ONE TOWN SQUARE: a community response to peak oil & climate change

With the pressure on everybody in the environmental community to rally ’round the effort to pass the referral of HB 3540 (now Measure 49), I’ve been repeatedly attacked for my continued opposition to the Measure 37 rewrite and asked to explain how I can be so stubborn and unrealistic. The explanation requires an excursion into the historical and intellectual context of land use in Oregon—so please be patient with the length of this post.

Land use planning arose in Oregon as a tool to protect farm land and, to a lesser extent, forest land from sprawl. The program assumed and was premised on endless growth. The bugbear was California, where everyone could watch as relentless sprawl consumed farmland and the countryside at a fearsome rate.

The planning program was not an environmental program, and god forbid we should try to regulate farm practices. Recall the stink about and the resistance to the pesticide reporting program. We environments latched on to the planning program as a tool—albeit an ill-designed one—to get at the protection of ecosystems, especially on privately-owned lands which are outside the focus of the mainstream conservation organizations. It turns out keeping housing developments from consuming rural lands is a pretty good proxy for keeping the ecosystems found on such lands more or less intact.

Measure 37 put an end to the planning program. M37 is predicated on the notion that there is no legitimate public interest in private lands and on the idea that the individual can and does exist apart from the community and individual rights were somehow created and continue to exist independently of the community in which we find ourselves. Of course, these notions are absurd, both historically and logically.

The rewrite starts by accepting the premise of M37, that there is no legitimate public interest in private lands. It then goes about trying to mitigate the damage to the lands the old planning program was most concerned with—the most valuable farm and forest lands, especially those surrounding the urban areas in the Willamette Valley—by limiting the amount of new development that can take place there. The price for this? Cementing in law an ideology which disables government from being able to act to protect or promote the public welfare.

The forces behind the rewrite panicked at the thought of 7,000+ M37 claims being built out, swamping all that they had worked for over the last 35 years. I believe this panic is unwarranted for a number of reasons, not the least of which are economic. The “fix” would allow somewhere in the neighborhood of 21,000 new dwellings in rural areas statewide—Measure 37 as it stands would presumably allow even more. Total housing starts in Oregon have averaged around 25,000 over the last few years—and by far the greater part of these were in urban areas. The market for rural houses would be flooded, and it would take years to work off the excess, given good market conditions. But the real estate bubble is popping and markets collapsing, all over the country, while at the same time interest rates are rising and credit rules tightening. And then there are the legal uncertainties with M37 as it currently exists—especially the questions concerning transferability of claims and of the right to use any development that actually gets built. With all these problems, most of these houses would never get built.

The rewrite would clear up M37’s uncertainties, ensure the transferability of claims and of subsequent development, and would likely result in more development actually being built out. And for this, we sell out our most deeply-held principles and values.

There were other strategies that we might have employed to fight off the worst effects of Measure 37. Taking advantage of the “public health and safety” exemption, we could have focused on the most important geographical areas—for example, arguing that the food produced in the Hood River Valley is simply too important for the health and safety of Oregonians to be sacrificed. We could have worked to broaden the scope of “public health and safety” to encompass ecosystem protection. We could work towards declaring that all land use regulations are health and safety regulations, essential for maintaining the health and safety of the planet and all those who live on it, including humans.

The reality is the cheap and abundant energy that fueled sprawl over the last 50 years is gone. The patterns of the past cannot and will not continue long into the future, M37 or no. The sugar plums of unearned profits that dance in the heads of M37 supporters are the unearned fruits of endless growth, growth that will of necessity come to an end. The challenge we will face in the future is not accommodating unending growth, but figuring out how to live in a world that is energy- and emissions-constrained and within ecosystems that are changing in unpredictable and uncomfortable ways due to the furies of global warming that we have unleashed.

The folks responsible for the rewrite lost their nerve, betrayed our core principles, and negotiated surrender with themselves (not with the M37 proponents, who weren’t and never will be interested in any “compromise” at all). They insist that surrender is the only realistic option. But the stakes are too high to give up. The reality is that the future of our civilization is on the line. We can only prevail if we remain true to our belief in the value of healthy communities and steadfast in our resolve to work to make our communities better. Voter approval of the rewrite would not only likely result in more on-the-ground damage—it would leave us in a far worse position from which to carry on the struggle for a decent future.