TURF: THE GREEN DREAM
The Man Who Invented Ecotopia
Author Ernest Callenbach talks about localism, the future, and the state of Ecotopian ideals.
The following is an extended, edited version of Geov Parrish's interview with Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach on
the 30th anniversary of his futuristic novel about Pacific Northwest secession. The story is told from the perspective of an American
reporter, William Weston, who is one of the first outsiders allowed into Ecotopia some 20 years after Washington, Oregon,
and Northern California have successfully separated themselves from the rest of America to form a new country. What he finds
is an alternative universe, a place that is socially progressive, hardworking, and connected to nature. It is a society without
the internal combustion engine but with maglev trains. It is, in many respects, the first picture of how a modern society
could be restructured around environmental principles, and in that, was both reflective of its era and a road map for future
ecologically aware development. Ecotopia proved to be a seminal book. Not only did it sell nearly 1 million copies in nine
languages and generate a sequel, it became something of a utopian manifesto for the green movement, including the German Green
Party.
Today, at age 75, Callenbach is retired from his day job at University of California
Press, where he was
founder and editor of Film Quarterly. He lives and writes in Berkeley,
Calif., where Geov Parrish talked with him by phone. He, like his
fictional character William Weston, offers his observations on the Ecotopian phenomenon, how far it's come, and where it is
likely to go in the years ahead.–The Editors
Geov Parrish: What's changed in the 30 years since you wrote Ecotopia? Are we any closer to Ecotopia now than we were
in 1975?
Ernest Callenbach: History is a spotty thing; it moves back and forth, and so there's been some backsliding from where
we were in 1975, especially on the internal combustion engine.
I think the reason that George Bush is so enthusiastic about hydrogen—to the extent that he is genuinely enthusiastic,
and we can't really tell—it's because he imagines that hydrogen will be made out of petroleum source fuels. But those
of us who think in the longer term know that that's not good for the long run, so we're going to have to think about renewable
sources for hydrogen, and the only place in the world that's doing that is Iceland. The Icelanders have a tremendous wealth of both hydroelectric and geothermal energy.
So it makes sense for them to produce hydrogen using that kind of energy, and they can probably be totally self-sufficient.
Luckily, there aren't too many Icelanders, so even if everybody has at least one car, they can probably get away with it.
In more populous larger countries without their resources, it's not going to be so easy. So in the long term what's
going to happen probably is that cars are going to scale back, somehow or another, we don't know. Probably it won't happen
voluntarily, because at least in countries like the United States, we are so totally dependent on and wedded to the automobile,
both in practical terms and emotional terms, that we're going to have to be driven out of the driver's seat by main force
rather than getting out on our own.
Parrish: What makes this region different? Why did you pick this region to secede from the United States and chart a different course?
Callenbach: Well, it's partly just because I live here [in Berkeley, Calif.] If you're going to write a novel about a place, you'd better
have a fair amount of knowledge about what the place is like and what the people who inhabit it are like. But I think the
larger reason is that Ecotopia is a kind of bioregion. At the time I was writing Ecotopia the term "bioregion" had not yet
been invented, although it followed very soon after. But we now see that the Cascadia bioregion, as the zoologists and botanists
now call it, stretches north from the Tehachapi
mountains in Southern California all the way up through British Columbia and into the Alaskan panhandle. And this is an area that's defined by a fairly uniform climate;
and the animals are pretty much consistent throughout—meaning animals of all kinds including insects and so on—as
well as the plants. So there's a certain geographical unity to the area. And my contention, as well as that of a lot of professional
geographers, is that in the long run the characteristics of your bioregion help to determine what you might call your regional
character. And if you contrast Ecotopians—let's call them that for short—with people who live in hot, dry, arid
climates of the Southwest, or climates of, say, Quebec . . . we see that people are somewhat different in these regions. They
like different things and they have different possibilities open to them about building and getting around and raising food
and a whole panoply of other things that in the long run. (Globalization is making us homogenous all over the world, but there's
a limit to that.) And I think in the long term, especially when globalization collapses under its own weight, as I think it's
going to do because it's really a sort of tissue of monstrous subsidies that nation-states are still able to give to corporations,
but when that can't be done any more, then I think regionalism will reassert itself. And Ecotopia will be one of those regions.
Parrish: What are some areas in which that regionalism might assert itself, say, in the next 30 years?
Callenbach: Well, I think in city design all over the world, there are new things happening; that planners at least
have pretty well gotten the picture that you can't build yourself enough freeways to maintain the auto transit system in the
long run. We're going to have to do something else. So cities in the Northwest—Portland and Vancouver and Seattle—and
San Francisco, for that matter, are all busy trying to do two things: one is to build more coherent networks of public transit,
and the other is what I call in the book to build mini-cities, or emphasize neighborhood characteristics of cities within
the huge areas of cities. I think Portland is probably
the city that has accomplished this the most, at least on this continent. Maybe Toronto. That's one thing that's happening.
People are very discouraged about the national government, that is, people who are interested in the public welfare
over a long period are pretty discouraged with what's going on nationally in our political life. And so they are turning toward
local defense of natural areas to the extent we still have them, which is considerable when you compare this country to others.
They are beginning to think of doing things which are within arm's reach. So you have things happening like what are called
watershed councils, where people who live within a watershed begin to unite—and these are often very disparate people.
There's a very well-developed watershed council near here where you have ranchers, not only cattle ranchers, but you also
have farmers who grow tree crops, fruit crops and so on, sportsmen, fishermen and so on, bicyclists, people who like to kayak,
conservationists, students, local businessmen in small towns who don't want to see their small towns gobbled up by distant
malls and so on. And they're beginning to say, "Look, we live here. We need to take care of this place. We need to share the
work of doing it and we need to agree on some sort of core values that we can all work within. And oddly enough, this is a
very traditional thing in a sense, but it's also a very Ecotopian thing. And I take a lot of comfort from that. And I think
this is happening all over the country, by the way. It's not just happening here in the Northwest, although perhaps we have
more of it out here.
It's easy to exaggerate the difference between us and the rest of the country. Not only the red states but the blue
states, and I think we need to seize on the common urge to take care of our place and see whether we can't get through this
current bad period and come out the other end with at least some of it intact.
Parrish: What are the impediments to achieving Ecotopia?
Callenbach: Well, there are two major impediments. One is that we are living under a system of very corrupt government.
I don't think there's any possibility of mincing words. The American governing system has become colossally corrupt. And that's
true not only on state levels but also on the national level, of course. So many of our representatives are in the pockets
of corporate entities of one kind or another that it has become very, very difficult to do anything that is in the interest
of the great mass of the American people. So we have to think sooner or later of what are called in Maine and Arizona
"fair elections," a system of publicly financed elections, where people can still run by money they've raised from corporations
and other large sources, but if they want to, they can run on public funds. This has been tried now in Arizona and Maine
for two electoral cycles. It seems to be working very, very well. More than half of the candidates from both parties are now
running, as they say, running clean. This means that if you get elected, you no longer have to look over your shoulder all
the time to see whether your backers are going to rein you in or not if you vote for something public spirited. There have
been attacks on this, of course, in both states, especially in Arizona where there's more people and more money at stake. But so far, the systems have survived constitutional
challenges, and they seem to be working very well. There's a considerable movement in that direction here in California and I imagine in Washington and Oregon, too.
The electoral forum is necessity number one. Necessity number two, which is not altogether separate from that, is
that we have to rethink what corporations are. Because when corporations are in charge of all basic aspects of a nation's
life, terrible things happen, and we are witnessing these terrible things around us day by day. I've just been reading a wonderful
book [Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights] by a man named Thom Hartmann, who
is one of the chief thinkers in this area, going back to figure out how corporations were first given the rights of persons.
I think this is colossally important, because corporations are licensed by states, at least formally, and what the states
give, the states could also modify or take away. As they did initially. And we have to somehow rein in the absolutely unchanneled
corporate power that is now ruling the land. Because without that, we're not going to be able to accomplish much, either ecologically,
environmentally, or socially. So electoral reform and corporate reform are the two twin pillars of a decent future for America.
Now it may be that American democracy has run its course. I think Hartmann believes that it lasted until 1880 or somewhere
along in there. So we had about 100 years of it, and then it was gone. I think maybe that's a little bit too pessimistic.
Or even if it had gone, maybe since we know what it was and could be, we can recapture it. I would like to think we could
do that short of breaking the nation up.
The idea of Ecotopia as a separate country, I wrote it as a metaphor so that people could think, "Well, supposing
we were in charge of this area out here, what would we do to take care of it? How could we live decently, how could we help
each other be happy?" Because when you think of a nation of 280 million people, it's pretty hard to think those thoughts.
It's like a gigantic blunderbuss tearing down the freeway—nothing could stop it—or an oil tanker in the straits,
something like that—there's not much possibility for steering. But small countries have the possibility to steer. And
it may be that the United
States, like
the former Soviet Union, or perhaps even China, or perhaps even India one of these days, will have to be broken down into smaller and more efficiently governable
entities.
There's this wonderful book called The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau, which came out about 15 years
ago now. One of his nations within the continent is Ecotopia, and he has eight other ones, including Mexamerica, which is
Southern California and some of the desert areas to the east and Mexico itself, and it's a fascinating book. Joel is a journalist at the Washington
Post, he's not a visionary like me, he's just a hardheaded journalist. And he spent a year traveling around the country—and
this goes back to one of your first questions—and he found that people live very differently in the different regions.
They think differently, and they have different priorities. And he sort of summarizes it. It's a very, very readable book.
And I think he would contend that this process of differentiation is global.
We see the same thing happening in Europe, where the Catalonians
in northeastern Spain are effectively an independent country even though they are
technically part of Spain. The Basques would like to attain something similar. The
Basques occupying both Spain
and a little corner of France.
The Bretons in northwestern France
would like to recapture some of their autonomy. The Scots in the United Kingdom have been given back—by Tony Blair in one of the good things he did early in
his regime—the Scots' Parliament. It now has tremendous powers compared to what it was reduced to by the British long
ago. And, of course, we see a whole bunch of new nations in the former Soviet Union. And it's likely that most of these what you might call overgrown nation-states are not really workable in the long
term. At least not workable as democracies.
And one of the things that's going on that I couldn't foresee at the time of Ecotopia is the existence of very fast
widespread communications through the Internet and so on. Although it leads to easier and easier surveillance and control
from the top, it also makes it possible for people in regions to know a lot more about what's going on without having to be
dependent upon a largely corporatized press. And that's very exciting, because it means if you are a devolutionist in Wales—which
is another area which would like to have more of itself to itself—if you're a devolutionist in Wales, you can be in
contact with people in Brittany and anywhere around the world and lay common plans and learn from each other.
That's, I think, going to be a big theme in the remainder of the century.
Parrish: What are you reading these days? What kind of ideas are exciting you?
Callenbach: Well, I read a tremendous number of periodicals. The book that I'm just finishing now is Thom Hartmann's.
I don't read much fiction, oddly enough. I never have. I wish I had more time to do it, but the reading time that I have,
a lot of it is on the Internet now. Trying to keep up with what's going on in the Middle East and so on. And one has to be less and less dependent on newspapers. I find now that when something hits The New
York Times I knew about it two days ago through some of the stuff on the Internet. You can get addicted to it, of course.
It can eat up your life, and I try not to spend too much time on the computer.
The big question that I'm really trying to think about—and I'm trying to shape an article about it—it would
be called something like "Going Down With the Empire." Because there are quite a lot of people in the world that think the
American empire has overreached itself and is hollowing out; that the American working class—in the period of World
War II and right after that—the American working class was allowed to thrive in a way that it had never been allowed
to before, perhaps because they needed to be bought off in order to put their shoulders, their collective shoulders, behind
the war effort in World War II. But we now see a very concerted effort to destroy not only unions, but also pension plans,
and everything else that has supported what you might call the working middle class in some comfort in this country compared
to most other countries. And I think now the Republicans and the other right-wing people have realized that now is their time
to strike and destroy all this, as they call it, welfare state that allows people to live decent lives even though they're
quite modest working folks. And this is going to propel us more in the direction of a Latin American country where you have
a large number of very, very poor and quite desperate people eking out an income and an upper middle class and an upper class,
small upper middle and an even smaller upper class, who live extraordinarily well by any historical standards, obscenely well.
