on on the island and then considered at a quarterly meeting of all twenty-six trustees, called the Trust Council, which moves with all the procedural formality of the League of Nations. There is, you have no doubt gathered, no proportional representation at the trust. Salt Spring has only 8 percent of the final vote on the way any of its land is used, and in rural areas, land use is just about everything. As a kicker, it contributes 60% of the funding for the trust.

The trust is a blue-chip organization; it is expensive, headquartered in British Columbia’s capital city, with forty-five full-time employees and a steady flow of consultants. From its offices stream an unending flood of glossy propaganda about ecosystems saved and dangers advancing that require more land to be saved and more regulations placed on private land, and of course on all waters, whether runoff ditch or ocean.

Every few years, each island puts itself through a revision of its Official Community Plan. Carefully selected islanders serve on committees examining each “problem” within the trust region: affordable housing, tourism, economic development, water. Environmental movement goals are codified and tested during these thrash-fests of “participatory democracy”—goals like limiting house sizes to less than three thousand square feet, for instance. Or requiring a permit and the consultation of a registered environmental professional ($2,500 fee to be borne by the applicant) to plant a garden within 100 feet of any body of water, man-made or natural. Or requiring a 150-foot setback from the ocean for any house, and if a house already within that 150 feet burns, it cannot be rebuilt in the same place -well, tough luck for the stinking-rich oceanfront homeowner who just met Nemesis.

The outcome of a year or so of such meetings, displays, and “community consultation” is an astonishing maze of regulation, the result of which is stasis and worse. Despite living within easy reach of three gleaming modern cities filled with active wealthyish men and women, each islands’ population is in steady decline, losing young families every month. On the smaller islands, as the young leave and the economy deflates faster, the elderly, deprived of the services that the young provide and fund, leave too.

While the trust is supposed to deal only with land use, in typical bureaucratic mission creep, it calls itself a local government. But in fact, all the other multiplying details of actual government are handled by a regional director, who spends his life dashing from committee to committee, all staffed by volunteers. Liability is limited, therefore, which may not mean much to the average citizen and in fact rule by volunteer committee sounds quite nice and inclusive and participatory, until those volunteers have mismanaged the drinking water so entirely that the lakes are poisoned with toxic algae, and no one is responsible—whereupon chaos reigns and the quarreling is epic. Salt Spring is typically described as an argument surrounded by water, as, I was to find, is every other community into which the movement has inserted its brand of land-use management.

But the trust and its islands remain an ideal, a banner brandished high by the environmental movement. Our islands are your future, in many ways, especially if you live in the country, but also pretty much everywhere, in the suburbs and in the cities where smart growth, an urban variation on the ironclad regime we endure, is rapidly being effected.

While I had not grown up on the Pacific coast, I did have roots in the region. Both sets of paternal great-grandparents had pioneered there in the 1870s, both of the men, curiously enough, named John Joseph. John Joseph Banfield was civic minded, and his family are still embedded in the life of Vancouver, since they founded the billion dollar Vancouver General in a tent with their friends from church. The Nicksons, by contrast, never joined anything. John Joseph Nickson is described in the record as a “pioneer contractor,” who laid out, then built waterworks and sewers—which flooded every year because he hadn’t accounted for the torrential rains. But that didn’t stop him. Harbors were dredged, neighborhoods clear-cut, sidewalks laid, tunnels dug, and terminuses, bridges, and breakwaters built in an explosion of enthusiastic late-Victorian growth.

The rest of his family, a wife and seven children, embraced a splendid isolation; according to my father, they were known for their beauty but mostly for their eccentricity. They became so peculiar that Vancouver society traded sightings of the last of John Joseph’s children far into the 1980s. My great-aunt Rena, white braid hanging to the middle of her back, torn suede jacket, face resplendent, furiously strong, darting into a convenience store, would inspire days of conjecture. She had ridden for Canada in the 1924 Olympics, made famous by the film, Chariots of Fire, wherein she married the youngest son of the convenor, the Duke of Sutherland. Together they started pony clubs in Canada. She lived in what can be charitably described as a hut, wherein everything was covered in generations of dog hair. Twenty paces from her front door stood her once well-appointed stables. In winter, she’d pack up her ancient beasts and ferry them to her farm on Vancouver Island, which was ever so slightly warmer—for the horses.

Rena’s brother, Harold, lived up the coast on a thousand acres of waterfront, alone in the now dilapidated family house, a genuine hermit, his siblings’ six bedrooms lined up on the water side of the second-floor hallway, kept as if they were coming back tomorrow, except for the grime on the chests of drawers. On his mile of beachfront, small cottages tucked into the trees were missing doors and windows; they had been guest houses, married children’s cottages, and playhouses, but all were long abandoned. He died as he lived, alone, pitched forward in the bed of his pickup truck, not found for three weeks, caught by death in his last ecstasy, I like to believe.

