"Better Then"?

Ocean Hoptimism
Sep 29
6 min read

Updated: Sep 30

Nostalgia, Environment, and Justice in the American Psyche

Every few years the country re-litigates a feeling: things were better then. The exact “then” floats—1955 Main Street, 1984 morning in America, late-90s pre-9/11 calm—but the mood music is the same: simpler, safer, more American. It’s a powerful story. It’s also selective memory.

If we look specifically at environmental quality and social justice, the air we breathe, the water we drink, who gets protected and who pays the costs, the “better then” thesis collapses under the weight of actual history. Yet the feeling persists. Why?

The Environmental Ledger: Fewer Poisons, Hotter Planet

What got better:

Air and water quality. The era many people romanticize was the era of leaded gasoline, uncontrolled smokestacks, and rivers that caught fire. U.S. particulate and ozone levels dropped dramatically after the Clean Air Act; many rivers rebounded under the Clean Water Act. Bald eagles, brown pelicans, and peregrine falcons rebounded after DDT restrictions. Lead was pulled from gasoline and paint; children’s blood-lead levels plummeted. Acid rain declined. LA smog still exists, but it’s a fraction of what it was.
Worker and neighborhood protections. OSHA, the EPA, Superfund, vehicle emissions standards, catalytic converters: none of that existed in the supposed golden age. “Better then” often meant you just didn’t measure the harm, or you pushed it out of view.

What got worse (or more visible):

Climate change and its symptoms. We replaced obvious, local smog with an invisible, global fever. Heat waves, megafires and smoke, stronger rainfall extremes, and coastal flooding have turned the background music louder.
Diffuse contaminants. Microplastics, PFAS (“forever chemicals”), and pharmaceutical residues aren’t as photogenic as an oil-slicked duck, but they persist, bioaccumulate, and complicate everything from fisheries to human health.
Biodiversity. Habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and warming oceans erode ecological resilience. The baseline keeps shifting; each generation normalizes a thinner, quieter nature.

Bottom line: On many local environmental metrics, America is far better off today than in the mid-20th century because of regulation, science, and enforcement. On the global climate and biodiversity front, we’re worse off. The nostalgia error comes from conflating a cleaned-up neighborhood river with a stable planet, and from forgetting just how toxic “then” truly was.

The Justice Ledger: Whose Simplicity?

“Things were simpler” is often code for “roles were rigid.” Simpler for whom? In the simpler past, segregation was law or practice, redlining carved hard boundaries into cities, Indigenous sovereignty was ignored, disabled Americans had no ADA, LGBTQ people lacked basic protections, and women’s legal/financial autonomy was narrower. “Simpler” meant fewer rights to contest.

The environmental mirror of this is environmental injustice: the siting of landfills, refineries, freeways, and hazardous facilities in communities with the least political power: often Black, Brown, immigrant, poor, or rural. Those communities were designated sacrifice zones so that others could enjoy “simplicity.”

Today, when equity frameworks ask to rebalance attention and investment (clean air in fence-line neighborhoods, flood protection where risk is highest, tribal co-management of lands and waters) some people experience the change as loss. Psychologically, that’s status threat plus loss aversion: gains for others register as losses for me, even when the total pie is larger (cleaner air benefits everyone). Hence the refrain: “We used to be free to build without all this red tape.” “Red tape” often means “now we must account for costs we used to externalize.”

Bottom line: The expansion of rights and the recognition of harms once ignored make the present feel “complicated.” What’s actually happening is that hidden complexity, human and ecological, has finally been brought into the ledger.

