Reframing the Argument

We had an election recently, and it did not go the way I had hoped it would.

I took some time this past week to think about the implications of it—-what I hoped for, what is now at stake. And, most importantly, what we have to do about it.

First, I believe that the election results will bring about genuine challenges to democracy in the United States. As someone who used to live in Texas, I grew up surrounded by election skepticism in a very gerrymandered district. Attempts to make voting more difficult are not new in this nation, and they have become very regular in certain states. For many Americans in less voter-friendly places, I can imagine that the task of voting may become more arduous.

I also believe that many Americans will face legislation that threatens their bodily autonomy and identity. Republicans have made anti-trans rhetoric a staple of their campaign messaging in addition to their general stance against anyone who is non-conforming in any sense. In September, Texas made it difficult—although not illegal—to change one’s gender marker on birth certificates by removing it as an option on online forms. Sixteen states have passed anti-trans legislation in 2024; this website is keeping an active count of bills that have been successful. And, after the Dobbs ruling, twenty-one states set abortion restrictions ahead of what Roe v. Wade allowed, making appropriate healthcare less available to many of those who need it.

In light of the impending Trump presidency, the oil and gas industry may get the green light for various projects, including ones that may temporarily boost local economies but permanently harm the environment. The Trump coalition has expressed interest in opening federal and protected land for extraction, potentially fueling, literally, the climate crisis.

Frighteningly, Project 2025 has also laid out a framework for defunding and dismantling government agencies. Trump has promised to defund the Department of Education; authors of Project 2025 reportedly believe that NOAA should be “broken up and downsized,”; and the 2025 Mandate for Leadership’s chapter 15 goes into extreme detail about how HUD would be overhauled to address and eliminate any progressive policy. Defunding these agencies will have a profound impact on the United States’ management of the environment, access to education, and safety for people who are housing insecure.

Unlike executive orders, some of the damage that can be done by a Trump administration could be incredibly long-lasting. Democrats had hoped to take charge to prevent any more Trump Supreme Court appointments. Of the nine justices currently on the court, Trump has appointed a third, and the three he has chosen are all conservatives aged 55 or younger.¹ With another four years, he may have the power to affect decisions for several decades.

Recent conversation and news coverage have treated this election as a potential referendum on the Democratic party, or worse, an American referendum on democracy itself. I’m not convinced that the election was either of those things. In reality, a voter’s negative perception of the economy has a correspondingly strong negative impact on the incumbent party’s chances of reelection, and despite economic realities, the majority of Americans have repeatedly reported that they don’t feel better off than they were four years ago. With polling like that, perhaps we were wrong to have been somewhat optimistic in the first place.

But frankly, I’m not interested in further pontificating the election outcome; I’ll leave that for the news outlets to dissect. Agree or disagree with the results, what’s done is done. I argue that we designers need to strategize.

THE ARGUMENT CHANGES

The day after the election, a classmate of mine asked the class what we were going to do. “How,” he wondered, “will we work as landscape architects in this political environment?”

A very scary question indeed.

With an administration potentially working against environmental stewardship and investment in resilience (defunding NOAA, for instance) it’s certainly hard to imagine the incoming executive administration and Congress will be sympathetic to our profession’s interests. As long as I’ve been politically engaged, we have had a degree of interest and federal support for green infrastructure, environmental research, and habitat protection. The EPA, NOAA, DOE, and HUD were all established long before I was born and they have been working as potential allies for the work that designers are doing in the United States to help us build a safer, healthier, and more equitable country. But with threats to organizational funding and indeed the very existence of these entities, landscape architects and environmental activists could very well see a sharp decline in governmental support for our efforts.

As an example, this past summer I worked on a project that would rely primarily on HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH); the project would require substantial funds to rebuild housing for a Native community threatened by pollution on their land. This is to say, the future of this project may now hang in the balance. It may no longer be possible to move forward, at least not on the path we anticipated. The defunding of government agencies may similarly threaten other projects.

Absent wholesale defunding of the EPA, NOAA, the Department of Education, and HUD, the Trump administration plans to fill various government agencies with political appointments, cutting down the number of career bureaucrats employed by federal offices. If like-minded conservatives fully staff these funds-granting agencies, we may still see a reduction in our ability to fund necessary work. We may be talking to a brick wall.

My response to this dire situation is that we need to consider how we will be reframing the arguments for our profession. We have long been blessed with agencies who were at least generally interested, by mandate, in supporting environmental protection, housing, and other public needs. Without these groups, we will need to become our own advocates, speaking to a value proposition that we must define ourselves. Upon entering design school I did not imagine that public speaking, scientific research, and policy writing would become necessary skills, but then again I did not foresee a Trump reelection in this country.

