Tom Keane

Commitment and faith at Market Basket

Wild-cat strikes, workers risking their jobs, customers and employees walking picket lines — all because they are upset over the removal of one multi-millionaire CEO. In a world full of the 99 versus the 1 percent and labor versus management, it seems almost incomprehensible that workers would stick their necks out for one Arthur T. Demoulas, the loser (for the moment) in a decades-long family feud. Indeed, there’s a whiff of scorn in some commentary: Why are the peons, well down in the corporate ranks, in this fight at all? They are deluded, perhaps, sucked in by some clever PR machine, fools placing their families and their futures on the line for some plutocrat.

The critics have it wrong, misunderstanding the nature of work. Jobs don’t have to be merely about making money — although surely that’s a necessary component. At their best, they are about a shared enterprise, a collective commitment to a mission. At their best too, they elevate and challenge us, engaging our faculties in an endeavor imbued with satisfaction and meaning. Good companies — good bosses — can create such a culture; Arthur T., by almost all accounts, was one such boss.

The Demoulases are a family tragedy, quarrelling descendants of Greek immigrants Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas, who founded what is now the Market Basket supermarket chain. The two central characters in the saga are both, unhelpfully to casual readers, named Arthur. There is Arthur T., who up until five weeks ago presided over a rapidly growing and highly profitable chain of 71 stores with $4.6 billion in sales. His nemesis is Arthur S., who last month managed to force out Arthur T. and other key management staff, replacing them with his own hand-selected team.

Improbably, employees rebelled, demanding the board reverse its decision. The company fired a few ringleaders which only seemed to give new vigor to everyone else. A weekend walk through a Market Basket feels almost surreal. Employees are working, but at their stations are bold signs of support for Arthur T. His initials are emblazoned in large letters across an otherwise empty seafood counter. “When you believe in something,” reads a sign at the check-cashing counter, “sometimes you have to stick your neck out.”

Some of this is because of a personal connection. Arthur T. is a hands-on manager; he knows workers by name and treats them as peers. But it’s not only that. In the cutthroat world of grocery stores, Arthur T. grew a business focused on lower prices — far below those of competitors such as Shaw’s or Stop & Shop. He did so by keeping the company debt free and by compensating employees well, reducing turnover and building expertise. He also made the creation of the chain a team mission, one that engages nearly all workers. The company’s profit-sharing plan — now at risk — has for years meant that eligible employees receive 15 percent of their compensation as a bonus, put into retirement accounts. “Share the success” exhorts a March 2013 letter to employees, and one senses (and surely the picket lines prove) that this isn’t B-school gobbledy-speak. Arthur T. means it.

The employees believe that the Arthur S. side of the family will undermine this business model: Market Basket will be “sold or pillaged of its assets,” worries an employee-distributed flyer. What they fear is the destruction not of Arthur T.’s creation, but of their own.

Arthur T. seems uniquely alone in the pantheon of CEO heroes, but really, there are many others. One merely needs to look at commonly available lists of “Best Places to Work.” Companies such as Google, SAS, and the Boston Consulting Group have figured out the same thing as Market Basket: Create the right culture and you can build extraordinary things. The difference is that their boards don’t fire the managers making them such a success.

I expect someday soon Hollywood will make a movie out of this story. Business schools will use the Market Basket workers’ revolt as a case study while public relations firms will treat it as a cautionary tale. Indeed, this is a story that could be told from the pulpit, not about Arthur T. but about Market Basket’s employees and what they are teaching us: faith, commitment, and inspiration. Here’s hoping they win.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on July 29, 2014.

Marriage and Millennials

It’s not enough that they want to upend the modern workplace. Now the millennials are out to upend marriage as well. Wedding planners and finger-wagging moralists are beside themselves. But maybe the kids are on to something — as long as it doesn’t go too far.

