Abstract
Urban greening projects are increasingly promoted as win-win solutions for climate resilience. Yet even well-intentioned initiatives can provoke conflict when they intersect with contested landscapes, competing environmental values, and uneven access to decision-making power. This article introduces the concept of procedural environmentalism to analyze how actors mobilize competing environmental claims to influence land use decisions through the planning process. A case study of the Modoc Multi-Use Path conflict in Santa Barbara, California is used to illustrate the contested procedural terrain of environmental decision-making, highlighting how both supporters and opponents invoke environmental values to assert legitimacy. Based on interviews and public documents, the findings show how procedural inclusion more readily privileged climate-oriented values over environmental protection-oriented claims. As green conflicts become more common, it is increasingly important to examine how planning processes mask deeper asymmetries of power and legitimacy by selectively recognizing certain environmental values over others. These dynamics shape not only whose visions of environmental action are recognized as valid, but also whose priorities determine the spatial dynamics and future of urban environments.
Keywords
Introduction
Green infrastructure is having its moment in the spotlight. Across the globe, cities are embracing projects that integrate the built and natural environment to facilitate social and ecological benefits (Grabowski et al., 2022). Designed to reduce natural hazard vulnerability and improve human health, green infrastructure interventions such as active transportation projects are increasingly seen as hallmarks of sustainable urbanism (Buehler and Pucher, 2021; Depietri and McPhearson, 2017). This growing enthusiasm reflects a larger paradigmatic shift in how urban futures are being imagined. Greening is no longer a fringe or aesthetic consideration, but a central component of planning and policy agendas—what has been termed the “urban greening orthodoxy” (Anguelovski et al., 2018). This shift is reinforced by international frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which emphasizes sustainable and inclusive urban development as a key priority (United Nations, 2015).
As cities invest in green infrastructure to address climate change, new tensions are emerging over whose environmental values are recognized and whose visions of the future are empowered through institutional frameworks. While the transition to green infrastructure promises environmental and social benefits, friction often arises when projects conflict with long-standing practices of environmental stewardship or privilege certain environmental values over others. These conflicts reflect deeper political struggles over recognition and power and raise important questions about who has the right to shape the green urban future. A growing body of scholarship has examined the distributional externalities of urban greening such as green gentrification and spatial inequality (Anguelovski and Connolly, 2022; Anguelovski et al., 2019). While some attention has been paid to the procedural dimensions of these transitions, such as how decisions are made and whose knowledge is included (Ottinger et al., 2014; Yazar et al., 2025), less attention has been paid to the role of environmental values in shaping whose claims are seen as valid. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on the procedural dimensions of environmental value conflicts and the tensions that arise when divergent visions of environmental action collide within the planning and siting of green infrastructure projects.
The Modoc Multi-Use Path in Santa Barbara, California, offers a compelling site to examine tensions between diverging environmental values. Part of a broader state effort to expand active transportation and promote climate resilience, the Modoc Path was designed to close a key gap in regional Class I bicycle lanes fully separated from vehicle traffic. To do so, however, the project proposed building through a protected green space known as the Modoc Preserve. As conflict emerged, both proponents and opponents framed their positions in environmental terms, embracing very different visions of environmental action and responsibility. The Modoc Path controversy offers a clear illustration of a community group excluded from early planning decisions, who turned to legal action as a tactical means to compel recognition of environmental values they believed the project undermined. It also provides a window into street-level transformations, revealing how everyday social interactions reflect and shape broader political and environmental dynamics. As Emilia Smeds and colleagues observe, “streets are in many ways the quintessential social infrastructure of neighborhoods” (Smeds et al., 2023: 698).
To explore how environmental values are important to procedural inclusion, this study examines the Modoc Path controversy through the lens of procedural environmentalism. Procedural environmentalism is introduced as a framework that highlights how competing environmental claims are made and then filtered through formal planning processes. It asks: how do actors with divergent environmental values strategically engage procedural mechanisms to assert legitimacy and shape land use outcomes? How do planning processes, such as grant writing and environmental review structure which claims are recognized? And what does this reveal about the politics of green infrastructure development in an era where climate action and environmental protection do not always align?