So while I knew next to nothing of forest or fish policy and even less about land use and conservation, I understood the ferocious euphoric pull of the Brobdingnagian rain coast. Greenpeace was founded here; in fact, this region produced the fiercest ecowarriors of the last generation: Sea Shepherd, Earth First and its demon spawn, the Earth Liberation Army, the Earth Liberation Front, and the Earth Liberation Institute were birthed here, their members captured by the scale of nature that so blandished then conquered my elders. And out of this region, forgotten by the rest of the world, came the ideas and the muscle that created an ideology and a strategic plan, that to the average bear sounded so good, so positive and life affirming, that we all bought in. And then we watched as  those ideas slowly brought the modern economy to its knees.

Like everyone, I was oblivious of all this until my land partner needed his money. An industrial filmmaker in San Francisco, Jim was pedaling his stationary bike one morning, shouting into the phone, and was felled by a stroke at thirty-nine. After two years of rehab, he was barely able to function, and he needed his money out of the land. We had agreed, in London a decade before, that he would retire to the little forest he’d help me buy, and we would each have a house. This was now out of the question, and after two years, his investments had dwindled to nothing, and he was facing desperate times. I had been paying him slowly, but the land’s value had tripled since we’d bought it, so no payment from any income I could earn would ever pay him off in time. There was a solution, but it was so difficult to bring about that my mind shied away from it until it was clear that I had no choice.

A “density,” in zoning speak, is the right to build a house. One density equals one house. Salt Spring, back in those heady times when the world was thought to be easily remade, had been granted 4,700 densities by its citizens’ committees, divided up in various lot sizes. The average density would be one house per five acres. In order to create neighborhoods like mine—a typical rural, “medium density” neighborhood—a dozen smaller, 3-acre lots were created and surrounded by small holdings ranging from 10 to 160 acres. My 30 acres was a “remainder,” which meant that it was left over from dividing off small lots, and was held as a unit to make up the 5-acre average. That meant it was treated as a 5-acre lot and I could build only one house. Which I had built.

However I could buy a density or development right from another landowner on the island who, with his eighty acres, say, had the right to build four houses, and transfer it to my lot, thus giving me leave to build two houses, then subdivide. This much was legal. The trust wanted to move densities into the center of the island, where I lived, so that the outer forests and highlands would be held pristine. They approved of density transfers in principle.

In practice, however, they did not. Not one had ever gone through, of the hundreds that had been tried.

Although its pet bureaucrats had introjected transfer of development rights into land-use codes, the environmental movement disapproved of them, largely because they meant that the right to build on a plot of land where only a rich idiot having a nervous breakdown would try to build a house—water access only on the side of a cliff, say—would now suddenly be transferred to a central zone. A house that wouldn’t have been built now suddenly could be. It seemed that instead of 4,700 houses, the most vocal islanders wanted only those that existed, 3,000.

This is called downzoning, and it is the movement’s dominant imperative.

I needed to measure the extent of my problem, so I called up Emma, and we went off to a trust meeting. The room at the Lions club—a room with which I was to become depressingly familiar—was filled with people, all simmering with rage. But this was a different crowd. These people seemed older and more serious. And more conventionally dressed. A smattering of the patchouli and wood-smoke crowd was present but wasn’t dominant. As the trustees took their places at the front of the room, the murmur rose sharply, then sank. Again there were no empty seats. Emma and I pulled chairs out of the storeroom and set them against the back wall.

The fug settled in, and the local trust committee settled down to muttering. Various announcements were made and agenda switches announced. The fellow I imagined to be the chair, a short rabbinical type with a round face and dancing, amused eyes, then made a short speech advising us to show the decorum for which the islands are famous. A few chuckles greeted his allusion: the islands were proud of their distinct lack of decorum. The meeting promptly devolved into a town hall segment, in which a great many people objected to a great many things, not one of which made sense to me. Floundering, I leaned toward Emma and asked, “Who’s up there, anyway?”

“Small guy in the middle is the chair of the whole trust, David Essig. He’s good, he’s all right, he’s one of us—he lives on Thetis. Doctorate from the London School of Economics—an economist.” We nod at each other, impressed. “The two flanking him are the local trustees. The guy is Eric Booth, he used to be a Realtor.” The word was hissed rather than whispered. I note the long blond hair caught in a ponytail, intense blue eyes, workout clothes. He is staring crossly into his laptop screen. “The second, Kimberly, is all right, we think,” Emma continues. “Union, gets it, on the whole, but not predictable.”

“What about all the others?

“Staff,” she said.

“Why are they in such a foul mood?”

“Would you want that job?”

