We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like
“You can’t fight City Hall”
“We’ve always done it this other way”
“That’s impossible”
“You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.
Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.
A cynical friend responded, “Sometimes…none of this is true.” And I replied,
But all of it is, sometimes. Sometimes is the anchor word here, that allows us to play with our perceptions. All of it is true once in a while, but all of it is not true often enough that the inability to go there feels normative to you. As someone who has spent some big chunks of my life on the margins for various reasons, I can assure you that the narrow, normative, conformist version of reality isn’t real for a big percentage of the population—but who’s in and who’s out might vary over time.
My “margins” experience is both direct and indirect. Directly, I’ve been treated as marginal—”othered”—for living in poverty in my younger years…for not being into sports, hypermasculinity, or TV celebrity culture…for being Jewish…for being bisexual…for being a Northerner in Georgia and an Easterner in Southwest Ohio…And I’ve confronted ageism against both the young and the old—which started when I was very young and has continued now that people are beginning to think of me as old.
But I’ve also worked with a lot of groups that were marginalized in ways outside of my own direct experience of it. In college in the 1970s—long before same-sex couples were socially acceptable—I ran the campus Gay Center and started two more in cities where I had college co-op jobs and went to my first same-sex wedding in 1978 or ’79. I did community organizing around the environment and safe energy all the way back to 1971, when I was a 14-year-old high school junior—and that consciousness didn’t really become mainstream until THIS century. I worked as a paid organizer for an elders’ rights organization at 22 and 23. I had my consciousness raised about a whole bunch of disability rights and minority rights issues during the six years in the 1990s when I served on my city’s official disability access committee (helping public spaces like theaters and restaurants meet accessibility codes) and simultaneously on the District Attorney’s Civil Rights Advisory Board (sensitizing lawyers, cops, and criminal justice workers to the needs of marginalized communities). I worked for 15 years in that city and 24 years in the neighboring small town where I live now on opening up the electoral process and city/town government to disenfranchised voices. And for more than three years, I’ve been deeply involved with immigration/refugee justice work, including an extended visit to the US-Mexico border where we visited a huge refugee camp daily and heard the stories of some of the most marginalized people in the world.
This diversity of experience may seem very random—but certain common threads hold it all together into a larger whole that feels coherent and meaningful to me. A few examples:
All of this work is about empowering people who have felt powerless
All of it embraces the same construct that the poet presents: that just because something is a certain way doesn’t at all mean it’s impossible to change it (I even did a TEDx talk on this called “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare” (it’s 15 minutes long, riffs on a quote by Muhammad Ali that I misattributed at the time, and discusses how socially and environmentally conscious businesses can change the world—to watch, click the link and then click again on “event videos”)
All of it works on the theory that change happens faster and more fully when it becomes a movement—while acknowledging that acting alone can still make a significant difference. (I’m very proud of my one-person, three-day demonstration against the US bombing of Libya that drew middle fingers and jeers on the first day, but supportive honks and waves on the third day, as well as many individual conversations with people who thought differently, sometimes reaching common ground and always de-demonizing each other—but I’m even prouder of the broad-based movement I founded that saved an endangered local mountain.)
It all recognizes that change happens both internally, inside your own heart and brain, and externally, as the actions of one person or a movement ripple out into the wider world–and as these movements find common ground and begin to work together, discovering their intersectionality: their common struggle.
Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition politics newsletter (which I read daily) quoted a reader who suggested that Democrats label the Republican platform for 2022 as “The Big Steal.” Here is his suggestion, with edits and additions by me:
Vote Republican, and you vote for the “Big Steal”:
Your Social Security will be stolen.
Your Medicare will be stolen.
Your prescription drugs will be stolen.
Your affordable health care will be stolen.
Your right to privacy will be stolen.
Your control over reproductive choices will be stolen.
Your voting rights will be stolen.
Your right to elect leaders will be stolen.
Our democracy will be stolen.
It’s not perfect, but you get the idea. Iterations are endless. Republicans want to take things away (The Big Steal), including personal liberties and equal protection under law. Democrats want to provide Americans the things they need to lead safe, healthy, productive lives—including personal liberties and equal protection under the law. Somewhere in there is a winning message.