This study draws on a growing body of work on green conflicts, environmental values, and environmental governance, introducing the concept of procedural environmentalism as a critical lens for understanding the uneven terrain through which environmental values are negotiated. It provides a background on the Modoc Multi-Use Path controversy and the different stakeholders involved. The findings present three interrelated dimensions of the conflict: (1) the articulation of diverging environmental values, (2) contested meanings of conservation, and (3) the use of environmental regulation to force conditional inclusion in the decision-making process. The discussion weaves these findings together to reveal a central paradox: while procedural systems often reproduce inequality, they can also be repurposed by communities seeking to assert environmental claims and demand recognition in planning processes that have otherwise left them out. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader implications for participatory planning in an era of accelerating green infrastructure development.
Green conflict, diverging values, and procedural environmentalism
The literature on green conflicts arises from ongoing debates about how to understand and represent opposition to green development projects in a context where opposing views are often dismissed as irrational or self-interested by those sympathetic to planners (Freudenburg and Pastor, 1992; Gibson, 2005). These conflicts span a wide array of green infrastructural projects, including wind and solar farms, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power installations (Neri et al., 2019; Straka et al., 2020; Tinsley et al., 2024; Voigt et al., 2019). Eskjær and Horsbøl (2023) offer a typology of green conflicts that helps parse out emerging tensions at the intersection of climate action and environmental values. Type 1 conflicts involve internal disagreements within environmentalist agendas, such as debates over tactics or priorities among similarly aligned actors. Type 2 and Type 3 conflicts center on frictions between climate-oriented goals and other environmental priorities. Type 2 describes conflicts that emerge when environmental protection efforts are challenged or undermined by climate mitigation or adaptation initiatives; Type 3 captures the inverse, where climate actions are blocked or reshaped by environmental concerns. Type 4 refers to conflicts over how best to respond to climate change, often within a shared recognition of its urgency. These different types of conflicts are particularly revealing because they highlight that “green” goals are not always aligned, and that environmentalism itself is not a unified field but a contested terrain of competing values, priorities, and imaginaries.
Green-on-green tensions are rooted in conflicting value systems. Some are anchored in broad worldviews, while others are shaped by specific contextual relationships to place. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) underscores the many value systems present in environmental decision-making (Anderson et al., 2022; Raymond et al., 2023). Their typology distinguishes between instrumental values (useful for human purposes), intrinsic values (valued in their own right), and relational values (derived from relationships between people and nature). While this framework encourages a more inclusive accounting of environmental commitments, instrumental values such as climate mitigation, mobility, and economic gain tend to dominate urban greening contexts, often at the expense of more relational or protectionist values (Anderson et al., 2022).
Environmental values are also politically consequential. They represent orientations that align with specific pathways for social and environmental action. Adrian Martin and colleagues (2024) offer a typology of environmental values that correspond with distinct governance trajectories: (1) green economy, focused on market-based solutions and technological innovation; (2) nature protection, rooted in conservationist logics; (3) Earth stewardship and biocultural diversity, emphasizing relational and place-based ethics; and (4) degrowth and post-growth approaches, which challenge extractive paradigms and center systemic transformation. This typology helps illuminate how conflicts over environmental claims are also conflicts over what kinds of futures are being pursued, and whose visions of environmental care are rendered viable within dominant planning paradigms. At the international level, the valuation of nature often favors instrumental and market-oriented values, which have come to dominate discussions on pathways to sustainability (Martin et al., 2024: 807).
In climate-oriented planning at the city level, green goals often serve broader development agendas that emphasize green economies. For example, Anguelovski and Connolly (2022) show how the appropriation of land, resources, or value in the name of urban greening can entrench existing inequalities and marginalize community-based values, particularly when climate goals are privileged over social and historical attachments to place. This dynamic reflects a deeper tension within urban greening initiatives and a need to attend to the procedural dimensions of how legitimacy is constructed, who gets to speak for nature, and how environmental claims are filtered through institutional processes. Procedural exclusions perpetuate historical injustices by marginalizing the worldviews and values of those with the least power, including Indigenous communities (Sultana, 2022; Whyte, 2020).
