The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

John Kitzhaber

At a June 2005 Ecotrust–Ecotrust Canada joint board meeting, former Oregon governor JOHN KITZHABER spoke of a politics of engagement for the 21st century.

I have a deep personal commitment to the mission of Ecotrust and Ecotrust Canada — a mission based on the belief that our ecological and community values are, in fact, interdependent.

It's also a mission to create a society here in the Northwest that reflects and celebrates that kind of interdependence. But I think our efforts are increasingly being frustrated by a set of outdated governance and problem-solving tools. That's what I want to talk about today.

The institutions and structures of our society, in many instances, tend to view our ecologic and economic values not as interdependent, but rather as mutually exclusive, thus creating a politics of scarcity if you will, and a zero-sum environment in which there always has to be a winner and a loser.

It's a process that defines only our differences and does not speak to our common goals and aspirations. And if we're to be successful in building Salmon Nation, then I think it's important that we understand how these institutions have evolved and the way in which they limit our ability to achieve our objectives.

These structures that I refer to emerged at the turn of the last century when the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson was eclipsed by the Federalist philosophy of Alexander Hamilton. And if you recall, Jefferson was the chief proponent of what has been called the "politics of engagement," a model in which people worked together in common cause to work out their differences, and solve problems for their mutual benefit. And the Federalists espoused the politics of disengagement, a model through which problems were solved not by cooperation, but rather were managed by a strong central government which sought to balance private interests, one against the other.

Throughout most of the century that followed this debate, Jefferson's politics of engagement prevailed. But when the industrial revolution overtook the country, the Federalist viewpoint eclipsed that of Jefferson.

What emerged was this strong central government that in many ways reflected what was going on in the workforce: it was paternalistic, it was bureaucratic, it was top-down, and it sought to manage conflicts by balancing the private interests of one against the other. And this politics of disengagement grew throughout the 20th century with the gradual ceding of problem-solving responsibility from individuals to third parties — to bureaucracy, to legislature, and in more recent years, to the courts.

In the mid-1970s when it became clear that unfettered economic development was having a detrimental impact on our environment, and we had this collision of legitimate values, the system responded in exactly the way it had been designed to respond: by trying to manage the conflict through a framework of federal laws and regulations, among them, of course, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. And because the objective was to manage the problems, to manage the conflict, rather than actually to resolve it, the conflict has, not-surprisingly, continued.

And at least in the U.S., the dance goes like this: environmental interests sue natural resource industries and governmental agencies for failing to comply with the pertinent standards and regulations, and they strive to strengthen those regulations through congressional action. The regulated industries fight the regulation in courts and try to weaken those regulations in Congress when they have the ability to do it.

And what's increasingly clear, at least to me, is that this does absolutely nothing to resolve the problem and create sustainable solutions. It simply shifts the venue for the conflict from the court to the legislature, to the ballots, to the legislature, to the courts, while problems continue to fester, and the acrimony and the polarization continue to divide us as citizens.

The primary tools of this structure — law, regulation and enforcement — weren't designed to bring people together to solve problems. And they weren't designed to engage complicated problems, the resolution of which requires the voluntary participation of thousands and thousands of people.

Maybe the best example of this type of challenge is maintaining water quality. Through the first two-thirds of the last century, the major source of water pollution was point-source pollution that you can identify and see, and that lends itself well to a regulatory model. Today the major cause of pollution is non-point-source pollution, which comes not from farms or fields but from rooftops and lawns and driveways and highways. Reducing non-point-source pollution requires a change in behavior by thousands of individuals, many living in urban and suburban cities. The fact is: you can't do that through legislation, through litigation, or through enforcement.

My point is simply this: if we want to create a Conservation Economy here in the Pacific Northwest, a sustainable society, then I think we have to find the wisdom and the courage to move beyond the government structures and tools that we inherited from the past, and create new ones to match the challenges that face us in the 21st century.

So where do we begin? One way to begin is to do what I call a retro-design exercise. That's basically to ask yourself: what would the legislation look like to create the natural resource management structure that we have today? It helps you kind of examine your operating system and see whether it makes any sense.

Let me just give you a couple of examples. Think about the structure through which we manage public forestlands. They're not designed around ecosystems, they're organized along bureaucratic and political boundaries, not natural boundaries like forest ecosystems or watersheds, and you can't manage them that way.

Or consider western water law – the doctrine of "first in time, first in right," the doctrine of prior appropriation. That was created in the middle of the 19th century for the hard rock mining industry, because we wanted to make sure they had enough water to hose down the plaster deposits, and help develop the west. Now, 150 years later, through endless litigation we can manage the water rights, but we can't manage the water resource.

How long would Microsoft last, if Bill Gates held on to a ten-year-old operating system? Or a five-year-old operating system, or one that's one-year-old? We're holding on to 40, 50, 150-year-old operating systems, and wondering why we can't resolve this economic natural resource conflict that seems to be ongoing here in the 21st century.

A few years ago I took a friend down the Rogue River in southern Oregon, a woman who was raised in New York and had never been to the wilderness before. And it was August and the salmon were spawning. There were a lot of fish in the river and a lot of dead fish on the banks. And we floated by this magnificent male Chinook, maybe 35 pounds, still heading upstream, but fighting his growing weakness. He was all beat up, he had that fungus growing on him, his fins were torn and tattered, his big hook jaw was working to get oxygen. And she turned to me and said, "My god, what is wrong with that fish?" And without even thinking, I said, "There's nothing wrong with him. He's just dying."

Because, even in death, the life cycle of the salmon is all about the future. It's about nurturing, and sustaining, and giving to what's coming next. And although I'm sure that fish never spawned, he gave his life, and in so doing, he gave the nutrients that the next generation depends on. And I think that's our challenge as well, that's our challenge to the future: to ensure that our children inherit not only healthy, sustainable ecosystems, but good jobs, and secure communities, where people get along and are concerned for one another.

I suggest to you that realizing that future is going to require a new set of tools, a new set of approaches, a new language, and a new way of thinking. I don't pretend that it'll be easy. It means beginning to embrace the possible, instead of just clinging to the familiar. It means leading instead of just reacting.

Indeed I think that finding the courage and the wisdom to re-evaluate the way to achieve our objectives is one of the simple challenges facing us in the creation of this vision of a Salmon Nation. But I also think it is something we can do. And I think it is something we must do — if not for ourselves, then for our children, if we want to leave them a legacy of abundance for the future.

•