This essay about serious matters begins with solutions, so readers do not become disheartened by the problems subsequently described.

We encourage you to fund and support: the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Sierra Club, and Chesapeake Climate Action Network. These groups comprehensively address economic opportunity, quality of life, and environmentalism. Other organizations that focus on single issues, like monarchs or water quality, will not succeed. This is wisdom imparted, among others, by the great agricultural philosopher and environmentalist Wendell Berry. https:/we/orionmagazine.org/article/in-distrust-of-movements/bears.html

Single-focus environmentalism also undermines the fundamentally necessary climate change fight. Recently, for example, water quality groups did not oppose a coal power plant transition to fracked gas because their mission does not include energy use. Some residents near the plant followed their lead, not knowing they would continue to experience local air pollution. The Sierra Club opposed the project, but most local green organizations remained silent, each with their own pet concerns like parks and farmland conservation. Not one county, state or federal elected official opposed this plant situated in one of the region's poorest and most polluted waterfront areas— where fish are non-consumable, in part, because of fifty years of the coal plant's operations. Not one government agency informed citizens that recent battery storage technological advancements rendered peaker plants like this one obsolete. Further, both county and state land use plans previously designated this site as planned protected open space.

Folks, this is one of many thousands of similar stories indicating how we cannot afford disarrayed, non-strategic environmentalism. A comprehensive approach is necessary to countermand the cynical slick forces working outside, and within all levels of government, to prevent successful citizen climate change and environmental activism. Governments, developers, and utility companies know how to promote butterfly gardens under transmission lines as environmentalism, call a new road a "greenway," and falsely claim that the draft Loudoun Plan saves rural lands and quality of life.

We must get firmly behind the best comprehensive environmental organizations to fight the forces that have long since mastered the game of land use planning disinformation. Most of their deception is through lies of omission about the environmental and human harm wrought from local land use and transportation plans. For example, Loudoun County and the Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments (WMCOG) both endanger human health. They do not disclose to residents living within ten miles of an airport (and adjacent to freeways) that their children are potentially exposed to life-threatening particulate matter air pollution. The American Planning Association (APA) is entirely responsible for the confusing mess that local land use planning has become. They did not institute quality control measures to prevent the widespread practice of planning concepts being used against planning's fundamental goal to serve the public good. To this point, the APA failed to monitor how Governor McDonald gifted developers with statewide upzonings, called Urban Development Areas, without commensurate land conservation requirements. Loudoun continues to do the same. It proposes both additional sprawl and dense development without any additional rural land conservation protections.

The Louisiana Adaptation Plan similarly exploits planning concepts to prevent climate change and wildlife protection solutions. It is slick graphically beautiful maps and wetlands illustrations, photos of families, and language about saving the local culture presents the illusion that it is green and citizen-oriented. Do not be fooled. This is a fossil fuel industry concoction. Its main goal is to mislead citizens away from challenging Louisiana's oil and gas interests that create the threats that the plan pretends to address.

I'm sure a planner wrote its smooth text. They told themselves that some environmentalism was better than none. They failed to heed Wendell Berry's warning that all that movements "virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place."