And a political structure that is, thanks to corporate control of the media, that is surprisingly stable. Now how long this
can go on before people get—the old Marxist term was immiserated—how immiserated people can get before they take
to the streets and throw the whole thing into the river, I don't know. But it may be quite a while.
Parrish: One of the things that's been exciting to me is that you've seen almost the opposite process going on in
Latin America. You have a number of governments that have gotten there
on the power of their opposition to the neoliberal regime.
Callenbach: Indeed, indeed. And that's very, very admirable, and of course, it's not welcomed at all in Washington
[D.C.], where they see that these governments may not be disciplinable, especially Argentina, they may not be disciplinable
by the international corporate structure.
But we're not that far down yet, and we're still a very fat country where there's a lot of juice to be wrung out and
put into rich peoples' pockets.
It's tempting to exaggerate the evils of politicians, even George [W.] Bush. Probably—this is kind of a heretical
thought—but probably had [John] Kerry been put in, he would probably do half of the bad things that Bush is going to
do. Because presidents are forced to do things. He would have inherited a totally oil-dependent economy. The reason he was
so wishy-washy about the war is because he's a bright guy and he realizes that America cannot give up control of the Middle East oil fields. No way. And there are a lot of other things that any American president would do which are counter
to the welfare of the general American people. But sooner or later, the American people are going to have to take responsibility
into their own hands again of forming a government such as they would rather have. It's either that or take the punishment.
Parrish: How do we start?
Callenbach: Well, by learning what's going on. That's the reason I want to write this article. If we can get an idea,
a sufficiently clear idea of what is happening to the American empire, and why we are having these wars on the periphery all
the time which don't ever really seem to settle anything and which we can't even seem to win decently. If we get an idea of
how the interests of the American population are being sacrificed, really, to the interests of multinational corporations
who don't care whether they are doing business here or in China. I just read something where the head of Cisco, which is this giant information technology
company, says, "We are laying plans to become a Chinese company." Well, that should stop people in their tracks, because that
means that the American population is sacrificeable, that the nation is an institution on the way out. I don't think very
many people are going to be comfortable with that. Ordinary people are not going to be comfortable with that. But once we
get a fix on what is going on, I think you will find a lot of people are going to rise up and be counted and say, "No. We
don't want that."
And so some of the very vigorous political organizing that happened during the campaign I hope will have longer impact.
I'm itching to see Howard Dean made the head of the Democratic National Committee, because I think that would make the Democrats
again into a fighting force that can reach out and touch ordinary people. Most of the Democrats, like Kerry himself, they
don't have a very good feel for how ordinary people live or how ordinary people think. I think Dean does, oddly enough. And
I think the Republicans are scared of him, which is one of the reasons why they make fun of him. The man is a soccer coach,
so he yells at a meeting and everybody tries to make him look like an idiot.
Parrish: The idea that politicians don't have a temper or use foul language is kind of preposterous.
Callenbach: Well, yeah. I think we might see some real action out of the Democrats if Dean becomes their head—whatever
powers the chairman has, I'm not sure they're that great actually. But it would be more exciting, more lively, and I think
it would get the attention of ordinary people. It's no accident that more than half of American voters do not vote. It's because
they don't see that there's any real alternative, and because we hold our voting days on days other than Sunday like all other
voting democracies do. It's very hard for working people to get out there to the polls. That's another thing that has to be
changed when we're reforming our electoral system.
Parrish: What would the next steps look like in terms of regionalism, in terms of crafting this particular area into
an Ecotopia?
Callenbach: Well, an odd thing is happening. It isn't only regionalism, it's kind of states' rights in a bizarre way.