Scholars have long emphasized the importance of procedural justice for environmental decision-making, which concerns how inclusion is structured or constrained and who has a voice in shaping environmental outcomes (Ottinger, 2013; Schlosberg, 2007). Taylor Johnson and colleagues (2023) highlight that procedural justice is not only about whether participation occurs, but how the design of regulatory and participatory processes shapes which issues are taken seriously. Critics have pointed out that inclusion is often conditional and that while participation may be formally offered, it is often limited for publics whose values do not align with dominant institutional logics (Haverkamp, 2021; Sovacool et al., 2019; Valkenburg, 2024). As a result, procedural justice becomes less a guarantee of inclusion than a terrain of contestation.
Procedural environmentalism builds on existing work in environmental governance, value conflict, and participatory politics, offering a lens for examining how actors navigate formal planning systems to assert competing environmental claims. It is not tied to a singular ideology or ecological vision but constitutes a field of struggle where questions of recognition, legitimacy, and authority are contested. Rather than assuming that participation is inherently inclusive or democratic, this approach foregrounds the strategic ways that publics mobilize environmental values and institutional mechanisms within systems that filter what counts as valid environmental concerns. Procedural environmentalism highlights how environmental claims become tools for asserting belonging, negotiating control over place, and challenging or reinforcing dominant narratives of sustainability. In contrast to idealized models of participatory planning, a procedural environmentalism lens focuses on the political labor of environmental engagement itself: how actors navigate institutional systems that privilege certain ecological values over others.
Case background and methods
The Modoc Preserve, owned by the La Cumbre Mutual Water Company, consists of 25 acres of protected open space located between residential neighborhoods in Santa Barbara, California. It contains vernal marsh, oak woodlands, riparian corridors, open grassland and is home to a wide variety of bird species and vegetation, including a row of iconic palm trees that separate the open space from the street. Although relatively small in scale, the Modoc Preserve represents a symbolic victory for the neighboring community. In 1999, the land was formally protected through a conservation easement granted to the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, intended to preserve the area permanently “in its natural, open space, scenic, wetlands, ecological and wildlife habitat condition” (Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, 1999: 2). For many residents, the Modoc Preserve represents a rare pocket of green space amid expanding suburban development.
The Modoc Road Multi-Use Path project aimed to close what planners described as “the missing link” in the regional bicycle network, connecting two multi-use paths separated from street traffic: the Obern Trail and a recently completed path that runs alongside Las Positas Road. The project was funded as part of a broader effort by the state of California to promote active transportation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bicycle advocates partnered with Santa Barbara County officials to apply for and secure funding in 2018 through California’s Active Transportation Program (ATP) under the project title “Modoc Road Multimodal Path Gap Closure” (Dobberteen, 2018). The project envisioned a 1.1-mile Class I multi-use path designed to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians, offering a safer alternative to riding alongside traffic on Modoc Road.
While initially framed as an uncontroversial infrastructure improvement project, the plan quickly became a flashpoint for conflict. Although the grant application stated that the project would remain entirely within county right-of-way, subsequent design proposals revealed two possible alignments—one (Alignment A) that would remove significant numbers of trees along Modoc Road, including a row of iconic palms while remaining in the county right-of-way, and another (Alignment B) that would route the path through the Modoc Preserve, requiring fewer tree removals but raising questions about the integrity of the 1999 conservation easement. Both options were met with public outcry, which erupted in mid-2022, when nearby residents learned of the county’s proposal. Notices regarding the Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND), an environmental review document required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), were released with little lead time. In August 2022, residents organized street protests along Modoc Road, with handmade signs reading “Asphalt is Non-Native,” “Save the Preserve,” and “Wrong Project, Wrong Place.” They also circulated petitions, quickly amassing thousands of signatures (Thomas, 2022). A month later, project advocates responded by publishing opinion pieces in the local papers and launching their own petition to show community support for the project (Cunningham, 2022). In December 2022, members of the Community Association for the Modoc Preserve (CAMP) filed a lawsuit under CEQA, arguing that the county’s MND was insufficient and procedurally flawed. The lawsuit culminated in a settlement in fall 2023.