The millennials are the much-maligned generation born in the 1980s through the early 2000s, raised on Harry Potter and 9/11, tech-savvy children of doting parents now entering a work world shaking from the Great Recession. They are, supposedly, too focused on self-actualization and not enough on making money for others. They expect the workplace to kowtow to them. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but I understand critics blaming those same doting parents for continuing to provide them with a place to live and free health care coverage until they’re 26 (thanks, Obamacare!). With goodies like these, who needs to work?

And now comes a new report from researchers at the Urban Institute: Millennials aren’t getting married either. The percentage who will be unmarried by the time they hit age 40 could be as high as 30 percent, predicts the study. Of course, that still means 70 percent will get married, but that figure is well below the marriage rates for early baby boomers (91 percent), late boomers (87 percent), and Gen Xers (82 percent). The Urban Institute researchers appropriately offer a caveat — these are forecasts, after all — and acknowledge that what might really be going on is that millennials are just postponing marriage rather than forswearing the institution altogether.

Let’s hope so. Not getting married at all could prove tragic.

The onset of adulthood — post-college until age 30 or so — has historically been settling-down time: finding a job, coupling up, getting married, having kids. It’s a world thoroughly plumbed by television shows from “Friends” to “How I Met Your Mother.” For those of that age, there are times when it seems as if weddings dominate the social calendar, as one friend after another becomes engaged, plans the event, and then insists everyone show up. Too much money is spent on all of this; indeed, the wedding business is a major $52 billion industry, with the average now costing almost $30,000. The day itself leaves parents of the bride financially broken (an antiquated tradition, by the way), friends of the bride with dresses they’ll never again wear, and everyone else with a mixture of aching heads and embarrassed regrets.

And for all that, there’s a strong chance they’ll just divorce anyway.

I overstate my cynicism. I’ve been to a number of great weddings, some quite recently. Still, one can’t help think that postponing wedlock would, for many, be a smart thing. Older adults would doubtless embark upon marriage with a greater seriousness of purpose. The day would be less about celebration and more about commitment. And who knows? With both parties steadily employed, perhaps mom and dad wouldn’t have to foot the bill.

But we should worry if the postponement is permanent. The Urban Institute data suggest that, straight or gay, people continue to couple up; they just don’t get married. That’s a problem. It’s not only the legal benefits of marriage — such as better tax treatment, visitation rights, and inheritance. Marriage is also a shield against poverty; the married are economically more secure (even when it comes to divorce). Then too — and of great consequence — children thrive better when raised in stable households.

Troubling too is that marriage rates — including for millennials — break along demographic lines. Better off and white individuals tend to get married far more frequently than those who are less well off or minorities. It’s a “marriage gap,” argues social observer Kay S. Hymowitz, creating a kind of matrimonial underclass “destined for separate and unequal futures.”

The upshot: Millennials waiting for marriage is probably to the good. But they — and everyone else — will regret it if they wait too long.

This column originally appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 27, 2014.

The real reason for income inequality

Income inequality is the public-policy topic of the moment, embraced as an issue across the political spectrum. Since the 1970s, the gap in incomes between those who earn the most and those who earn the least has increased markedly. Some have described this as a “hollowing out” of the middle class and everyone, it seems, agrees it’s a bad thing. But why is it occurring at all? The answer is that the US economy has been undergoing fundamental changes, changes that benefit workers with skills and smarts, but leave behind those with lesser educations.

Jobs today require more education than they once did. According to US Census data, 66 percent of all jobs in 1975 were held by those with high school degrees or less, while just 34 percent required some postsecondary education. By 2012, those figures had almost completely reversed: 65 percent of all jobs required post-secondary education, while just 35 percent were available to those with high school or less. The upshot: If you don’t have skills, it’s tough to find work.

Indeed, the unemployment rate confirms that, tracking almost exactly to education. Those without a high school degree, for example, had an 11 percent unemployment rate in 2013. Those with BAs, meanwhile, had just a 4 percent unemployment rate.

