Sustainability Northwest Region Is One Of The World’s Richest In Resources; Now If Only We Can Keep It That Way

Two traits Alan Durning says he’s never been able to shake are “a consuming need to learn about what ails my society, and an equally powerful passion to do something about it.”

The first helped steer the lanky, trombone-playing Phi Beta Kappa toward a career as a globe-trotting environmental researcher and writer for the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute.

The second brought him back to his Seattle roots three years ago, where, at age 30, he launched the nonprofit think tank Northwest Environment Watch.

Since then, Durning, aided by a meager staff and small army of volunteers, has offered commentary on National Public Radio, lectured at the White House and published a report on the automobile’s role in urban America. Now comes “This Place on Earth” (Sasquatch Books, $22.95), in which Durning makes a case why the Pacific Northwest - “the greenest part of history’s richest civilization” - is the ideal incubator for a new, sustainable economy.

This time, he argues, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“If Northwesterners cannot build an ecologically sound way of life,” he writes, “it probably cannot be done. … If we can, we will set an example for the world.”

Durning starts by ignoring political boundaries, instead defining the Pacific Northwest as stretching from southeast Alaska to northern California. (Washington Post writer Joel Garreau drew the same distinction in his 1981 book, “The Nine Nations of North America.”)

What attracted settlers, from Native Americans onward, was the region’s bountiful natural wealth. But nature’s gifts have been severely overharvested, Durning says.

“On some rivers, fisheries biologists outnumber migrating (salmon). On others, the legal briefs weigh more than the allowable catch.”

Erosion in the Palouse cost farmers 6 pounds of soil for every pound of wheat they grew between 1939 and 1979. Meanwhile, haphazard roads built to get at Northwest timber “bled soil into streams, worsened floods, fragmented habitats … and hastened the spread of exotic species and diseases.”

Mining, hydroelectric generation, urban sprawl, population growth, overconsumption … each exacts a price for which future generations will be held accountable. “The problem is not that Northwesterners are too materialistic,” he writes, “but that we’re not materialistic enough. Northwesterners care about things without caring for them.”

The conclusion Durning draws in “This Place on Earth” is sobering: “The region needs to slam on the brakes and turn around.”

“Looked at without flinching, the current Northwest economy must be pronounced wildly, screamingly unsustainable. It cannot last. It will not last. If people do not recast it by choice, natural forces will likely dismantle it with pitiless disregard.”

Of course, Durning doesn’t deliver so discouraging an appraisal of the region’s health without also offering a cure.

He starts with tax reform.

“Most taxes affecting the Pacific Northwest stand reason on its head; they fall overwhelmingly on labor and capital.” Durning recommends gradually eliminating taxes on income, capital, housing and labor, and replacing them with levies on activities that cause environmental harm.

He goes on to address population growth, rootlessness, the breakdown of community, and a handful of other obstacles to environmental and economic vitality.

But Durning acknowledges the “yawning chasm” between what is politically possible and what he sees as glaringly necessary.

“Ecological pricing, population stabilization and other requisites of sustainability are, politically speaking, preposterously idealistic,” he admits.

That’s why Durning urges a new way of thinking about jobs, neighborhoods and natural resources.

“The politics of sustainability is about changing not only laws and habits, but also - even primarily - world views,” he writes. “The challenge is to change them quickly enough.”

Durning concludes his treatise with a characteristically passionate observation. But this time the words aren’t his. Instead, he quotes a 1940s Northwest timber boss named A.J. Auden.

“We have spent these past 250 years … in restless movement, recklessly skimming off the cream of superabundant resources,” Auden said, “but we have not used the land in the true sense of the word, nor have we done ourselves much permanent good.

“It’s high time that we … settled down, not for a hundred years, but for a thousand, forever.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Molly Quinn