Republicans doing The Big Steal is half of the messaging. Yes, absolutely, we need to show that corrupt and greedy party for what it is. But we also need another half, maybe call it The Big Payoff. And the second part will subdivide into two as well.
The first part will be what the Democrats have actively accomplished. They have created jobs in a terrible economy. They have restored us leadership in the world sphere. They have taken some action to mitigate climate change. They have stood up for integrity of the political process and showed that insurrections and coup attempts will not be tolerated here. They have supported Ukraine against Putin’s barbaric war. And they have restored dignity and mission to a corrupt and twisted executive branch.
The second part is the wish list: things Biden and the Democrats tried to do but were blocked by filibusters, judicial opinions, or just plain refusal to cooperate from the Republican side. This would include Build Back Better, protecting the right to vote, protecting women’s right to control their own bodies, meaningful progress on the biggest issues like climate change and immigration reform, and of course, the right of regulatory bodies to regulate. Not only have Republican judges forced the CDC–which stands for, let us remind them, Centers for Disease Control–to give up protecting the public in transit facilities, but other decisions will threaten such rights as environmental protection and labor protection, using that very bad precedent to attack EPA and OSHA. Let’s also talk about the right not to be sitting next to someone who is carrying a concealed weapon. The right to love and marry whom you choose as long as they are above the age of consent. Etc, etc, etc
Don’t the Republicans ever get tired of their own shameless hypocrisy? A lot of the rest of us are sure tired of it. It’s time for the Dems to focus their messaging on why the Party of Never-if-a-Democrat-proposed-it is no friend of the people.
I offer these as a gift to the Democratic Party, its candidates, and its supporters.
Why do Republicans support socializing the costs of billionaires’ mistakes and misdeeds while privatizing their profits? Why should working folks have to pay to clean up their mess when billionaires don’t even pay taxes on much of their wealth?
Why do we pay so much more for health care, for university education, for prescription drugs, for so much else–and get less for our money than most other countries? Why did Republicans hold all three branches of government and come up with nothing to address these crises?
If we want to free the world of power-mad dictators and thugs like Putin, we need TRUE energy independence from renewable sources like solar, wind, small-scale hydro, and geothermal–so Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries can’t push us around because of our dependence on fossil fuel. That’s also our way out of the carbon crisis.
If you want to halt fuel-cost-related inflation, ditto. That will lead to better health outcomes, too.
Green energy will continue to create good, well-paying jobs right here in the US–and by the way Biden has presided over the longest steady growth in employment since 1939.
If expulsions of immigrants at the border due to fear of COVID–which are against both international law and human decency–aren’t warranted for Ukrainians, there’s no justification for their use to keep Black and Brown people out. Don’t accede to Republicans’ racist demands to hold COVID prevention/protection/treatment funding hostage to keep this cruel, illegal, and discriminatory policy in place.
Stop defending domestic terrorists! January 6 was an attempted coup, an attempt to blow up our democracy. Even Republican Secretaries of State admit that the 2020 election was the most fraud-free in history and that Biden won honestly (something we can’t say with certainty about Trump in 2016, since the Republicans blocked recounts in three crucial swing states). And yet you refuse to discipline even the most blatant seditionists in your ranks! Doesn’t democracy mean anything to you anymore?
Why are you, the party that claims to believe in freedom, passing laws that take “cancel culture” to levels approaching those of early Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia? How dare you make it a crime to teach or read honest history! How dare you try to suppress the speech rights of whole classes of people! How dare you try to roll back women’s reproductive rights, the right of people of color to vote, and the right to live without fearing violence because of who you are, what way you worship, or what you look like? Stop trying to grasp at your fading power OVER others and focus on your power TO do good in the world (hint: oppressing others is not doing good in the world)
Why was it OK to refuse to even hold a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland because nine months before the election was “too close to the election”–while Barrett was rushed through just weeks before?
Those of us in the US are probably used to hearing people go on and on about our high status in rankings of desirability. And in some ways, we are. (I am a US citizen and a lifelong resident, so in this post, I’m going to use “we” and “our” when referring to Americans.)
We are super-cosmopolitan, able to create cities where hundreds of different ethnic, racial, and religious groups not only live and work together but enjoy each other’s food, music, etc.