It’s not only that people with good educations have an easier time getting a job. They also earn relatively more than ever before — and those with poor educations, much less. As shown in the lower portion of the chart, back in 1975, those with lesser educations had earnings of about 84 percent of national mean incomes. Today, that figure has dropped to 66 percent.

It’s not just that those with lesser skills are making less. The college-educated are now making more. In 1975, for instance, employees with some post-secondary education earned about $1.55 for every $1 earned by those with only a high school education or less. In 2012, that figure had climbed to $1.80.

Much of the blame for these changes goes to technology: Many lower-skilled jobs have disappeared, replaced by machines, while at the same time those with higher levels of education are able to command better salaries because technology (such as computers) allows them to be more productive.

And the solution? Nothing that’s easy. There are doubtless some who wish we could re-wind the clock and bring back the good old days when a high school education was all a worker needed to provide for a family. That won’t happen. Others place the blame on companies for “shipping jobs overseas.” Most of those, however, are jobs the United States really doesn’t want: Low-wage and long-hour work that, even if returned to our shores, wouldn’t bring back a robust middle class. (Indeed, because they pay so little, they might exacerbate the divide.)

A better approach, perhaps, is simply to insist that lower-paying jobs pay more. That’s what proposals to increase the minimum wage do. Schemes to mandate better benefits — such as paid family leave — have the same effect. These may help somewhat, but they have their downsides. We can artificially push compensation up only so much before it begins to backfire. If the wages employers are required to pay are well above the productivity they are getting from their employees, companies will eventually get rid of those jobs — perhaps by going out of business, perhaps through new efficiencies, perhaps simply by replacing lower-productivity workers with machines.

Alternatively, we might tax more heavily those with high incomes and turn around and give it to those towards the bottom. Such redistributionist schemes have never been popular in the United States, however, and it’s hard to see enthusiasm for them building. Still, a variant of that — funding the cost of college educations for middle-class folks — might catch on.

That last thought leads us to education. As should be evident, if educated people do better in today’s economy, then the answer is to get more people educated. It’s not a quick fix, unfortunately, and in a world where politics demands instant results, it’s bound to disappoint. Yet in the long run, it’s the only way to keep America the land of opportunity.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on July 22, 2014.

The city needs Haystack — or something like it

When Haystack, the new parking app, held a late-May coming out party in Baltimore, that city’s mayor showed up, happily posing for pictures. When it came time for a similar event in Boston, however, Mayor Martin Walsh turned grumpy, issuing not one but two press releases decrying the company. Haystack, his office worried, would “artificially inflate the cost of parking,” “allow individuals to profit from public space,” and even (a stretch, I think) lead to “distracted driving.”

Walsh frets too much. Haystack is hardly perfect, but it’s part of a wave of new applications that seek to solve the most frustrating part of city driving: finding a parking space. Rather than threatening “appropriate measures to prohibit any such app,” Walsh should be working with Haystack and similar firms. Welcome change; don’t push it away.

Here’s how we find on-street parking today: cruising the streets. We try to spot signs that a car might be moving — a closing door, a flash of brake lights, passengers inside. We follow pedestrians with keys in their hands. If we think we’re in luck, we stop, blocking traffic, waiting while drivers load packages, belt themselves in, adjust seats, check their hair, and then, finally, drive off.

It’s a dumb system, and costly, too. UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup in 2011 said that, “on average, 30 percent of the cars in congested downtown traffic were cruising for parking.” An IBM survey of 20 cities worldwide found drivers spending an average of nearly 20 minutes finding a parking spot, making for a gigantic waste of time and fuel. Fixing all of this, quite obviously, would be good for motorists, cities, and the environment.

Haystack’s fix involves parkers informing everyone else when they’ll be leaving. It’s a simple idea. Motorists now circle streets because they don’t know when or where parking is available. Haystack lets them know. So why does Boston object to drivers having better information? Why would it want to keep in place our old and wasteful ways?