The dominant project under discussion was a proposed subdivision about twenty minutes from the village. The developer already had the right to build fifteen houses and fifteen guest cottages. He wanted to build twenty houses and no guest cottages and donate a large chunk of the acreage to the neighborhood as a park.

The neighbors were very much against the whole enchilada. They did not like the traffic, they thought the park was too small, and by the way, they were used to having all of that land for their own. They did not see why houses needed to be built up there in the first place, and they cited water shortages, eagle trees, red-listed species—snakes and frogs mostly—the health of the residents and neighbors, noise issues, septic issues, possible rentals of these houses to party people, overuse of water by these people, the need for a vacation home rental moratorium, and while they were at it, the need for a moratorium on density transfers as well. I scrunched down in my chair.

A proposed density transfer to a property at the end of the island was now, in fact, under discussion. The arguments against this transfer were furious and went on for a very long time. Finally, a large red-haired woman stood up, and beside me Emma tensed. Sneaking a look at her, I saw that her face wore a mischievous smile.

In a large, stern voice, she barked a warning from West Coast Environmental Law, the dominant environmental law firm in the region. Apparently the Farmers’ Institute owned a tiny sliver of waterfront land—less than five hundred square feet—near where the island’s marina operator wanted to put in a chandlery and showers for boaters from Seattle and Vancouver. The farmers, apparently, had been seized with the imperative that no such thing should happen, and were willing to go to the mat to prevent it.

I knew Emma had recently been elected to the board of directors of the Farmers’ Institute—“For the testosterone, darling,” she had said.

“Is this you?” I whispered.

“Course not.”

I didn’t believe her.

Not one of the hundred people in attendance spoke in support of any of the three proposed developments. Yet each was legal and rigidly conformed to the land use bylaw. I was to find out later that week, after an afternoon spent in the trust’s office wrestling with five-pound binders of meeting minutes and letters from the public, that each of the three applicants had drastically altered his initial plan, going far beyond the requirements set out in the island’s bylaws. Yet all three looked to be on the verge of failure.

I stumbled out of the hall with a blinding headache.

After deciding to fight, I took myself off to the local land surveyor—grizzled, despairing Brian Wolfe-Milner. After forty years working on Salt Spring, Brian knows more than anyone about the bones of the island, its zones and regions, and the regulation attached to each. I had gone to him as a reporter a few times, intimating that someday I might have to subdivide when Jim moved to the island. I stayed on to have several conversations, all ending with me nose-deep in despair while he watched with doleful amusement the process of discovering that the land into which you have sunk your savings is not really yours at all, all too familiar to him.

He alluded to the mountain of bureaucracy I’d need to scale, because the density transfer was only one aspect, the most difficult perhaps, but only one of a couple dozen others. I told him I had no choice. He contemplated me for a few moments, then recommended a colleague in the nearby town of Duncan, Brent Taylor, who might be willing to shepherd me through the process for $110 an hour. I was impressed both by the precision with which Brian knew the fee and by its size.

A few days later, Mr. Taylor heaved into my driveway in a dark green Chevy Suburban and squeezed himself into my little house. He was large and bearded and carried a stack of papers. The beard covered the double chin of a man who had to work at not running to fat, the glasses hid eyes that I was to learn could beam an empathy that was almost physical.

What I wanted him to say was, “This is a war, and we are now calling this the war room.”

Instead, he pulled out an application form, we filled it out (or rather, he did) in careful nicely rounded letters, and I gave him a check for $4,000. He smiled at me beatifically, with compassion, as if he were about to perform an operation and that operation would be painful and last a really long time and he didn’t have much in the way of painkiller to offer. I knew I had to ask, but was putting it off, dreading the answer. He was pinning the check to the application form, slipping it into a manila envelope, not in haste exactly, but he was trying to get out of the house.

“How long?” I asked. The files stopped disappearing into his briefcase.

“I’m sorry?” But he knew what I meant.

“How long till it’s done?”

He shrugged. “Hard to say.”

“Try,” I said.

“Nine months, absolute minimum,” he said finally, unwilling to the last breath. He thought for a moment. “But that’s if everything, and I mean every single thing, goes your way. Which it never does. And you’ll have to change the political system.”

Actually he didn’t say that last sentence. Nor did he bother mentioning that the trust had approved only one application in a thousand. But he did say it was under no requirement to even accept my application into the rezoning process. That one step itself might take months, and there was nothing I could do but wait. Oh, and his other client? Almost three years into the same process, with no end in sight.