We introduced modern democracy to the world–a huge improvement over the divine right of kings
We have enormous diversity in geography, agriculture, weather conditions…whatever you want, you can find it somewhere in the US
US technology leadership sparked enormous progress in fields as diverse as computing, clean energy, and space exploration
BUT on a lot of other metrics, we fall alarmingly short. Consider, for instance:
Quality of life: The US is number 15. Not horrible, but we could certainly do better!
Robustness of our democracy: Sadly, once the shinning light to all nations, the US dropped from full to flawed democracy in 2016, and hasn’t recovered. Appallingly, we are rated #25.
I could go on, but you get the idea. In metric after metric, the US was once the leader and now lags.
Lakey sees the increasing polarization of modern US society as a forge: a way of generating the heat necessary to create lasting social change (toward freedom and equality or toward authoritarianism—“the forge doesn’t care”).
This is not a new trend. The Scandinavian countries had their huge social revolution of the 1930s in times of great polarization (something he chronicled in his earlier book, Viking Economics). The trick is to harness that energy and channel it toward gaining mass support. He walks his talk, too; in the summer and fall of 2020, he led or co-led numerous workshops on what to do if the Trumpists tried to seize power after losing the election, training thousands of people.
He charges us to express our best concepts—not just what’s wrong with the system but the vision to make it better—in ways that feel like common sense to working-class people who want the system to work for them, too. After all, most of us actually do want a system that promotes equal access, a fair economy, and real democracy. We have to show them that our vision “has a spot for you,” even if that “you” finds the movement’s tactics disruptive and uncomfortable.
But he says progressives have largely lost that vision since the 1970s; we need to get it back. If we can get the diverse movements working together to confront their common opponents, we foster an intersectional “movement of movements” capable of creating real change—as the Scandinavians did then, with farmers, unionists, and students joining together to drive the moneyed elite from power. He warns us that polarization will get worse, because economic inequality is built so strongly into the culture. He says that we should consider organizing campaigns as “training for [nonviolent] combat.”
And we should expect those campaigns to take a while. Campaigns are well-planned (but adaptable) and sustained over time. It might take years, but you can win. One-offs (like the Women’s March at Trump’s inauguration) don’t typically accomplish change on their own. Traffic disruptions don’t make change; they just piss potential allies off. Disrupting banking operations is much more strategic because the bank is the perpetrator of the evil. How is the specific goal of the campaign advanced by this action? If it doesn’t advance the cause, don’t do it. A campaign he was involved with moved $5 million into credit unions and cooperative enterprises in one campaign that started in a living room and grew to encompass 13 states.
Oppression is only one lens we can look at things through—there are many others (he didn’t elaborate). The elite seeks to divide us (by color, gender, values, etc.)—but canny organizers look for the cracks in those divisions, and expand them. And stays optimistic, not getting stuck in “can’t be done” but figuring out how to do it.
Campaigns often start small. We can build our skills when the stakes are lower and make our mistakes then. Later, as the big challenges arise, we know how to handle them. You can lose a lot of battles and still win the campaign (eventually). And any tactic will be greeted with “this will never work” skepticism. But “Anyone who is arguing for impossibility” should remember the Mississippi Summer volunteers. When news got out of the abduction of Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney, Lakey (a trainer of volunteers for trhat movement) expected most of the next volunteer wave to abandon their commitments—but nearly all of them stayed, mentored by Black SNCC activists who had been living with the overt racism for decades.
The best-known antidote to terror is social solidarity. Get close to people. Organize campaigns not just with those who share your goals but those who are “willing to be human with you.” Make your peace with the personal risk, face it head-on. We risk by driving on the highway, we risk by NOT meaningfully addressing climate change. Accepting the possibility that you might die in service of the common good is liberating (and it’s not the worst way to die).
SNCC survived in the Deep South without guns; they would not have survived with them. Erica Chenoweth shows us that nonviolent movements have twice the success rate of violent ones.
If you want innovation, conflict helps to get you there. Yet, conflict resolution is a crucial skill, and it’s expanded enormously in recent decadesWe need those tools and people who will jump into the fray (to use them). But if our tools are too highly structured, you need to add interventions in informal settings.
Lakey expects surveillance and isn’t worried about it: “I think it’s a wonderful thing. We take that as pride: we are so important that they put staff time and energy into knowing what we’re up to—so we’re making a difference. Gandhi told India, if you gave up fear of them, the British would be gone. If people spread fears about Trump, invoice him for the hours because you’re doing his work.”