Because one thing that's happening is that the states, including some Republican governors, are realizing the feds have it
in for them, and that they have to defend themselves against the feds. Now, this is very bizarre. In California, it took the form right after the election—there was a lot of
to-do about secession—in a couple of columnists and a lot of letters to the editor in the Los Angeles Times. But what's
happening now, I think, is that we used to think that states' rights people were racist reactionary renegade Southerners and
so on. Now it looks like the people who are worried about states' rights are people from the blue states, the relatively progressive
states, who see that the feds are out to do in any kind of program in the states that helps large numbers of people. And that's
a very curious turnaround. So I think that maybe it'll be regionalism to some extent, but it'll also be state by state. You
know that Spanish expression, va si puedes, get out if you can? Or save yourself. He who can save himself, should. Something
like that.
We're entering a period where local politicians, who have to be a little bit more responsible to their constituents
than national politicians, I think are going to be feeling a lot of heat. And that could lead to some very interesting things.
Now, California, and probably the same is true of Washington, sends a lot more money to Washington [D.C.] than we get back
in terms of services from the federal government.
Parrish: That's true of most states.
Callenbach: And I think that's something that people gradually will get a fix on it. That this is not fair, and American
people like to see things reasonably fair. So I think maybe that's going to be a long-term lever that we can use.
Aside from that, I think wherever people see some avenue—and people are very varied in their tastes and talents
and desires and so on—wherever people see an avenue that they can do something to improve their local situation, whether
it's their neighborhood or their town or their state or the valley that they live in, or whatever, we can get that kind of
intensity out of commitment to place. And that's a very Ecotopian thing in itself, also. And schoolkids are getting in on
this in a big way, at least in California. There
are a lot of teachers who have the kids out prowling around trying to repair creeks.
Parrish: That's true here, too.
Callenbach: I imagine it is pretty much everywhere in the country; it's very marked around the Bay Area here. And kids
who have gone through that kind of program know a lot about nature, they understand in their bones something about the contradictions
between heavy development and some kind of sustainability. They know the word "sustainability." When I wrote Ecotopia I'm
not even sure the word "sustainability" existed, in the sense that we use it now. It was just coming into view, and I think
that you can describe Ecotopia as the first attempt to portray a sustainable future society, even though the word isn't—I
don't think it is, at least—in the book. The idea of being able to have natural cycles that continue indefinitely, round
and round, stable state cycles, stable state systems, as Ecotopians do call them, and that the idea is to think in very long
terms and to work with nature rather than against nature. And this is a big philosophical overturn, because we're coming out
of 200 years where we were assuming that we were in charge. Anything we wanted to do to nature, badly enough at least, we
could. We're now beginning to understand that that's not really the way it is. That's why I wrote another book called Ecology:
A Pocket Guide, which is an attempt to explain about 60 basic ecological concepts in ordinary language without any equations
or diagrams or anything. So that if somebody says to you "sustainability," you have a better idea what they're talking about,
not just in a goody-goody business sense, "The stock price is sustainable" or something like that, but what sustainability
means in terms of natural cycles and the human role in those natural cycles.
Parrish: What gives you hope?
Callenbach: Well, I think we often overrate the intelligence of the human species. A lot of the time we act out of
other things than intelligence. But when you look at things like the California energy crisis, when Enron and its friends were gouging Californians and running energy prices through
the ceiling, Californians started turning off the lights. And Dick Cheney made fun of conservation as a "personal choice but
not a policy question." Well, when Californians started exercising personal choice, it cut down their energy use by something
like 20 percent. It was staggering. The same thing happens when you have a drought or some other emergency like that. People
will pay attention if there's something really sensible being said to them. And I think that in the long run we need to get
past these awful empty political slogans of freedom and blah, blah, blah, and get down to questions of how we are living,
and what we are doing to ourselves and each other and to the natural world. And when we begin to talk in those terms, I think
most people have the capacity to be interested and to think about it, and we hope, move on it.