Stakeholder positions on the Modoc Multi-Use Path Proposal.
At the time of research, the controversy over the construction of the multi-use path was well underway, and a tentative resolution had been reached between parties. Opponents of the path were reluctant to speak on record during the lawsuit phase. Once that phased passed, an IRB process was completed. Purposive sampling was used, starting with individuals named in news articles, followed by snowball sampling. Respondents were asked to reflect on their experiences prior to, during, and after the introduction of the plan to construct a path through the Modoc Preserve. Each interview was semi-structured, and each source was coded to find common themes: environmental backgrounds and values, project concerns, project justifications, interpretations of key documents and communications, conflicts, and compromises.
Findings
Local news media framed the Modoc Multiuse Path conflict as an ideological battle between bikes and trees. In contrast, interviews, public comments, and observations revealed a far more complex landscape of competing environmental imaginaries. Participation unfolded across different procedural venues. Online forums, in particular, emerged as sites of more emotionally charged expression, where anonymity enabled anger, distrust, and moral critique to surface more openly. Rather than serving as neutral forums for deliberation, town halls, online spaces, and informal interactions functioned as uneven and interconnected arenas through which actors navigated inclusion, legitimacy, and voice. Across venues, actors on both sides described feeling pressure to circulate technical information, maintain project websites, and document “facts” in order to legitimize their positions within formal decision-making processes. Interviews served as a critical interpretive space where participants reflected on online exchanges and public encounters, clarifying underlying values, intentions, and procedural frustrations that felt illegible within official channels. The themes below draw on interviews and highlight three interrelated dimensions of the Modoc Path conflict.
Competing environmental values
Community members mobilized divergent environmental values to reinforce their positions, resulting in a clash of fundamentally different ecological imaginaries. These competing visions were rooted in distinct temporalities and environmental priorities, reflecting different understandings of what environmentalism entails and for whom. On one side, proponents of the multiuse path invoked a forward-looking, infrastructure-driven imaginary grounded in climate futurism emphasizing carbon mitigation and active transportation. On the other, opponents articulated a place-rooted imaginary centered on the conservation of the existing natural landscape amid rapid urban encroachment. The local Land Trust and landowner sided with the community opposition group (CAMP) in accordance with conservation easement obligations, while the County, Trees and Trails, and Strong Towns (together forming what was referred to as the “bicycle coalition”) supported the project.
Supporters of the Modoc Path framed the project as a climate-aligned intervention that advanced decarbonization, safety, social equity, and economic vitality. Grounded in a future-oriented imaginary, they emphasized the need to shift away from car dependency toward active transportation as a core strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As one advocate explained in an interview, “Transportation makes up 50% of emissions in Santa Barbara County. If we aren’t able to tackle our transportation issues, there’s no way we can address climate change.” This view aligned with a utilitarian or instrumental environmental logic, viewing the environment as a resource to be leveraged for public health, connectivity, and economic development. For example, one supporter noted that improved bike infrastructure could lead to greater economic prosperity. Others linked cycling infrastructure to social inequality, highlighting how historic highway expansion disproportionately harmed communities of color, and arguing that investment in pedestrian and cycling access could begin to “right the wrongs that were done.” For supporters, the Modoc Path was justified as a practical step toward a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient future.
Opponents of the path articulated an environmental ethic grounded in place-protection. Their values emphasized preserving the Modoc Preserve as one of the few remaining undeveloped green spaces in the area, shaped by decades of resistance to urban encroachment. While some community members stressed the ecological and aesthetic importance of mature trees, wildlife habitat, and shade, their advocacy extended toward a deeper affective and historical attachment to the landscape. One community member opposed to the project explained, “We fought for this back in 1999… [now] they come along thinking it’s just a big open field they can do whatever they want with.” Others invoked the language of attachment and longstanding commitments to open space stewardship. Among the most profound articulations of this environmental imaginary came from an Indigenous community member who emphasized a worldview rooted in reciprocity: “This space doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t belong to you. This space belongs to itself… Our ancestors are here. They’re with us.” This account reframed the preserve as a living territory with cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance. Together, these perspectives rejected a narrowly instrumental view of the land.
Contested meanings of conservation
At the heart of the conflict over the Modoc Path was a fundamental disagreement over the meaning and legal interpretation of the conservation easement that governs the preserve. While both sides strategically mobilized environmental values, they clashed over who held the authority to define what “conservation” entails. For opponents, the easement symbolized a permanent, non-negotiable protection from development. A core organizer with CAMP invoked this commitment repeatedly: “It has to be forever and in perpetuity. Forever has to mean forever.” For them, the easement was not just a legal mechanism but a moral contract, rooted in past struggles to prevent commercial development and tied to the land’s designation as a nature preserve.
Community members who supported the path interpreted the conservation easement differently. Drawing on its language about public access, they argued that there was room to expand infrastructure aligned with broader goals of accessibility. One advocate referenced the easement’s wording, emphasizing that “the public is allowed access” and that this was “clearly spelled out in the legal document.” This difference in interpretation highlights how the easement itself became a procedural battleground with its perceived flexibility or rigidity shaped by each side’s environmental claims to the land. For those tasked with stewarding the easement, the responsibility to interpret and uphold its terms was framed as both a legal and ethical obligation. One interviewee reflected that “some things that are written as strong intentions don’t actually land in the wording,” noting how skilled readers or attorneys might leverage ambiguity to justify development. These remarks signal a deeper tension between original intent and procedural reinterpretation, raising broader questions about who gets to speak for the land and on what terms. In this way, the conservation easement became a contested text, with both sides interpreting it through competing visions of what conservation should protect, permit, or prohibit.
The conflict over the easement’s meaning spilled into other dimensions of environmental governance as well and particularly in debates over native versus non-native species. For supporters of the path, the removal of non-native trees and their replacement with native plants was framed as an ecologically responsible and scientifically sound act, intended to offset the project’s environmental footprint. For opponents, however, this approach was viewed as a form of ecological disruption. Non-native trees were not seen as expendable invaders but as vital elements of the existing landscape providing shade, acting as firebreaks, supporting bird and animal habitats, and carrying aesthetic and emotional significance. One interviewee expressed frustration at what they saw as an overly rigid ecological ideology: “There’s just all these really anti-non-native tree-hating people in this town now.” A formal statement from opponents emphasized a broader ethic of ecological inclusion: “We are for saving and maintaining ALL healthy trees, be they native or non-native” (CAMP, 2022).
Supporters of the path were frustrated by opponents’ defense of non-native trees, which they saw as misinformed and self-serving. To them, the resistance to tree removal appeared to be driven more by emotional attachment than by ecological reasoning—an unwillingness to accept the trade-offs required for climate adaptation. One advocate expressed this frustration candidly: “Why are we fighting to save the trees that are not native? That’s what the so-called ‘path opponents’ or ‘tree lovers’ want—trees that are there today but will be gone in a decade or two, not much longer, a blink of an eye.” Supporters also emphasized that many of the trees marked for removal were aging or in poor health, and that replanting native species could restore ecological integrity over time. For them, opposition to the project signaled a broader reluctance to share space or embrace necessary transitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Adding further complexity, one community member opposed to the path challenged the binary logic of native versus non-native species. Drawing from Indigenous ecological knowledge, they emphasized that ecosystems are dynamic and adapt to human activity over time, with new interdependencies forming between introduced species and native wildlife. Referencing offshore oil rigs that have become artificial reefs, they explained, “Some animals have adapted to and now depend on these introduced species for their survival and habitat.” This perspective challenged fixed categories of ecological purity and called for a vision of conservation that accounts for dynamic relationships between species and evolving interdependencies.
Uneven institutional recognition and conditional inclusion through CEQA
Each side viewed the other as wielding disproportionate influence. Proponents described the Land Trust and CAMP as obstructionist in their use of legal process. Opponents, in turn, portrayed the bicycle coalition and affiliated advocacy groups as corrupt, moving the project forward without meaningful community input. While both sides appealed to environmental values to support their positions, they experienced different levels of recognition and institutional legitimacy. Proponents of the path gained an advantage in shaping the project’s direction due their close alignment with state alternative transportation priorities, technical fluency in planning and grant language, and early involvement in the proposal process.
