Eco-fiction by Jan Spencer
"My fellow Americans, I come to you this evening with a message that is simple and of great historical importance. As you all know, we are experiencing rapid changes in the world and at home. We are tracking events as well as we can at the Federal level.
"You elected me to be your leader five years ago on a platform to contain these changes, to keep the price of food reasonable, to insure supplies of gasoline, to maintain order and our prosperous way of life
"To be honest is critical at this time. We have failed in our promises. We have failed to understand and respond to global forces beyond our control. Admittedly, there were voices warning of these kinds of circumstances. We didn't listen very well. In hindsight, if we had made better choices and policies thirty, forty, even fifty years ago, much of this could have been avoided. Truthfully, the premise of an entire culture structured around buying, selling, and consuming to the degree we did--and leading the world to do the same--was a mistake."
Hundreds of millions, likely billions of people all over the world were tuned in on radio, TV, internet. What we were hearing was as definitive a political/historical declaration as had ever happened in history. An entire era of human experience was asking for forgiveness. An entire era was honestly being described, from the apex of the structure that promoted it for so long, as being a massive, misguided, mismanaged mistake.
I had an ironic sense of satisfaction. But somehow "I told you so" didn't seem to fit. Many listeners had already known the score, but after this speech no one was in doubt. The changes that had been happening at an alarming and accelerating rate since the 1960s up until the year of the Proclamation, 2013, were finally officially recognized.
"So my fellow Americans, we must adjust as we can. My advisors have crafted a set of recommendations.
"First, the Federal Government will do all it can to be of service. As you are well aware, our resources are limited. Still, we are here to advise and mediate as well as we can. We can best act as a source of information and advice.
"After months of debate, review, and analysis, we have come to the conclusion that the States can best respond to their own needs for management, policy, and decision-making. The Federal Government will continue to help provide for the common defense and to coordinate communications. We ask the States to contribute to maintaining a useful central structure. All other responsibilities and functions of government are to be transferred as smoothly and rapidly as possible to the States. We strongly urge the States to work together in a spirit of cooperation and trust for the well-being of their people."
We were approaching the Tenth Anniversary of the Proclamation. A lot had happened since 2013. Who would have believed these changes? Finally, we were starting to resemble the "sustainable future" I had imagined thirty years before. I looked around my living space. The dome was fifteen feet high, thirty feet in diameter. There was plenty of ventilation for summertime and those warmer spring and fall days. That had been good planning, since our average annual temperatures had risen over the past twenty-five years by nearly four degrees.
Even now, we still had those occasional wet spells in the winter. The dome was a great place to be dry but still be near the outside. It was the focal point of four houses. Inside, we had a small fish pond, several dwarf citrus trees, stone walkways, and herb beds. Fences had been removed and the dome was located on what had been parts of four different properties. This was Riverside Coop.
My friend Paul stuck his head through the open doorway.
"There's a combined neighborhood meeting at the Mall today. We need to talk about the parking lot conversion, security out East, and remodeling the inside of the Mall. You know, people are worn out with cutting up acres of asphalt. Anyway, I'm leaving. Will you meet me at the bike barn?"
"Sure, see you there in a few minutes."
Our coop made a lot of sense. It was more economical than living alone, and had an extended-family feeling. We generated all of our own electricity and were off the grid. We used composting biogas toilets--units that had been controversial, but were now required. They provided gas for cooking and compost for raising veggies while using very little water.
Eugene's population was nearly 175,000 now. The Willamette Valley had adapted to the changes comparatively well. Portland remained the center of economic activity in Oregon. Many changes were happening as transportation patterns and trade continued to adjust to a very different reality. Who could have thought that the Soviet Union was so fragile and would disintegrate along with all its associates back in the 1980s? In its own way, the United States and the economic system that was its gift to the world experienced a similar shocking rearrangement. Many, especially after the Proclamation, still referred to the United States as the US, but the US now stood for the Untied States.
Just what events caused this historic change? Much of the country had suffered and still suffered tremendously. Ecological and economic refugees numbered in the tens of millions. The breakdowns that many warned of came to pass in a fashion no one could have predicted exactly, but containing elements that many foresaw.
The shift began to accelerate in the late twentieth century. Global warming, once labeled "irresponsible science and scare-mongering," soon inspired top level damage control policies. Seven of the warmest years on record had occurred in the 1990s. Some were blamed on El Nino, but where did El Nino come from? The changes in global climates wrought havoc with agriculture, causing the world's combined grain output to fall by fifteen percent from 2002 to 2010.
Oblivious to the trends, China and much of the developing world continued with their economic expansion. Their policies favoring industrial and urban development at the expense of agriculture turned out to be unfortunate choices. Dropping water tables, salinized irrigation, and resource-intensive changes in diet all combined to make them ever more dependent on food imports.