I love the idea of acting locally and have done it (and written and spoken about it) for decades. My biggest success in 50 years as an activist was a local campaign that saved a threatened mountain. Your chances of winning are often higher, it’s easy to reach those most affected, and you can parley your success into much greater influence on the future direction of your community. And yes, it can be empowering.
BUT…we also have to do the long, hard work on the big-picture stuff. It took 100 years of hard organizing to end legalized slavery for non-criminals in the US (and by the way, the exemption for convicted criminals has been used shamefully in too many instances). It took decades to get national civil rights legislation, the right of women and people of color to vote, the right of same-sex couples to marry…pretty much anything worth fighting for. And sometimes, even large-scale victories happen surprisingly quickly. As an example, the safe energy movement took only five or six years to make nuclear power unbuildable.
And those local victories can inspire the national and international work–which often gets done most effectively at the local level, by existing organizations and coalitions.
I love this post from the Changemaker Institute, How to Change The World By Meeting People Where They Care. I love it because it approaches social change through a marketing lens. It starts by revisiting the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967, which struck down longstanding bans on marrying across the color line. Pointing out how Richard and Mildred Loving got people to care, the post goes on to ask how to get people to care about what you’re doing–and answers with a business-oriented focus on outcomes of your social change action, which you arrive at through these questions (quoting directly from the post):
What does it take to get an investor to believe in your business and invest in your mission?
What does it take to get customers to believe in your product or service and invest in it?
What does it take to get your employees to believe in your company’s mission and invest time and energy in supporting it?
What does it take to get people to support your vision for a better world? [end of quote]
Shel’s inspirational posters describing his “sweet spot” institutional mission and his 2020 and 2021 sets of three words to inspire his year
To take it a step further: I see getting out of the silo, rubbing shoulders with people who are not like you and examining different ideas from different industries or different sectors of the same industry as crucial is testing your own ideas, sharpening them enough to really get inside someone’s head and cause enough discomfort with the status quo to embrace the brighter future you propose. Whether you’re marketing a business or a movement, that’s a pretty important thing to do.
Guest Post by Sam Horn, author of Tongue Fu and many other books.
Does it feel like you’re talking on eggshells these days? You’re not alone. A report from McKinsey says, “Rudeness is on the rise and incivility is getting worse.”
As one woman said, “It feels like I can’t say anything right. It seems everyone’s on edge. They take offense at the least little thing. What can we do when everyone’s stressed out?”
She has a point, doesn’t she?
The last year and a half has been tough.
People have lost loved ones and jobs. Controversies around masks and vaccinations have put people at odds. Remote work and home-schooling have frayed nerves and tempers.
So, what can we do? We can Tongue Fu!
Tongue Fu! (a trademarked communication – conflict prevention/resolution process) teaches what to say – and not say – in sensitive, stressful situations you face every day.
It’s ironic. We’re taught math, science and history in school, we’re not taught how to deal with difficult people without becoming one ourselves.
And in these tough times, it’s more important than ever to know how to proactively handle complaints, disagreements, and unhappy, upset people.
Fortunately, that’s what Tongue Fu! teaches.
Here are a few challenges you may face at work, at home, online and in public – with tips on how to respond in the moment instead of thinking of the perfect response on the way home.
4 Tongue Fu! Tips for What to Say/Do When Things Go Wrong
Complaints When people complain, don’t explain. Explanations come across as excuses. They make people angrier because they feel you’re not being accountable. For example, if a host is upset because you’re late for a meeting, don’t explain why, just take the AAA Train:
Agree: “You’re right, Bob, our meeting was supposed to start at 9 am.
Apologize: And I’m sorry I’m late.
Act: AND I’ve got those stats you had requested. Would you like to hear them?”
When you take the AAA Train – Agree, Apologize and Act – instead of belaboring why things went wrong, you advance the conversation instead of anchoring it in an argument.
2. Negative accusation.
Whatever you do, don’t defend or deny untrue accusations. If someone says “You are so emotional!” and you say, “I am not emotional!” now you are! Instead, put the ball back in their court by asking, “What do you mean?” That questions motivates people to reveal the real issue and you can address that instead of reacting to their attack.
