(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
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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