Where wilderness meets wi-fi
A case study of "Abundance" in rewiring Yellowstone
In ordinary times, it would be unwise to tease an essay with the phrase bizarre local infrastructure showdown. But this season, everyone is talking about the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson bestseller Abundance, in which an accumulation of wayward infrastructure projects makes bigger political points. We’re in a moment when a local infrastructure debate—especially one involving a potential environmental controversy in Yellowstone National Park—can be oddly sexy.
Last month, the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) claimed that the National Park Service inappropriately waived more than a million dollars in right-of-way fees that a telecom company should have paid to bury nearly 200 miles of fiber-optic cable in Yellowstone. The park administration responded that the cable is essential infrastructure and fees will be assessed when appropriate.
It sounds like a tedious procedural dispute. And yet, aren’t tedious procedural disputes exactly what Klein and Thompson object to? The debate about their book has metastasized into politics that often get too abstract for me. But it’s a book full of examples of aggravating procedural roadblocks to projects that Progressives believe in. So is this another example? Or is the problem bigger than proceduralism—is the problem that we can’t agree on what makes for a good Progressive project?
As I understand the Klein/Thompson argument, solving today’s crises will require a lot of new building: affordable housing, renewable energy facilities, powerlines, and more. Yet rather than focus on those valuable outcomes, they say, today’s liberals too often make procedural objections to building anything. There are too many zoning restrictions and minimum parking requirements and fair-labor standards and endless environmental reviews and paperwork piled as high as a wind turbine.
Instead, the authors suggest, what if we could adopt a mindset of abundance—for example, let’s have an abundance of affordable clean electricity? That might provide both a positive, perhaps-achievable vision of the future and an idea that hits Donald Trump where he’s vulnerable—in his mindset of hellish zero-sum scarcity.
One example that the authors like to talk about is the how rural areas need broadband, and Progressives passed a bill to provide it, but procedural roadblocks have stalled it. Given that Yellowstone hosts almost five million tourist visits per year, it presumably needs broadband even more than, say, a North Dakota ranch. Yellowstone fiber-optic sounds like a good Abundance project.
Yet PEER’s argument that “National parks should not be subsidizing telecom companies” hits home for me. A respected institution, PEER effectively places the current decision in a history of Park Service telecom mismanagement. And the empty results of its FOIA request smack of cover-up at a time when we’re all vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
However, Yellowstone has been debating connectivity for several years now. PEER has usefully participated in the debate. If that debate has ended in the goal being deemed useful, maybe it’s time to set aside procedural objections and push it forward.
This strikes me as the heart of the issue: have we truly deemed the goal useful? I think we’re still debating. I think PEER is speaking for a swath of society that opposes fiber-optic as violating the character of a national park. I get it: we go to the wilderness to get away from our phones. But I’m also sympathetic to the counter-argument: that the Yellowstone proposal isn’t wiring the whole wilderness, just the frontcountry roads and all of their associated administrative and commercial and employee-housing and emergency-responder functions.
In other words, I personally lean toward the Park Service position, because I think the frontcountry is hardly wilderness. I’d rather have more cables along the roads and fewer cell towers atop the mountains; better connectivity at the hotels and ranger stations and no cell service on the trails. I believe this project helps that goal.
But it’s a difficult choice. I can imagine that many of my friends would prefer different goals.
And how has this choice been made? Not in a purely-democratic sense, in the form of an election or a town meeting. More in a technocratic sense, as the experts weighed the arguments and endorsed a goal. The problem with making choices like this is that you never know when they’re final. Maybe they could be changed by a new argument or a legal ruling or a procedural roadblock. Especially amid today’s partisanship, new administrations spend most of their time undoing the decisions of the previous one.
Nevertheless, I think this is the right way to make the choice. We don’t want a literal nationwide town meeting to decide about broadband in Yellowstone, because we live in a republic rather than a democracy. Way back in 1999, I wrote that “I don’t want to vote on tax minutiae, or acceptable mining practices, or the President’s sex life. I want a republic that listens, and understands, and makes decisions based on the public will.” But when the republic strays, we too often jump to structural discussions such as direct-democracy or proceduralism.
This lens can be turned on other Abundance projects as well. Have we really decided that we want to blanket the desert with solar panels? That we want affordable housing in our posh transit-oriented neighborhoods, or powerlines across our favorite vistas?
I love listening to Klein and Thompson argue why we should want all this. I see how tearing down procedural roadblocks would improve progress toward those technocratic outcomes. But the Yellowstone broadband example spurs my fear that our society has not yet actually embraced the outcomes that the technocrats desire.
Discussion:
I’ve seen two great critiques of Abundance. Michelle Nijhuis argues that the book “all but ignores life beyond city limits: wildlife and habitat are never mentioned, and trees, rivers, and ecosystems appear rarely and almost always metaphorically.” And Charles Marohn asks, “who decides?” The technocratic approach seems to assume that it will be scientifically obvious which worthy goals deserve to have their roadblocks removed, and he’s uncomfortable that it would apparently be accomplished by top-down state or federal laws.
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Timely topic.
A true story: I am standing behind the counter at a Yellowstone Visitor Center. Its not a particularly busy day, barely a line. But suddenly a young woman came spiraling in the door, right through the lines of folks waiting to buy a fishing license or ask where to stop if they only have two hours. She was bawling and shouting, waving a phone. The other rangers backed away. I asked how I could help. She wanted to know why there was no free Wi-Fi. At that time, the staff at Grant Village barely had service. Our cell phones worked (maybe) if we walked to exactly the right spot outside the showers in employee housing. Visitors could buy access at the lodge. None of my skills in dealing with the distraught were needed, though, because she wove her way back outside, crying and shouting, before I could say another word.
Since then I've wondered if Yellowstone and the other large parks shouldn't be refuges from life on-line and even from cell phones. The NPS will cite the needs of employees and administration in arguing for it, but I am old enough to remember when people sent postcards and wrote letters about their adventures. I've been a guide and wilderness ranger where cumbersome radios seemed adequate. Like John, I do not remember a decision that tech should dominate in any space, much less in the sacred space of a national park.
I quoted Christine Rosen's suggestion that perhaps there should be "emotional impact statements" detailing the pros and cons of these technology before they are adopted in my newsletter several weeks ago. We are past that, of course, without a voice in the relentless spread (I was about to say 'advance,' but that might have implied approval) of an electronic reality. I guess its my fault, not taking it for granted, but it seems to me that Abundance implies a lack of agency for anyone who doesn't want more of everything.
Of course, we live in both a republic and a democracy.