Money, of course. Haystack charges for its services. Those leaving a parking spot get paid by those who take the spot. The company gets a cut.

Haystack sunnily says it’s just charging for information. The city replies that Haystack is “selling” spaces — spaces the city owns. Haystack has the better argument. If the company merely provided the service as a good Samaritan, for instance — making the information freely available to all — I doubt City Hall would be frothing so much. Definitions aside, though, Walsh’s opposition misses the broader point: someone should be providing this information. Haystack’s business model doesn’t burden taxpayers with the cost of doing so, but if the city is so determined to keep control of information about public parking spaces, then it should engage Haystack directly.

There are a host of folks — many of them, like Haystack, looking to make a profit — who see the same kind of opportunities in transforming parking as Uber and Lyft saw in transforming the taxicab industry. SpotHero, for example, is a kind of Priceline for parking garages. SpotAngels helps motorists avoid tickets by alerting them to street cleaning, tow zones, and the like. Parkopedia bills itself as the “Wikipedia for parking.”

“The parking revolution will be digitized,” runs a headline in the magazine Government Technology. Even Boston is slowly getting into the act, now seeking bidders to provide more modern services. One would let motorists pay tickets via smartphone. A second would allow pay-by-phone parking — a good idea but hardly novel. Parkmobile, for instance, has provided the same service for years in cities such as Washington, D.C.

Anything more cutting-edge, however, will apparently have to wait. In pushing back so hard against Haystack, the Walsh administration looks more reactionary than reformer, more eager to kill interesting new ideas than figuring out how to make them work.

This column originally appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 20, 2014.

The stupid stuff we say

In 2010, Dan Gilbert excoriated basketball player LeBron James’s decision to sign with the Miami Heat, calling it “cowardly,” “narcissistic,” and a “shameful display of selfishness and betrayal.” Gilbert was not merely an aggrieved fan, however. He was the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team James was leaving.

Four years later Gilbert is still the owner, and James is now back. The two profess the past is behind them but still, those are thoughts Gilbert has made clear he wishes he’d never expressed. If Gilbert can take any solace in his boneheadedness, though, it’s that he’s not alone. People who should know better — people of power, wealth, and fame — say the stupidest things. They’re helping to give new life to an old cottage industry: the art of the apology. But better, however, would be never to say these things in the first place.

A few days ago, Malaysian politician Bung Moktar Radin congratulated Germany on its recent World Cup win: “Well done … bravo … long live Hitler,” he tweeted. Last month the US Department of Education posted a photo of actor Kristen Wiig, looking obviously intoxicated in a scene from “Bridesmaids,” with a caption saying, “Help me, I’m poor.” “If this is you,” warned the department, “then you better (apply for financial aid).” Also last month, TV viewers saw horse owner Steve Coburn let loose, saying owners who didn’t enter their horses in the first two races of the Triple Crown had taken “the coward’s way out.”

The month before, a Miami Dolphins running back tweeted “OMG,” “horrible” upon hearing the St. Louis Rams had signed Michael Sam, pro football’s first openly gay player. A few days earlier, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts proclaimed “Sexual assault is always avoidable,” ostensibly to mark May as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And in January, MSNBC expressed its approval of a cute Cheerios ad featuring a biracial family, saying, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.”

Predictable outrage, of course, greeted each remark. So did predictable apologies.

After a rebuke from his country’s prime minister, the Malaysian pol somewhat non-grammatically apologized: “I unintentionally said something that hurt d feeling of d ppl in Germany.” “We’re very sorry,” said the US Department of Education, regretting its “insensitivity.” I’m “very ashamed of myself,” a chastened Coburn said two days after ripping into the horse-racing industry.

The Miami Dolphins player, meanwhile, waxed broadly in his well-scripted apology, expressing remorse not only to Sam but to pretty much everyone else as well, promising in the future to “represent the values of the Miami Dolphins organization.”