I drove down the hill to see that client. Janet Unger owns a hardscrabble nursery and lavender farm at the end of the Fulford Valley, tucked into a hollow that looks as if Frederick Law Olmsted gazed down from heaven and guided God’s hand just for that moment. Hewitt is an Englishwoman of a recognizable type; they pop up in every farthest-flung pretty place, hacking sensible civilization out of solid rock. When I drive up, an elderly man with a pickup is helping her pull her massive wooden sign out of the ditch and reposition it. The nursery is filled with plants in various states of winter decay. A fifty-foot-long pergola has collapsed and a tin roof has buckled under the weight of the recent snow. She and her husband own a house on fifteen acres on an outlying spit, and it is that property that she is trying to rezone and that had elicited the most fury at the meeting the other night.

We take grocery store plastic bags around to the back and pat them down on plastic chair seats to protect ourselves. Everything is wet. In front of us rises a sheer face of green, the tree-covered mountain. Between us and the mountain lies a meadow, green again after the last spectacular blizzard. It is beautiful, but neither of us is in the mood for contemplation. And Janet Unger has no more time to waste.

“It was so personal,” she said. “So vindictive. They kept saying it wasn’t personal, but it was. Something that should have taken nine months has taken more than three years.”

I ask who “they” were. “My neighbors,” she answers. “We lived on that property on Isabella Point for almost fifteen years. They were our friends; we played bridge with them every week. We had a nice house on the ocean, about a twenty-minute drive from here, with fifteen acres of forest and rock face, uninhabitable land mostly, surrounded by thousands of acres of park and ecological reserve. One of our neighbors, our best friend, in fact, when we lost our retirement money in the stock market, suggested we do a density transfer and put in a four-house subdivision. He and his wife had done a similar thing a few years back, and he was a developer himself, so he knew what I should do.”

I can guess what happened next, but I ask anyway.

“An orchestrated campaign began, attacking me and my husband as despoilers of the environment. Letters to the paper were written, and person after person stood up at meetings to tell the community how terrible we were to try to do such a thing. Despite the thousands of acres of wilderness around us, they were insisting on a buffer zone for that wilderness. We had applied to build four extra houses, so when that application was turned down, we resubmitted it for just two additional houses on the fifteen acres. That took another twenty months. You can’t believe how brutal they were, the lies they told about us. We couldn’t look our neighbors in the face as we drove by. Our best friends deserted us. It broke up our thirty-two-year marriage; we couldn’t speak to each other by the end of it. Last year, my health collapsed; I have cancer. If I live, I won’t live in that house in that neighborhood or on this island. I’m selling everything, including the nursery.”

I am cold, but it isn’t the weather. “Who started it?” I ask. There are only a few candidates, but I need to know which, in order to try to neutralize her. And it will be a her.

She shrugs and mentions a charismatic local environmentalist as the source of the attack. “Though maybe now,” says Pat, dry as paper, “she has changed, since she is developing her own family’s property, subdividing and selling two oceanfront lots for a million dollars each. All her permits are going through lightning fast, I can tell you.”

“Get prepared,” she says over her shoulder, on the way back to fixing her sign, “for people to hate you without reason.”

Today, Janet Unger lives in a trailer park. It is a groomed and manicured trailer park, where most of the pretty little houses, modeled on the double-wide, are set on concrete pads, not wheels. But it is a long, long way from the five-bedroom shingled house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Her rezoning and subdivision took seventy-two months, and by the end of it, her marriage was dead, her husband was dying, and all her money had disappeared down a bureaucratic wormhole.

Her nursery stands abandoned. By the time she was able to put her property up for sale, the market for country real estate had declined and then, with the ’08 crash, collapsed. She was lucky to afford a little house in a trailer park.

The environmentalist who led the charge against her went onto better things. Her family’s subdivision had sailed through, and she built herself an ultragreen house with ever so virtuous salvaged materials and settled down to work for outfits like the Western Climate Initiative as an independent woman.

The Western Climate Initiative is a collaboration among seven U.S. States and two Canadian provinces to design a regulatory regime to reduce greenhouse gases. This woman’s career progression is typical in the movement. A “kill” of someone deemed to be a developer—even if she is only dividing fifteen acres in thirds because she’s lost her retirement money—is a required initiation; it proves you have the stomach for what needs eventually to be done.

Transnational organizations are typical too. They sound high-minded and entirely good. Their final goal is the power to regulate your every exhalation, for what else is it but CO₂? It is axiomatic that no voter will know what’s happening until it’s too late. Democracy is always and everywhere overridden when it comes to green goals.

Little doubt, too, that Janet Unger’s neighbors have not counted the cost of their ever so righteous crusade on behalf of the environment (and the exclusivity of their neighborhood. No doubt they believe ruining her family was a terrible necessity that would serve as a stark warning to any purveyor of ticky-tacky condo developments for the great unwashed.

The bureaucrats who oversaw the seventy-two months of Janet Unger’s misery were not held accountable for the bust-up of her marriage, her husband’s fatal heart attack, or her cancer. Her bankruptcy at their hands meant nothing to them at all.

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Chapter two of Eco-Fascists.

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Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson