Let's be clear: there's nothing wrong with protest. It's foundational to a free society. The First Amendment isn't just a nice suggestion — it's the whole ballgame. But there's a difference between citizens organizing to hold power accountable and a professional class that treats perpetual outrage as a business model.

Leonard, best known for The Story of Stuff and her stint leading Greenpeace USA, and Carothers, a longtime environmental media figure, have spent decades in advocacy circles where the solution to every problem is more regulation, more government intervention, and more restrictions on how individuals and businesses operate. The assumption is always the same: people can't be trusted to make good decisions, so the enlightened few must guide them.

Here in San Francisco, we've seen where that philosophy leads. We have some of the most aggressive environmental regulations in the country and some of the worst results on basic governance — clean streets, functioning transit, affordable housing. Maybe, just maybe, the professional protest class has been optimizing for the wrong metrics.

The real question isn't whether Leonard and Carothers care about the environment — they clearly do. It's whether their preferred toolkit actually works. Decades of top-down regulatory activism have given us a city where it takes years to permit a housing project, where small businesses drown in compliance costs, and where the bureaucratic apparatus grows ever larger while quality of life stagnates.

Protests should challenge power. But when the protesters are the power — embedded in NGOs, foundations, and government advisory boards — who's actually holding whom accountable?

Something to think about next time someone tells you they're "fighting the system" from inside a taxpayer-adjacent nonprofit.