This imbalance in recognition became especially visible in the environmental review process under the California Environmental Quality Act, a statewide law intended to ensure that environmental impacts of proposed projects are thoroughly assessed and that the public has opportunities to weigh in on decisions affecting land use. For projects expected to have minimal environmental impact, agencies may issue a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND), a streamlined form of review which asserts that any potential harms can be mitigated to below-significant levels without requiring a full study. In contrast, projects with potentially significant impacts require a more extensive Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that often involves public hearings, additional analysis, and extensive documentation. The Modoc Path project qualified for an MND, a decision that became contested by opponents who felt that the path’s ecological and cultural impacts had been minimized and rushed through under the guise of procedural compliance.
Although CEQA was designed to enable public participation in environmental decision-making, many opponents of the Modoc Path felt that the process failed to meaningfully include them. A major source of frustration stemmed from limited time for public input. Both the path plan and the MND were shared with little notice, leaving community members scrambling to respond. One CAMP member recalled learning about the project only hours before the public comment deadline: “It said we had until 5:00 that day to respond… and it was over 100 pages long… We were just baffled and really irritated that we were finding out about it that way. It felt really sneaky and underhanded… like they were trying to pull something off.” A community member and former county official involved in regional transportation planning acknowledged that once the county received funding, “the project had run out of time.” Pressured to meet grant deadlines, the county shifted its focus to compliance—“under the gun,” in his words—leaving little room for feedback or consultation. This sense of procedural exclusion extended to Indigenous community members with ancestral ties to the land. One interviewee shared that they only learned about the path while working on an unrelated project nearby: “It’s really unfortunate to have to find out that way. It would be nice to be brought in from the very beginning.” The perception that decisions had already been made further reinforced opponents’ sense that participation was conditional and constrained. Furthermore, participants described town halls as offering little opportunity for meaningful participation. Both opponents and proponents characterized these meetings as highly constrained and performative, with limited time to speak and few mechanisms for influencing outcomes.
The lack of transparency, compressed timeline of the project planning process, and performative structure of townhalls converged with growing skepticism toward the MND, which became a focal point for contestation. Opponents described the document as a “rubber stamp,” suggesting it was designed to approve the project regardless of ecological consequences. One community member voiced concern that the outcome felt predetermined: “We felt that it was not sufficient and that it was pre-ordained… they had that in mind before they even started.” Others criticized the omission of key environmental impacts, such as the loss of shade canopy, which one interviewee estimated would exceed 10,000 square feet. “It was going to change the microclimate here tremendously,” they explained, describing the proposed alignment as a potential “kill zone.” Proponents, by contrast, viewed the MND as a balanced tool and an acceptable compromise that offset tree removal through native plant restoration and reflected a reasonable weighing of environmental trade-offs. By treating the removal of non-native trees and the replanting of native species as a form of environmental mitigation, the MND effectively endorsed one interpretation of the easement over others.
Feeling silenced, opponents turned to litigation as a tool for institutional recognition. CAMP filed a lawsuit under CEQA, raising over $10,000 through a public fundraising campaign. For many involved, legal action was not intended to halt the project outright but to compel acknowledgment and negotiation. As one interviewee explained, “When a lawsuit is pending, people tend to take you more seriously.” Despite this, the lawsuit was framed by media outlets and project supporters as a selfish and reactionary tactic, often referring to CAMP as a NIMBY group. Interviewees described the emotional toll: “There was a lot of anxiety and stress involved. It was a David versus Goliath kind of scenario.” Another added, “There was shock, surprise, trepidation, and eventually anger—these emotions kind of welled up in our neighborhood group.”