“Dumb mistake,” said Bay State Governor Deval Patrick, making clear his administration would never blame sexual assault victims.

“I personally apologize,” said the president of MSNBC, terming the anti-conservative gibe “outrageous and unacceptable.”

All well and good, I suppose. But still, the offending comments were made. Some — such as the Department of Education post — were just inadvertent or lame jokes. Others — such as MSNBC’s tweet — were likely more deeply felt. Either way, what once would have been boorish thoughts heard or seen by just a few, are now, with stunning rapidity, spread worldwide as stories, tweets, posts, or emails passed on from one user to the next. That’s what happened to public relations rep Justine Sacco, who last December tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” immediately before boarding an 11-hour flight to Cape Town. By the time she landed, her tweet had become a worldwide obsession and her job had been lost.

Dan Gilbert wrote and posted his screed in the heat of the moment following LeBron’s much anticipated “Decision.” Coburn the horseman faced the cameras emotionally distraught from his loss. Competing for ever more followers and influence, Twitter and other social media encourage users’ desperate efforts to be distinctive or outrageous.

There’s much to like about instantaneous communication, but not, perhaps, about thoughts instantly expressed. An old piece of advice runs through my head every time I see these now-familiar routines of offending statements and heartfelt apologies: Sleep on it. That notion runs counter to the immediate-response ethos of social media, but it’s worth reviving. Edit thyself. Few of us are so smart or clever that we always get it right the first time.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on July 15, 2014.

How to grow the ‘sharing economy’

Thanks largely to clever technologies, Boston’s transportation system is evolving, moving away from the familiar model of private cars and public transit to something cheaper, greener, more convenient, and more consumer friendly. It’s an exciting possibility the city needs to embrace; it also needs to push things along.

The new transportation model is all about sharing, the buzzword for what some call the “sharing economy.” It includes innovations such as ride-sharing (Uber), bike-sharing (Hubway), and car-sharing (Zipcar). All three rely on cutting-edge communications; none would have been feasible in a pre-Internet world. Smartphones allow users to find out where bikes are available, order up a ride, or reserve a car. (The same technology, by the way, is making conventional public transit more user-friendly as well, telling commuters when the next bus or train will be coming by.)

Collectively, these three methods supplement existing ways of getting around, but — and this is the key idea behind the sharing economy — they also mean that it’s no longer necessary for residents to own their own forms of transportation. Consumers benefit considerably, avoiding the expense of a purchase, maintenance, parking, and insurance. The city benefits too. Boston built America’s first subway, putting streetcars underground, because crowded streets were too clogged to handle traffic. The city faces similar problems today. Hubway, Uber, and Zipcar offer a solution with minimal taxpayer expense.

Minimal expense, yes, but there’s still much the city can do — or not.

In the case of ride-sharing services such as Uber, what the city needs to do is nothing. As we recently saw in Cambridge, where the city clumsily proposed regulations that in effect would have killed Uber and its ilk, the old-guard taxicab industry is desperate to protect its monopoly status. Rather than get involved, politicians should just stand back and let change occur unimpeded.

When it comes to bike-sharing, though, more needs to be done. Hubway, first launched in 2011, requires minimal city funding, relying instead on user fees, grants, and corporate donations. Originally focused on downtown Boston, it now includes further-out neighborhoods as well as Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville. Ridership has grown every year; in 2013 there were almost 10,000 subscribers and 1.5 million rides. That makes for a lot of forgone car trips (and 500 tons less of CO2 emissions). Still, if you’re an urban biker, you know that sharing city streets with cars is a scary proposition. Getting from point A to point B shouldn’t require a high measure of courage, which is why the city needs dedicated bike lanes. It’s not a matter of building new pathways. Rather, as New York did along 8th and 9th Avenues, it means keeping cars and bikers apart.