We need to develop a much more concrete politics. That is to say, a politics about how we are living now and what we
like about it and what we don't like about it. Sooner or later, I think the idea, the dominant idea behind consumer society
is that you will be happier if you have more. Now we know for a fact that's not true. They've been taking public-opinion surveys
and so on for decades now, and they all show that beyond some level of obvious misery, increased money and possessions do
not make people happier. Maybe when you get way, way up on the upper middle class and you have so much money you can't think
about it, maybe then you get a tiny bit happier. But in the great range of human income and consumption and so on, the amount
of goods you have is really not that significant. A lot of other things, your relationships, your community, and so on, those
are the things that really make people happy. Our consumption of goods has tripled since 1960 or thereabouts. But are we three
times happier? Nope. We're just about exactly as happy as we were then.
So this has to get through our thick skulls somehow, that what makes for a good life is not goods. And I think maybe
some of the people in Seattle that have worked on this, you undoubtedly know [voluntary
simplicity advocates] Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, those people, working on what they call "enoughness." We have to learn
what is enough for us, and if enough of us can do that, it will change the nature of our society and our prospects for survival
will greatly improve.
gparrish@seattleweekly.com
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0512/050323_news_callenbach.php
__
Endangered Ecotopia
It's three hours south in Oregon, but is
now a dream at risk.
by Randy Gragg
In 1981, I discovered Ecotopia. Newly arrived in Seattle from Reno, Nev.—drawn by a childhood attraction to
the setting for Here Come the Brides—I moved into a house full of Whitman College grads who promptly gave me the book,
describing it as a Northwest "user's manual." Ernest Callenbach's '70s fantasy quickly became mine as I relished joining the
natives seceding from Ronald Reagan's United States.
But it wasn't until 1989 that I actually found Ecotopia, three hours south, across the Columbia River in Oregon. I
wasn't looking for it: The dippy early-20s idealist had evolved into a thirtysomething mercenary who merely saw a Portland job as a rung on a ladder to somewhere else.
But that was, um, 15 years ago.
Rereading Ecotopia on its 30th anniversary highlighted the biggest reason I've stayed: I've been living in a secessionist
state. But it also made me realize that if Oregon
doesn't create an updated user's manual quickly, it's doomed to slide back into the lower 48.
Oregon's
detour from the mainstream began quietly in the early '70s with two events: the passage of a statewide land-use planning law
called Senate Bill 100 and the adoption of a road map to Portland's future called the 1972 Downtown Plan. Together, they sliced state and city right out of two grand American
traditions: the Jeffersonian gentleman farmer turning into a real-estate speculator; and the modernist redesign of cities
for the exclusive convenience of cars.
Under Senate Bill 100, Oregon established
19 statewide land-use goals: No. 1, "citizen involvement," followed by such simple, far-reaching ideas as conserving agricultural
lands, creating adequate transportation, and protecting coastal beaches. Fully implemented, the bill led to the creation of
the state's famed "urban growth boundaries," protecting farms, forests, and essential habitats from urban sprawl. Inside the
boundary, the real-estate market determined land values. But outside it, the state froze the property tax assessments and
limited land divisions. Consequently, what the land produced determined its value, whether it was agricultural goods or timber—or
a more virgin landscape that simply served sportspeople and tourists, watersheds and habitat.
As much as SB 100 managed rural land for the collective public good, so did the '72 Downtown Plan guide the city.
Concerned about Portland's failing downtown and the ability of the city's tax base
to adequately support schools, citizens initiated the plan. But a cadre of visionary planners, led by then-mayor Neil Goldschmidt,
turned that plan into a blueprint for a downtown where people could comfortably work, shop, live, and play. Goldschmidt's
reputation may be mud today, but under his political leadership, the city jackhammered a riverside freeway to build a riverside
park, centralized the entire region's transit system on two downtown streets, knocked down a parking garage to build a public
square, and traded in a proposed freeway for the Northwest's first modern light-rail line. Planners crafted regulations putting
the local streets and sidewalks ahead of freeways as the most critical urban arteries. They outlawed new surface parking lots
and mandated ground-floor retail shops.
