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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 1999)
(The $ o r tb m h (© b u rn er fi, 'f"'- Anything That We Love Can Be Saved B y P ortland C ommissioner E rik S ten and A ngela W ilson Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his mark on history for his tireless efforts to ensure civil freedom and justice for African Americans, and for his prin cipled - and all too costly - com m it ment to nonviolence as a moral obliga tion. Several years before the end o f his too-short life, however, Dr. K ing’s strong commitment to environmental health became a major focus o f his work. Said King, “all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network o f mutuality, tied into a single garment o f destiny.” His words are as true for us now as they were more than three decades ago. The environment is where we live, work and play. It is the foundation on which we build our families, commumties and futures. O ur nation - and the world - are at a turning point. W e have inescapable evidence that our short-sighted ap proach to transportation, housing, ag riculture, manufacturing and other ele ments o f m odem life have left a heavy burden on our land, water, air andhealth. We have engaged in the destruction o f the environment that provides the very air, food, water that sustains us and all the other species that share this planet Earth. In Portland, we need only look atom- waterways and the health o f local fish species for an indicator o f the need to rethink how we impact our environ ment. On March 13, 1998, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is- , sued a rule to list steelhead trout - residing in a swath o f waterways reach ing f ro m Longview, Washington to Hood River, Oregon - as threatened under the Endangered Species A c t P o rtla n d is th e largest municipality in the affected region. For too long we have engaged in basic municipal activities with little re gard for or knowl edge oftheireflfects on fish and other residents o f our shared e n v iro n m ent Someofthese activities can be grouped optimisti c a lly u n d e r the heading o f “W e Didn’t Know Any Better.” In this cat- egory, we might put things like the use o f lawn pesticides, the practice o f put ting streams in cul verts that hamper fish passage, and the construction o f a storm water sys tem that treats rain like sewage. In another, more com plicated cat egory are those unintended conse quences o f other programs - the prob lems that might be called “W e Meant Well, B u t...” In Oregon, we have achieved a great deal o f notoriety for our efforts to stop sprawl - but at this point the environmental benefits of "smart growth" come at some costs to our watersheds (The more we pave over the surfaces o f our watersheds, the more the natural flow regime in our creeks is disrupted). Here’s another example” for more than a century, the city has taken water from the Bull Run watershed for mu nicipal usg. As a result, the Bull Run river has very low flows during the summer months, depriving the threat ened species o f habitat. InMay 1998, the PoitlandCityCoun- cil committed to eliminating ormodify- ing those Portland government opera tions that contribute to the destruction o f steelhead habitat, and to increase our efforts in restoring the health o f area waterways. Portland Mayor Vera Katz asked me to oversee our citywide _ S^ L — —___ C7 Nonviolence And The Environment B y H ank W essei . man , P h D. As a graduate student in anthropol ogy back in the 1970’s, I got to read the diaries o f former missionaries and the fieldnotes o f the early anthropologists who first came into contact with indig enous peoples. These Europeans had great faith in their own cultures ’ability to conquer and control nature, and their writings about the traditionals emphasis on living in harmony with their environment often reflect an atti tude o f condescension mixed with dis dain. After all, their G od had given them dominion over the Earth and all its creatures, and the indigenous peoples reverence for their land and the spirits that resided within it struck these West erners as archaic, primitive and as su Commissioner Erik Sten ;sponse to the ESA listing. The City ofPortland sees the Endan- ered Species Act as an opportunity to ring our operations in line with our alues and our vision for our city; to nake good on our stated desire to be esponsible stewards o f our environ nent for ourselves and for the future. Our choice is both simple and vital, ¿ach o f us must be willing to look at our iveryday actions and determine how to ie constructive, not destructive; how to ;ontribute to the health o f our homes, reighborhoods and watershed and not degrade them. Poet and novelist Alice W alker re- cently published a book entitled, Any thing That We Love Can B<? Saved- The sentiment contained in that title must permeate the work we do to reconstruct ourrelahonshiptoourworld.Thisisatall order.But-likeD r.K ing-Ialsohave“an audacious faith in the future" The chal lenge is enormous, and we will only be successful if our citizens become en gaged in and ultimately committed to the ause. perstitious. Most well informed citizens today are aware that the environment which sustained the traditionals with such ease is under siege from a hundred fronts. Most also understand that the ultimate causes lie in die ever-escalat ing population explosion and the re sulting overexploitation o f the natural resource base. This is easily seen in our prevailing mythologies which have tended to deify our ‘founding fathers” wile demoniz ing nature as an enemy to be overeome or conquered. As school children, we learned about the pilgrim s getting through that first terrible winter and heard stories o f the suffering pioneers surviving Donner Pass or being sub jected to the attacks o f hostile Indians. O ur God-given doctrine ofmanifest destiny prevailed, o f course, and by the late 1800’s, the W est had been settled and 95% o f the indigenous peoples o f North America had been killed. But our ongoing preoccupation with nature as enemy prevails and can still be seen in the rash o f recent disaster films focused on killer asteroids wiping out civiliza tion or on tornadoes, volcanoes and Hank Wesselman as well as staggering economic losses. As the end o f the millennium ap proaches, however, w e seem to be tak ing stock o f who we are. where we came from and where w e are heading. This is a time o f reflection - a time in which every established hypothesis is being challenged, from those o f the sciences to those o f religion. The whole moral and ethical code of our society is under scrutiny as well, and the views w e have o f ourselves, our species as a whole, and the envi ronment in which we five, are undergo ing a profound paradigm shift in re sponse. W e are becoming aware that we have traveled down a materialistic path as far removed from that o f the indig enous peoples as it is possible to go. A n d w e are coming to understand that in achieving all our great technological miracles, we have treated the land with violence. The looming spectre o f global w arm ing is a clear indicator that the abusive activities o f industrialized man are steer ing us tow ard an environmental catas trophe o f unprecedented proportions. We are rediscovering something that the traditionals have always known. There are natural laws that have no concern for the legislated rights o f spe cial interest groups or for the corporate business m an's profit margin. These laws are universal and supercede hu man statutes. They are non-negotiable. T he v iew s o f the in d ig en o u s peoples on land ownership are begin ning to look a whole lot less like super stition and a whole lot more like wis- • Pepsi is proud to be a part of the Commemoration; o f the Blue-Print Crea. by Martin Luther King, Jr., fo r Social