Zipcar needs help too. The Cambridge startup was founded in 2000 and now is based in Boston. A unit of the Avis Budget Group, it last year had over 4 million reservations in 28 cities around the world, including London and Barcelona. But for all of its success everywhere else, it’s something of a poor stepchild in its home base. In most cities, Zipcars can be found in reserved spaces on city streets (in Baltimore, for instance, 40 percent of its locations are on-street, regional VP Jonathan Gonsky tells me). Not so in Boston, where all of its pick-up locations are off-site: in alleys or on private property.

Why does that matter? Zipcar says car-sharing climbs dramatically with more visible, on-street locations. Boston makes available on-street space for restaurant valet services. Why, Zipcar wonders, not for car-sharing — especially since it’s willing to pay dearly to rent the spaces?

With parking tight in many neighborhoods, residents’ first reaction to that idea would likely be an unequivocal “no.” But Zipcar has persuasive data showing that every one of its cars reduces the number of privately owned vehicles by as many as 15. In other words (and somewhat counterintuitively), giving over an on-street parking spot to a car-sharing service actually makes it easier for everyone else to find a space to park. It’s an idea the city should explore.

Noise, traffic, and crowding are the city’s soft underbellies, threats to growth that need to be managed. The sharing economy, with a little help from the city, is no short-term novelty: it’s the new transportation system of the future.

This column originally appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 13, 2014.

Walsh will meet obstacles in building a late-night city

Uh oh, it appears that Boston’s pell-mell rush to be party capital of the world is now on hold. For the time being, New York looks to remain unchallenged as the city that never sleeps.

Sometimes it seemed as if the most pressing issue in last year’s mayoral election was the demand for later closing times. State law currently prohibits alcohol sales after 2 a.m. That may be fine for sleepy little hamlets, ran the thinking, but not for Boston. The booming city is increasingly a haven for the young and the high-tech and if Boston wanted that boom to continue, if it wanted to be (that most over-used of terms) world class, it had to accommodate the newcomers’ apparently insatiable desire to go drinking until the wee hours.

Most of the mayoral candidates, including Marty Walsh, said they were on-board. So when Walsh became mayor, it looked as if dusk-to-dawn boozing was right around the corner. All that was needed was a signoff from the Legislature and, since Walsh used to be a legislator, it seemed like a done deal. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t a done deal at all. And blame for that appears to belong to state legislators from Boston who were listening to their constituents.

The recalcitrant legislators may eventually cave — and they should — but even if Boston is permitted to expand closing times, the battle doesn’t end there. It’s not that people don’t want bars open until all hours. It’s just that they want them to be open somewhere other than where they live. Once, perhaps, one could find areas where there were few city dwellers, and no one would mind nocturnal carousing. Not anymore. The Seaport? Not with a residential building boom underway. Downtown Crossing? Its resurgence is being marked not just by new retail but also new apartments and condos. Allston? New developments are now targeting an older, non-student demographic.

Indeed, Boston’s very success — the fact that seemingly everyone has decided they want to become new urbanites — now means there are almost no sections of the city where residents wouldn’t squawk about all-hours establishments in their midst. True, it’s NIMBYism — not in my backyard, thank you — but it’s utterly understandable. People unhappy with revelers vomiting on their front steps at 2 a.m. will be even more unhappy when it happens at 4.

Still, one thing is odd. Why is the Legislature getting involved in this at all? Why are state reps from Pepperell or state senators from Amherst weighing in on closing times in Boston? If there’s anything that should be up to local control, it’s obviously local matters such as opening and closing times — or, for that matter, how many liquor licenses can be issued and who it is that can issue them.

Not only does state law limit closing times, but it also specifies how many licenses any city and town is allowed to have. The quota is a formula based on population, with one license allowed for every 1,000 residents (with provisions for additional licenses for larger cities). For places like Boston — whose population swells daily with commuters, tourists, and those seeking nightlife — those limits are too tight. Then, to add further injury, Boston isn’t allowed to issue the licenses. Unlike every other city and town, Boston’s three-member licensing board is appointed by the governor.