Imagine says, “You don’t care about your customers.” Reacting with, “We do care about our customers.” makes them wrong. Instead ask, “Why do you say that?” The client may say “I ordered supplies two weeks ago and still haven’t received them.” Now you know what’s really bothering them and you can fix their problem instead of debating their accusation.
3. Arguments.
If people are upset and you try to talk over them, what will happen? They’ll talk louder. The voice of reason will get drowned out in the commotion.
Instead, make a T with your hands (like a referee would) to cause a pause. Then say these magic words, “Let’s not do this. We could go back and forth for the rest of the afternoon about what should have been done, and it won’t undo what happened. Instead, let’s put a system in place to prevent this from happening again.”
You can also put your hand up like a traffic cop to do a pattern interrupt. Say, “Blaming each other won’t help. Instead, let’s figure out who will be in charge of this in the future so we can trust it will be handled promptly.”
As John F. Kennedy said, “Our goal is not to fix blame for the past, it’s to fix the course for the future.” If people start blaming, remind them, “We’re here to find solutions, not fault.”
4. Have to give bad news.
It’s easy to get defensive if your have to give bad news and say “It’s not my fault,” however that makes people feel you’re brushing them off.
A more empathetic response is to say “I can only imagine” as in ‘I can only imagine how disappointing this is.”
Then turn, “There’s nothing I can do” into “There’s something I can suggest. We have set up a 24 hour job-line with…”
In the real world, things go wrong. And sometimes we can’t fix them. We can at least let people know we care and we’re doing the best we can to help out.
Don Draper said, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”
We can change conversations and outcomes for good by using Tongue Fu! approaches.
Because when we treat people with respect, they’re more likely to treat us with respect.
And that’s a win for everyone.
This post originally appeared in Sam Horn’s newsletter and LinkedIn. Reprinted with permission. Sam’s 3 TEDx talks and 9 books have been featured in NY Times, on NPR, and taught to Intel, Cisco, Boeing, Capital One, NASA, Fidelity and Oracle. Want support completing your creative projects? Check out Sam’s Stop Wishing – Start Writing Community.
It is very unfortunate that the original developer didn’t get any guarantees that a buyer would maintain the fossil-free commitment written into the sale documents. Nonetheless, I think a creative and skilled attorney could make a number of different legal arguments that could force the developer to honor the agreement. Could the Environmental Defense Fund? perhaps take this on? It would be a great precedent to say that a community developed specifically as an eco-community could not then be put at the mercy of eco-hostile development.
As a non-lawyer, all I can do is speculate about the arguments a lawyer might use to block the conversion of the acquired parcels to fossil fuels (I have no idea if any of these would hold up in court and I am not presenting this as legal advice). Arguments could be made about such harms as
Introducing new health risks (especially to children)
Negative progress on climate that goes against International, US,Colorado, and neighborhood climate goals
Adverse possession (a doctrine that gives rights to squatters in certain circumstances)
The deliberate destruction of a cohesive intentional community
And of course, about consumers’ rights: this could clearly be seen as bait-and-switch: buying into a community with a stated purpose, and having that purpose violated, even shredded.
But the courts aren’t the only recourse. I do know something about organizing movements, and these neighbors should be organizing a movement. To list a few among many possibilities, they could be:
Organizing mass protests outside the developer’s office
Saturating the local paper with letters to the editor and op-eds
Enlisting allies in powerful environmental organizations, of which Colorado has no shortage
Protesting at the capital in Denver that their rights are being taken away
Contacting the press ahead of and after all of these events
Physically but nonviolently blocking attempts to connect the pipelines (note: this is illegal civil disobedience and participants might be subject to arrest)
Researching obscure laws that might provide tools that can successfully block the connection
Organizing boycotts and other public shamings of the developer
Plus, I really have to wonder what the developer is thinking. Eco-friendly homes are in high demand, can often sell for more than the price of comparable fossil-powered homes, and prove a skill set that many homeowners want. After all, people moved from other states just to participate in this community. And forcing eco-hostile housing development into an eco-friendly community is a recipe for public relations disaster and a bad, bad reputation.
Why not simply stop, think about the benefits of keeping this community identity, and use it as a marketing tool? That would make so much more sense than risking ongoing hostility, a ruined reputation and possibly much worse.
