Dear Ezra,

I’ve followed your work for years with deep appreciation. You’ve helped name something essential: the American crisis isn’t just ideological — it’s operational. The Abundance Agenda, as you’ve helped shape it, is directionally right. We need to build more, faster, and with a clarity of purpose equal to the scale of our challenges.

But I want to offer a friendly challenge — and a story.

When I ran the research at California Forward, we were embedded with Governor Newsom’s team as a kind of shadow government, working behind the scenes to support efforts to streamline permitting. Not from a place of theory, but from the muddy gears of the state’s machinery, where beautiful intentions so often get lost in translation.

There was endless talk of “high-road transitions” and “resilience infrastructure.” But the rooms were full of shiny people with shiny degrees speaking shiny language. Few had ever dealt with an inspector. Or filed a CEQA notice. Or negotiated easement logistics with a skeptical neighbor at dusk.

Meanwhile, the people who actually build — the field engineers, the permitting clerks, the project managers coaxing progress out of contradiction — were mostly absent. Or unheard.

And so: here’s my story. In my hometown, we built a stormwater retention ditch. A humble project. But one that, on paper, might’ve taken ten years — weighed down by overlapping jurisdictions, agency confusion, and paralyzing proceduralism.

Instead, we built it in a day. With shovels. With neighbors. With just enough permitting jiu jitsu to avoid a bureaucratic quagmire.

It wasn’t a megaproject. But it worked. Water slowed. Soil drank. Trust grew. And it reminded us what real capacity feels like: not just funding and ambition, but fluency — the deep civic muscle memory that lets a community respond, adapt, and act. We wrote about it in the “Dirt Simple” edition of the Protocolized newsletter.

Ezra, I believe in the Abundance Agenda. But we need to be honest about what abundance takes. Not just vision, but vocation. Not just speed, but soil.

The path to abundance must be grounded in the earth.

Kind regards,
Patrick Atwater

Shovels n' Dirt, Not Slide Decks: What the Abundance Movement Keeps Missing