It’s embarrassing, a holdover, allegedly, from the days when the Irish ruled the city and distrusting Brahmins controlled state government. The origins of the policy in bigotry make it particularly offensive, but whatever the motivations, limits like these don’t make sense. Merely as a matter of principle, Boston — and not the Legislature — should have control over what goes on within its borders. Walsh is right to seek to change all three: longer hours, more licenses, and local control.

But even if Walsh wins these battles, that just shifts the political action from the State House to City Hall. If anything, city pols will be even more sensitive to residents’ objections. Oh well. There’s always cold tea in Chinatown.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on July 8, 2014.

Sharks, turkeys and other signs of success

As if this were a good thing, a group of scientists announced that the great white shark — the ruthless killing machine of “Jaws” — is making a comeback. Some 2,000 are in East Coast waters, feasting off the gray seal, another animal also thought to have been long gone. And it’s not only great whites; populations of tiger sharks, porbeagles, and others are mounting.

Meanwhile, turkeys roam Brookline in gangs, like teen toughs from the 1950s, puffed up and strutting. Winchester residents say they’ve seen a mountain lion, while bears now wander into suburban backyards.

Lions and tiger sharks and bears, oh my.

Whatever happened to humankind’s dominion over the earth? I thought the whole point of civilization was to get rid of the things that hurt, frightened, annoyed, or just creeped us out. Cage the lions, get rid of bats, spray mosquitoes, and swat spiders. Are we sliding backwards, losing our nerve: from “veni, vidi, vici” to “hic sunt dracones”?

Or are we just growing up?

Environmentalism in the United States came in two big waves. One was during the era of President Theodore Roosevelt, the advocate of the strenuous life who pushed the creation of the national park system. The second began in 1962 with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which led to the first Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. While Roosevelt’s conservationism was a celebration of wildlife (the flora and fauna in the woods, not Boston’s hoped-for 4 a.m. closings), the second wave was a reaction to degradation and poisoning. Carson’s book recounted pesticides killing birds and other life. Moreover, it was increasingly obvious that the air had become unbreathable, the water undrinkable, and the soil laden with toxins. The result was a series of major pieces of legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

And, of course, since government can never do anything right, all of them failed miserably.

No! In fact, they were a startling success. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how bleak things were back then and how much better they are today. For example, dense, thick haze once routinely covered many cities. People were often urged not to go outdoors; the air was too hazardous to breathe. Those days are now gone.

Granted, the fixes weren’t easy. Homeowners were outraged when told they couldn’t burn leaves in the fall. New emissions-control systems made cars more expensive. Businesses complained about the costs of scrubbers. Yet their impact has been felt everywhere, from Boston to Los Angeles to London. Remember the storied London fog, whose gloom set the mood for much Victorian literature? It was largely soot and sulfur dioxide from burning coal, making for evocative evenings, yes, but it was also a killer that once took the lives of 12,000 people over a few days. Thanks to environmental controls, the fog is no more. The novelist’s loss is humanity’s gain.

The return of the beasts is also humanity’s gain, a restoration of ecological balance. Their resurgence has been quite intentional, the result of an array of state and federal laws. New England’s landscape, once almost denuded from farming, is now 80 percent forest. The Boston Harbor, mocked as the region’s cesspool, is now swimmable. Raw sewage can no longer be dumped in coastal waters.

No question, many of the complaints about environmental rules are true. They can be arcane, complex, and counterproductive. Impact reviews are too often hijacked by those with parochial interests. Too many regulations are prescriptive (e.g., install this brand of scrubber) rather than results-oriented (e.g., cut particulates by 90 percent). And there are real costs, to businesses and individuals. Fishing restrictions threaten livelihoods. Beachgoers eye piping plovers in their midst and make surly jokes about “tastes like chicken.”

But it’s worth it.