SB 100 and the '72 plan didn't spawn Portland's
Ecotopian behavior, per se. But SB 100 established a line—rather than a divide—between rural and urban that, while
separating them, recognized their interdependence. Most important, together, bill and plan established a foundation of collective
investment and community spirit in the vein the ancient Romans called civitas. Fifteen years after SB 100 and the '72 plan's
adoption, the state adopted, without irony, the slogan, "Oregon: Things look different here."
Indeed, much like Callenbach's protagonist, William Weston—a journalist and the first American to visit Ecotopia
since the secession—visitors to Portland are enthralled and mystified by everything from the growing system of light
rail and streetcars to the 11,000 cyclists who stream into downtown every day to the absence of Styrofoam cups (banned in
1990). In short, like Ecotopia, the city has forged a noticeably distinct civic ethic and aesthetic. Even the modestly sized
signage that so irritated Weston as he tried to navigate Ecotopian cities has a Portland parallel in the strict 200-square-foot
limit on outdoor advertising.
On a more fundamental level, Portlanders prize participation over spectatorship. They've yet to dump all professional
sports (although the Blazers' antics may yet inspire it) in favor of Callenbach's vision for how Ecotopians released aggression—tribal
war games. But Portland has the lowest TV viewership of sports in the country. The
broad and deep political and community involvement Callenbach fantasized is common practice in Portland. Robert Putnam, who documented the decline of American civic participation in the
seminal study Bowling Alone, last year published a follow-up study, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, detailing
how Portland is—by far—the most civically involved city in
the nation. In the years between 1974 and 1994, as the rest of the country saw a 50 percent drop in attendance at public meetings
and membership in civic organizations, Portland's
rate doubled.
Callenbach only paid passing attention to agriculture in Ecotopia. But in Oregon, it is the root and the soul of secessionism. Keep in mind, SB 100 was crafted by a rural
dairy farmer, Hector Macpherson, and ramrodded through by Gov. Tom McCall—both Republicans—and passed by a legislature
controlled by urban Democrats. It was, first and foremost, a farmland preservation act. No more compelling evidence of its
success can be found than by comparing South King County to
the Willamette Valley. Sitting in the shadows of volcanos, both valleys are filled with some of the richest soil in the world.
Over the last 30 years, however, South King County has
only grown industrial and suburban sprawl. The Willamette
Valley, its long-range form envisioned by landscape architect Lawrence
Halprin during McCall's tenure, sprouted world-class turf, wine, and nursery industries and a growing network of organic farms.
Yet, if SB 100 and the '72 plan clearly provided the architecture for Ecotopian Oregon, the system updates since have
failed to provide protection from political viruses infecting the rest of the country. SB 100 and the '72 Downtown Plan began
as revolts, but the divides between sides—rural and urban, business and neighborhoods, Dems and Republicans—were
resolved by finding the common interests held by all as Citizens. In recent years, however, a redistricting has occurred in
which the Citizens are increasingly under attack by a coalition party best named the Advocates.
The Advocates can be conservative or liberal, rural or urban, free enterprisers or communists. What they share isn't
an ideology, it's guidance by ideology. As Citizens search for consensus through deliberation and informed compromise, Advocates
regulate, litigate, and pass ballot initiatives. As Citizens work for what's best for the city and state as a whole, Advocates
only want to win—at any cost.
This new two-party system first surfaced in 1991 when the Advocates narrowly passed Oregon's first property tax rollback measure. Poof! The unifying theme of healthy schools
funded by a healthy local tax base disappeared. The depletion of timber, the rise of high-tech, the globalization of agriculture,
and perhaps most pivotally, the expansion of the suburbs have all further empowered the Advocates. Urban and rural mutual
dependence—moreover, mutual understanding— disappeared. Disagreements are no longer decided by finding the pragmatic
middle ground of long-term, shared economic health and livability; they are decided by a suburban plurality that slides to
whichever end of the Advocate spectrum offers the brightest spin.
Sounds like 'merica, you might say. Yup, sure does. There is a growing expanse of Oregon that looks like it, too. What's so aggravating is that the still-vital areas that
neither act nor look like the rest of the country are now under siege courtesy of an unprecedented right-left-right combination
delivered by the Advocates in 2004.