In this new era, we may be forced to question what we are hoping to appeal to when we propose new projects and ask for funding and support. Identity politics have been singled out as a potential source for Americans’ perceived dissatisfaction with the Democratic party, and although I think this is a red herring and a scapegoat, I do not think that it is a useful tool in our advocacy toolbox at all. Rather, I think designers and environmentalists alike will be forced to speak in economic terms about the value of their projects and advocacy. While we may personally find moral and ethical justifications foundational to our work, appealing to an administration that is interested in defunding entire federal agencies is impossible without explicit economic framing. Simply, we need to be focusing our rhetoric on win-win outcomes. Our environmental issues become economic issues; our numbers must become our virtues.

This is not to say we have not already attempted to address economic benefits in our design advocacy. In the very same New Jersey project, I wrote a brief that addressed economic development impacts from the project alongside describing environmental and social justice’s role in our motivation; this brief will be used with policymakers and local organizations to build support for our design work. Furthermore, the economic positioning I’m describing isn’t new; this is how environmental activists have functioned in more conservative places for decades now. As an example, Texas’ relative openness to wind energy isn’t rooted in the state government’s commitment to clean energy but rather its drive to dominate the energy market from any sector. 

In sum, I merely believe that environmental and social justice will not and cannot be our primary advocacy mechanism in another Trump era. And with some of these agencies now threatened by those rising to power, we may no longer be appealing to the same funding sources at all.

A slight upside to the conservative attempt to deregulate and defund is that more power can be given to state agencies. Yet if states’ infrastructure is not developed enough for states to self-regulate the environment and adequately support housing development and education, then there is nothing to fall back upon. California has long been a challenger to the federal government, with its environmental regulations having a “ripple effect” that reaches other states. The state also has its own environmental protection agency which can help to fight against deregulation’s effects within California’s boundaries. The EPA also has a list of what agencies other states have that may be able to fill the void, but this also means that standards, available funding, and processes can vary widely as designers attempt to work with state authorities rather than federal entities. 

On November 19th, the Washington Post editorial board published an opinion expressing that the fight against climate change is not entirely lost in a Trump presidency. The board suggests that Trump’s interest in deregulation could actually benefit those looking to invest in green infrastructure by removing regulatory barriers. The opinion also references the fact that decarbonization in the United States ultimately continued during Trump’s first term, and even with a pro-drilling mentality in place, decarbonization is likely to continue. Whether this is enough to compensate for Trump’s desire to withdraw, once again, from the Paris agreement is certainly up for debate, but there is plenty of reason to believe that hope is not lost and that economic arguments for the environment can sometimes succeed.

I believe, then, we work in this administration with an adaptable response to a changed attitude towards environmentalism. We stay updated. We work against efforts to dismantle resources that help disadvantaged Americans. This is not the first time landscape architects, designers, and environmental advocates have worked under a government that has become hostile to their efforts; there are ways we can continue the fight.

DO WE GIVE UP?

Can’t we all move to Canada? Or the UK? No, probably not. And while I have this option, there are plenty of people who lack the choice.

It’s also important to remember that while there are plenty of people who voted for Trump and others who are working to cripple government agencies and roll back protections for vulnerable Americans and immigrants, there are millions of Americans who didn’t. I don’t want to let them down.

Yes, I think we should be prepared for years of challenges. It’s very likely that major issues, both domestic and abroad, will be addressed very painfully by the incoming administration. I cannot pretend to be capable of adequately describing the depth of the difficulties being experienced in Palestine and Ukraine, and both of these situations can be worsened by poor choices on behalf of the Trump administration. Likewise, this blog cannot even begin to fully address the myriad threats described at the beginning, including healthcare, bigotry, and voting rights. There is a long road ahead.

But some of these issues are ones I can tackle.

I maintain that those of us with an interest in working for the public good, building a better nation for Americans, and participating wholeheartedly in the international community for the interest of all of humanity and life on Earth should continue onwards with a commitment to the task.

Endnotes

¹ Justice Neil Gorsuch, interestingly enough, has broken with the conservative wing of the court on a number of Native American related cases, including Haaland v. Brackeen, Arizona v. Navajo Nation, Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians et al. v. Coughlin, and the much more well-known McGirt v. Oklahoma which held that much of eastern Oklahoma falls within reservations. This author is curious about the relationship between conservative originalist interpretations of the constitution and early Indian law considering other conservative justices often have differing views.

Revised Nov 19. 2024 to add a Washington Post article that adds another dimension to this argument.