Why Nostalgia Feels True (Even When It Isn't)

Shifting baselines. We compare today not to reality but to the remembered best day of our youth, when our bodies were stronger, neighborhoods felt familiar, and climate impacts hadn’t compounded.
Availability bias. The old harms (lead, visible smog) went down, so they faded from memory; the new harms (heat, smoke, PFAS) feel like fresh insults.
Media mix. Negative stories consistently outperform good-news stories in click-throughs, and most platforms’ ranking systems are built to reward high engagement. The result: more doom gets surfaced, which generates even more clicks; local progress (a restored wetland, a pollution settlement, a new bus line) gets little airtime.
Identity threat. When society revises the roster of who counts, through voting rights, civil rights, or environmental justice, those who always had the mic can experience the volume shift as censorship rather than balance.
Comfort with externalities. It was “easier” when the costs of a cheap gallon of gas or a plastic-wrapped lifestyle were off-books: borne by downwind, downstream, or future communities.

Was Anything "Better Then" for Environment and Justice?

Yes, if your yardstick is narrow: fewer rules to follow when building a freeway; fewer lawsuits; fewer people empowered to say no. If your factory dumped waste without penalty and the paper declared it “progress,” then the 1950s were terrific. If you were the fish downstream, or the child with asthma, less so.

Sometimes the past had genuine strengths we should salvage: dense streetcar networks before we ripped them out; walkable neighborhoods before car dominance; community cohesion before nationalized culture wars; a journalism model less optimized for rage. But these aren’t arguments for rolling back civil rights or environmental safeguards. They’re invitations to build better now using best-of-both world lessons.

The Pie Problem: Finite Slices vs. Growing the Whole

A core misunderstanding frames justice and environmental safety as fixed pies: if more protection goes to one group or region, others must get less. But many interventions grow the pie:

Clean air standards reduce hospital visits, boost worker productivity, and extend lives across zip codes.
Energy efficiency saves money for households and businesses.
Wetlands and oyster reefs reduce flood damage for entire metro areas.
Public transit and walkability cut emissions and household transportation costs while improving access to jobs and schools.
EJ screening and targeted cleanup reduce the highest exposures first, shrinking overall disease burden.

When winners and losers do exist (say, retiring a coal plant), a just transition (retraining, revenue-sharing, local reinvestment) converts zero-sum politics into net-gain outcomes.

So... Does the Belief Hold Any Water?

As an emotional truth, nostalgia is real. People did feel safer when change was slower, neighbors looked familiar, and harms were unmeasured. As a factual claim about environment and justice, “better then” mostly fails. We breathe cleaner air, drink cleaner water, recognize more people as worthy of protection, and possess better tools to identify harm. We also face a planetary climate crisis that old America helped create and that new America must help solve.

Equity and justice do not equal oppression; they equal accounting; putting previously ignored costs into the balance sheet and inviting everyone to the table where decisions are made. The discomfort isn’t proof that justice is tyranny; it’s evidence that the bill for yesterday’s “simplicity” has arrived.

A Forward Stance

If we want what people genuinely miss (stability, safety, shared purpose), we won’t find it by rewinding to a curated past. We’ll get it by:

Keeping the gains (clean air/water rules, endangered species recovery, lead removal) and scaling them up for climate and biodiversity.
Centering fairness—who benefits, who bears risk—and measuring success by reduced harm, not just increased output.
Designing for co-benefits: daylight a creek and cool the neighborhood; electrify buses and cut asthma; restore dunes and defend homes from storms.
Telling the whole story: not doom-scrolling, not rose-tinting. Wins are real. So are warnings. Progress is messy, and measurable.

“Better then” is a feeling about a moment when many costs were out of sight. “Better now” is a project: see the full picture, price the full costs, share the full benefits, and build a future simple in the only way that matters: simple to defend to our kids.

That’s the lane Ocean Hoptimism tries to hold open: telling the whole story, not just the obituary. We spotlight the wins... reefs standing resilient, communities restoring wetlands, historically excluded communities now shaping conservation on their own terms, policies that worked, even the resurrection of a sunken fishing vessel like the Western Flyer to serve as a floating classroom for the future... alongside the grit it took to get there. The goal isn’t to sugar-coat the crisis but to give people proof that progress is possible and worth fighting for.