Since SB 100 was passed, the Advocates of property rights—most outside government— have attempted to damage
or overturn it a dozen times, always losing. Meantime, liberal Advocates—mostly environmentalists— have buttressed
the land-use planning system with increasingly byzantine regulations. In 2002, property rightists finally won at the ballot
box, 53 percent to 47 percent, passing an initiative called Measure 7 that required compensation for any loss of land value
due to regulation.
The courts struck it down. But rather than boldly addressing the criticisms that a growing majority of Oregonians have
with the land-use system—namely burdensome regulations out of step with the state's changing demographics, industries,
and economies—environmental Advocates grew even more aggressive, attempting to pass a series of draconian environmental
regulations. To the already threatened middle ground, they went off like a car bomb.
Maybe even a Tom McCall would fail in this political environment. But I doubt it. Consider "Vortex I: A Biodegradable
Festival of Life," the anything-goes rock festival McCall sponsored in 1970 at a state park to distract the local antiwar
activists from a near-certain clash with Richard Nixon's appearance at an American Legion convention in Portland. That's leadership: When reason can't succeed, switch to street smarts.
The environmentalists' intentions were, perhaps, noble—watershed protection. But even as Measure 7 suggested
reason was failing, street smarts were in short supply. In the month before the 2004 election, both the city of Portland and Metro, Portland's
regional government, adopted new "environmental overlay" zones. The protests reached such a pitch, both governments stopped
the overlays, but not before transforming Measure 7 into a more powerful, legally resilient virus called Measure 37. It passed
62 percent to 48 percent.
At face value, Measure 37 is simple: Any property owner whose land is reduced in value by new regulation shall either
be compensated for the loss or have the regulation waived. But the fine print made the measure retroactive to the property's
purchase date. In some cases of continuous ownership by a family or company, "new regulation" could mean zoning adopted in
the 19th century.
Sloppily written, but politically unstoppable, Measure 37 will take months, if not years, to legally sort out. In
the meantime, it is threatening to bludgeon a 30-year legacy of land-use planning into something unrecognizable as Oregon. The message is clear: Unless the Citizens of Oregon get off the ropes, the next generation
will only know the Ecotopia in Ernest Callenbach's book.
info@seattleweekly.com
Randy Gragg is the architecture and urban design critic for The Oregonian, Portland's daily newspaper.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0512/050323_news_portland.php
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The Green Dream
The quest for a sustainable, ecologically sensible society in the Pacific Northwest.
Trying to live in balance with nature is something Seattleites take for granted as a civic good: transit projects,
urban villages, recycling. But it wasn't always so. Indeed, the first popular modern articulation of the ideal of turning
the Pacific Northwest into an ecologically sane habitat for humans was the million-selling
1975 utopian novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. The novel imagined that in the late 20th century, the Northwest, including
Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, had successfully seceded from the more materialistic and militaristic United
States. Shutting off to the outside world, the Ecotopians had set about creating a new, sustainable society in which nature
worship and technological innovation went hand in hand.
We're in the new century, and Ecotopia hasn't happened. Yet rereading the book today (Bantam issued a 30th anniversary
edition this month), it is amazing how many of its ideas are our conventional wisdom. When we talk of sustainable cities,
green building, and growth management, we're speaking the language of Ecotopia. Indeed, the word "ecotopia" has come to mean
any effort to create or promote an environmental ideal.
For this Turf, we depart from our usual format to a look at the big picture: the state of Ecotopia today. Geov Parrish
talks with author Callenbach, the man who launched a movement with his speculative fiction; we look at the challenges facing
the one city-state in the region—Portland, Ore.—that has done the most to implement Ecotopian ideals, and the
dangers it faces; and we look at whether Washington can find a political formula that moves beyond the red/blue divide to
help us realize our green dreams.
—The Editors
• Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach talks about localism, the future, and the state of Ecotopian ideals. Interview
by Geov Parrish
• Three hours south in Oregon, the
dream is at risk. By Randy Gragg
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0512/050323_news_intro.php