I don’t mean to sound Pollyannaish. Things are far from perfect. Even as we deal with old problems, new crises, such as global climate change, emerge. Yet the history of environmentalism is a fundamentally optimistic story about ourselves and the capacity of government: Despite fits, false starts, blind alleys, and bureaucratic clumsiness, we have the capacity to improve things. It’s not a matter of whether we can. It’s a matter of politics, a matter of whether we will.

This column originally appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 6, 2014.

Free, disagreeable speech

One court says it’s OK to take voyeuristic videos of women. Another says it’s OK to harass them as they enter abortion clinics. Both cases sound like the makings of a new war on women — yet both were correctly decided.

Four months ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court provoked an uproar by ruling that it was legally permissible to take pictures up women’s skirts. At least, that was how many saw it. “Massachusetts court says ‘upskirt’ photos are legal,” read a CNN headline.

The justices weren’t, of course, out to make the world safe for voyeurs. The problem was the statute itself: It actually didn’t prohibit upskirting. The SJC practically invited Massachusetts to change the law, pointing to models from other states. That happened, and just this last week police made their first arrest under the state’s new, more specific law.

But why go through all of this — and in the process, let off one Michael Robertson, the creep whose actions led to the SJC case? It should have been obvious to the justices that this kind of stuff should be illegal.

Obvious, perhaps, but that’s not what judges are supposed to do. They parse language, interpret meaning, and balance interests — but they shouldn’t write laws. That’s the prerogative of legislators, or, through the initiative petition process, the people.

Last week’s “buffer zone” case has provoked yet another uproar. The US Supreme Court struck down a 2007 Massachusetts law prohibiting speech opposing (or even favoring) abortion within a 35-foot radius around abortion clinics. Much public reaction was harshly critical. The decision “shows a troubling level of disregard for American women,” said the head of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Gubernatorial candidate Don Berwick called it “a loss for women.”

It’s currently popular to believe, particularly when it comes to the Supreme Court, that ideology, not constitutional principle, drives judges’ opinions. But the decision was unanimous, including liberal and female justices. That fact alone suggests something else was at play.

That something else was the First Amendment. The state’s buffer zone was an obviously faulty piece of legislation, one that cut too freely against the constitutional right of free speech.

The amendment, I think, is popular in the abstract — a piece of secular sacred text, if you will — but not beloved in its application. We all favor free speech for those with whom we agree. But we’d just as soon squelch those we strongly disagree with, or, at a minimum, put them off in a corner where they won’t bother us. Dissenting speech can be annoying, upsetting, even offensive, especially when it’s up close and personal. That’s what seemed to upset many commentators the most about the buffer-zone decision. They viewed pro-life speech outside of clinics as a kind of bullying, an intrusion on women’s personal space at a time fraught with distress and anguish.

But that, too, is part of the First Amendment; constitutionally, the government can’t shield us from speech even if that speech disturbs us greatly. (If it could, you’d doubtless see a demand for buffer zones against a broad range of loud and insistent protesters.)

Of course, quelling speech wasn’t the professed purpose of the buffer zone. Its avowed concern, in the wake of shootings and threats of violence, was with women’s safety and access. Limiting speech was just a means to achieve those goals.

Courts have long recognized that interests like safety and access can require “narrowly tailored” limits on speech. It was the “narrow tailoring” requirement that tripped up the buffer. Read fairly, the court’s opinion was a matter of line drawing. The Bay State’s buffer treaded too heavily, prohibiting all speech at all times of the day: belligerent and potentially threatening as well as quiet and non-confrontational.

More targeted rules might pass muster. As with the voyeurism case, the court suggested alternatives, including more acceptable laws in states such as New York.

Absent getting rid of the First Amendment, pro-life speech around abortion clinics isn’t going to stop. But safety and access are different matters. It took the Massachusetts legislature only a day to pass a new upskirting law. A fix here won’t come as fast, but is needed soon.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe on July 1, 2014.