Ultimately, the lawsuit ended in a settlement that secured some concessions, including a commitment to avoid using hot mix asphalt and to shift the alignment in ways that would reduce tree loss. Yet even this resolution was marked by ambivalence. Community members involved in the lawsuit acknowledged that they dropped the case not because their concerns had been fully addressed, but because they lacked the financial and legal capacity to pursue a full legal case. There was also concern that a full EIR process would simply affirm the proposed project, offering a procedural façade without substantively addressing their claims. As one interviewee put it, a full lawsuit would have been “an expensive proposition,” likely resulting in the county “regurgitating the same boilerplate stuff” and sidestepping the core concerns of the community. While the final plan was seen as “somewhat acceptable,” it also reflected the limits of CEQA as a vehicle for meaningful contestation when institutional legitimacy and procedural influence remain unevenly distributed.
Discussion
The Modoc Path conflict reflected more than a debate between bicycles and trees; it exposed a deeper struggle over whose visions of environmental action are legitimized through planning institutions. Many documented environmental conflicts focus on struggles between marginalized communities and external state or corporate actors. In contrast, the Modoc Multiuse Path controversy involved organized community groups on both sides of the debate, each mobilizing environmental values, place-based attachments, and claims to procedural legitimacy. Opponents and proponents alike framed their positions in environmental terms and engaged planning processes as sites of contestation. This complicates conventional accounts of participation that assume clear distinctions between “community” and “developer,” or between environmental protection and opposition. While internal community division is common in environmental conflicts, this case highlights how such divisions are actively constituted and mobilized through procedural planning processes.
The Modoc Path controversy exemplifies the kind of green-on-green conflict that Eskjær and Horsbøl (2023) define as Type 2, where climate-oriented infrastructure projects challenge existing environmental protection efforts. While both proponents and opponents framed their positions as environmentally motivated, they drew on distinct imaginaries of what constitutes “good” environmental stewardship. The conservation easement, rather than resolving conflict, became a site of contested meaning: was it meant to allow access, or to permanently prohibit development? Proponents and opponents alike drew from the easement to legitimize their positions. This raises deeper questions about who has the procedural power to define what counts as conservation, and which forms of environmental knowledge are rendered legible within planning processes.
The concept of procedural environmentalism, understood as the strategic ways that actors mobilize environmental values within governance processes, helps illuminate how planning systems privilege certain values over others. In this case, environmental claims expressed through quantification, technical documentation, and standardized ecological categories such as native versus non-native species aligned closely with the logics of planning and CEQA processes, while experiential, relational, and affective forms of knowing were marginalized within formal decision-making venues. This uneven valuation of knowledge helps explain why some community actors invested heavily in producing technical arguments and “facts.” As a result, procedural expectations shifted participation toward performances of technical competence. These dynamics parallel Gwen Ottinger’s (2013) argument that publics are often excluded from technical decision-making not only by overt exclusion, but also by the framing of what counts as responsible environmental knowledge. Some turned to litigation to force recognition of impacts they believed had been dismissed or undercounted. The lawsuit led to modest concessions, but it also underscored a deep distrust in the environmental impact assessment process itself.
The procedural dynamics of CEQA also revealed how legal mechanisms can simultaneously enable and constrain participation. Although CEQA is designed to ensure public input on environmental decisions, its implementation in this case produced only belated and conditional inclusion. Opponents, who discovered the mitigated negative declaration only shortly before the comment period closed, scrambled to make their concerns heard, pattern observed in cases where participation is compressed to meet institutional deadlines (Maguire and Lind, 2003). Interview accounts suggest that these choices were not experienced as accidental oversights, but as shaped by funding timelines and implementation pressures. Notice was narrowly distributed and issued with little time for response, a strategy widely perceived as prioritizing speed and funding deadlines over meaningful engagement, with some participants interpreting this as an intentional effort to bypass anticipated dissent.
Finally, procedural environmentalism helps us understand how climate futures themselves are being imagined, contested, and acted upon. Viewed through this lens, the Modoc Path controversy reveals how planning systems operate as filtering mechanisms that amplify visions for the future that align with dominant governance logics, while relegating others to the periphery. Climate-oriented priorities such as alternative transportation and native species restoration were readily taken up within planning processes, congruent with what Martin et al. (2024) describe as the “green economy” orientation that frames environmental action through technological optimism and infrastructure-based solutions. This mirrors insights from science and technology studies, where scholars have long emphasized that the ability of institutions to see, validate, and act upon certain forms of knowledge is socially constructed and politically contingent (Haraway, 1988; Jasanoff, 2004; Star, 1999).
