What? Cali weakening its environmental laws? What’s next, airborne swine? A frozen yogurt machine in Satan’s breakroom?

The 55-year-old statute was signed into law by Ronald Reagan (yes, that Ronald Reagan) and requires that all public projects include a supersized environmental impact review. Under a 1972 court ruling, public projects came to mean any development that needs government approval, thereby pretty much meaning any development.

“CEQA,” says the state’s webpage, “is intended to inform government decisionmakers and the public about the potential environmental effects of proposed activities and to prevent significant, avoidable environmental damage.”

Note “intended to.”

Intentions haven’t lived up to reality—not because the act failed, but because it succeeded beyond all reason. Opponents of development used CEQA to bludgeon any manner of developments into the dust, making it practically impossible to build almost anything.

Environmentalists are predictably shocked and appalled by the CEQA changes, and they’re using “devastating” and other such words to describe its effects on California’s ecosystems. But they would be wise to stand up and cheer. For too long now, green groups have gotten the blame for the silliness of others, including opponents of a new college dorm who leveraged CEQA to stop the project’s “social noise.”

Today’s crop of oft-persecuted greenies might be too young to remember that 60 years ago they were seen as the good guys, the folks in white hats riding in to clean up the smog that shrouded cities and the rivers that glistened with so much oil they’d catch fire.

Supermajorities of Americans were sympathetic to the environmental movement and demanded the creation of agencies that would regulate the polluters. And those agencies succeeded. Skies cleared and rivers ran clean.

But while pollution ebbed, the bureaucrats charged with writing environmental regulations remained. No regulator ever says, “My work here is done,” and goes home. Egged on by more extreme elements of the environmental movement, they looked for more to do.

Fast forwarding through the decades, CEQA became less about the environment and more about NIMBYism. What was designed as a pure environmental law didn’t stay that way: It swelled with tumors and cankers that clouded its mission and won it legions of enemies along the way.

This regulatory muck has manifested in many ways, but what ultimately pushed CEQA over the edge was the state’s acute housing crisis. The average rent in California is $2,800, a price point that has driven thousands of people into tents beneath the interstate bridge. The state and its president-aspirational governor want to build 2.5 million new homes by 2030, and to do that, something had to give.

Perhaps tipping the scales against some of CEQA’s excesses was the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It notes the paradox that progressives champion affordable housing, yet those same progressives use zoning and environmental cudgels to prohibit the development they say they want.

Another problem is that projects became overburdened with political to-do lists. If you require stormwater management, then you can require it be built with union wages, American steel, veteran-owned subcontractors, and so on. A project might survive a couple of those mandates, but plenty of overburdened projects capsized under their weight.

The fundamental problem with environmentalism circa 2025 is that it fails to acknowledge that human beings are part of the environment. It assumes that mankind is always the enemy—a looming, fetid presence not to be worked with but to be battled to the death.

While it may be true that a blind cave shrimp is incapable of filing an amicus curie brief and someone should stand up for its right to exist, it’s also true that the subspecies of homeless human beings needs a place to live.

Environmentalism circa 1970 had more to do with the well-being of mankind than the birds in the skies and the fish in the rivers. We were disgusted with the filth that we had created, so we cleaned it up for the benefit of all God’s creatures.

With the new Trumpian direction of the EPA (Every Project Approved), state law will become exponentially more important in protecting the economic and human rights to clean air and water. As that comes to pass, state regulators would do well to remember that people are living beings too.