The danger of procedural environmentalism lies in how such selective legibility can become institutionalized, normalizing exclusions that, while subtle in some cases, may produce deep inequities in others. David Pellow and Lisa Park have cautioned how environmental planning can reproduce forms of enclosure, displacement, or exclusion under the banner of sustainability (Pellow and Park, 2011). Kasia Paprocki (2019) extends this conversation to climate adaptation in her concept of anticipatory ruination which explores how imagined climate futures are mobilized to justify interventions in the present that undermine existing relationships to place, especially in marginalized communities. This resonates with Jamie Haverkamp’s (2021) call for adaptation otherwise, which foregrounds relationality, contestation, and the colonial legacies embedded in dominant adaptation frameworks. Together, these insights reinforce the stakes of procedural environmentalism: it is not just about participation or process, but about whose futures are enabled and whose are denied.
Conclusion
The Modoc Path conflict offers a window into the frictions that emerge when climate infrastructure intersects with contested environmental values. As urban greening becomes a key strategy for climate mitigation and adaptation, projects framed as universally beneficial may still generate conflict—not necessarily because communities oppose environmental interventions, but because they hold different visions of what environmental care entails. This paper introduced the concept of procedural environmentalism to make sense of these dynamics, highlighting how actors mobilize environmental values to influence planning processes and land use decisions.
Findings from the Modoc case reveal that participation does not guarantee procedural fairness. Opponents, excluded from early planning decisions, turned to CEQA as a last resort effort to compel recognition. Their eventual withdrawal from the lawsuit reflected a growing skepticism that the law could recognize the forms of environmental value at stake. This ambivalent relationship to environmental law underscores the terrain that procedural environmentalism seeks to illuminate: one where actors work within, against, and around systems that prioritize certain environmental values over others. Rather than idealizing participation or dismissing resistance, this framework draws attention to the political labor of environmental claims in land use conflicts and the ways in which these claims become strategic tools for shaping decisions.
Viewed through the lens of procedural environmentalism, this case raises important questions about current debates surrounding CEQA and similar procedural planning mechanisms. As critics of CEQA characterize it as an obstacle to development and a tool for obstruction, this case suggests that such framings risk overlooking the role that procedural mechanisms play as sites through which community members on multiple sides of a controversy articulate environmental values, contest expertise, and seek inclusion in decision-making processes. Efforts to curtail procedural avenues for engagement may therefore reduce opportunities for formal participation without eliminating conflict, potentially displacing contestation into more polarized arenas such as online forums.
As conflicts over green infrastructure and climate planning become more frequent, they invite closer attention to the procedural terms under which environmental claims are negotiated. This includes examining assumptions embedded in funding and planning frameworks themselves. Ethnographic, legal, and interdisciplinary approaches will be especially important for tracing how environmental claims are mobilized across different institutional contexts, and for revealing how legitimacy is constructed, negotiated, or denied. For planners and policymakers, the implications are clear: building more just and inclusive processes requires more than widening participation, it also requires grappling with the institutional biases that determine which claims are heard and which are dismissed. Making space for multiple environmental imaginaries, even when they challenge dominant frameworks, offers a path toward climate planning that is more accountable to the communities and ecologies planners seek to serve.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am deeply appreciative of the residents, advocates, and local officials who generously shared their time, perspectives, and lived experiences. I am also grateful to Taylor McEvilly for her early contributions to this project as a research assistant, including her work organizing and scheduling interviews, conducting preliminary interviews, and helping to code the initial dataset.
Ethical considerations
This study received ethical approval from the University of California, Santa Barbara IRB (approval #10-24-0097) on February 02, 2024. To protect the confidentiality of interview participants, interview data have been de-identified where appropriate.
Consent to participate
All participants provided written informed consent prior to participating.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request.