When the droughts became increasingly frequent from the '90s into the new century, the global price of grain rose to levels unaffordable in many countries, if the grain was available at all. Food riots became the norm all over the world, even in wealthy countries. Regional wars broke out over access to water. Famine of epic proportions left a toll of tens, then hundreds of millions. Foreign markets, upon which the global economy depended, collapsed. Starving people don't make good customers. A global restructuring based on regional and local needs became the order of the day. In the United States, the primary effect was drastic rises in food costs. As a result, backyard gardens proliferated. Diets changed dramatically. Meat became an item beyond the reach of many who had taken it for granted their entire lives. Black market home-processed meat killed thousands through food poisoning. Unprecedented increases in energy costs and erratic supply affected everyone.
It was three o'clock. I needed to make it over to the mall. At 75, I was still up and active. I had agreed to meet Paul at the bike corral.
Riverside Coop had its own bike shed. Our twenty-five members shared a typical assortment of bikes and trailers. There were three wheelers for odd loads, recumbents, bikes for two or three people. We even had a covered quad: two bikes for two forming a square with storage and a canvas top for wet weather. Eugene was really lucky for its local bike industry. Now bicycles were an important part of trade with towns all along the west coast.
"Hey Paul, let's go!"
The ride through the neighborhood was a joy. It was something like Village Homes in Davis, California thirty years before--highly vegetated with food plants as landscaping. Our neighborhood, Whiteaker, had begun removing driveways and backyard fences fifteen years before, the first area of Eugene to make those changes. Most people in our neighborhood were living in some type of cooperative. The cost of living was just too high for one or two people to be the sole occupants of what used to be a medium-sized three-bedroom house.
Some coops were created purely out of economic necessity; others formed for a variety of social, spiritual, or personal reasons. Coops with similar interests forged coop associations, and groups with years of experience acted as mentors for newer groups. The need to share resources and avoid costly duplication affected nearly everyone. After all, with a loaf of bread costing four times in real terms what it did at the turn of the century and a bicycle tire six times, major adjustments were called for.
Our street had its own small community center with day care, wood shop, small library, tea house, and food pickup. The local electric shuttle stopped there. One could go all over Eugene and Springfield on the shuttle, just like the trolley 80 years before. Cars were no longer accommodated in this part of town.
Other neighborhoods adjusted as they were able. Some of the "country club" areas had converted golf courses into community gardens. Some were even reshaping their neighborhoods like Whiteaker. The old strip malls and shopping centers were being converted into parks and new housing, their parking lots removed. In the central part of Eugene, additional residential floors were added to one and two story buildings. Streets were also narrowed, since few cars remained. Most people used the shuttle or bikes, sharing the roadways with a modest number of small electric cars similar to golf carts.
Some neighborhoods were not so able to transform. People living in the surrounding hills became local immigrants. Without ready access to cheap and available gasoline, few were able to maintain living up there. One enterprising fellow constructed something like a ski lift to transport residents up the hill. From there, they would coast by bike or a "soap box derby" to their homes. It worked for a while but broke down and without spare parts fell into disuse. His former clients moved elsewhere.
New housing became necessary in the flatter areas of town. The abandoned hillside areas became known as "Hillside Lumber and Hardware." Eugene boasted a new, growing industry, salvaging the hill houses and reusing them in more accessible locations.
"Hey Paul, check out the kids!"
We were riding through the nearby gardens. School children paraded by in colorful costumes. Small rituals like this were becoming increasingly common. Education, now much more holistic, emphasized the value of Nature. This class of second graders was learning about where their food came from.
Attitudes and approaches to children and infants--who had been neglected for decades in the last half of the twentieth century--had changed a great deal. Mothers and fathers spent far more time with their children, and community, coop, and family helped with child care as well. Changes in lifestyle and values meant far more nurturing and attention for kids.
All along the river were gardens. This area had been a peach orchard in the '50s, used for dumping construction debris in the '70s, reclaimed as a park in the '80s, and now was an essential part of Eugene's urban agriculture. Individuals, coops, and businesses rented plots. Some of the harvest was donated to people unable to garden. Windmills pumped water up from the Willamette even as far as the former golf courses over a mile away.
Locally produced food comprised the majority of our diets now. The former grass seed farms up and down the Valley now grew wheat, corn, flax, and hemp. The Willamette Valley had proved to be far more able to adapt to the changes than practically any other part of the country.
Riding through the urban gardens reminded me of just how essential local food production had become. Several geothermally heated greenhouses in Eugene also now supplied food in the winter. Still, wintertime diets had become a bit simpler than in the days of cheap, readily-available California citrus. But that was already showing signs of changing. Several people had left potted oranges out all winter for several years in a row without damage. I had even seen a few local satsumas for sale at the farmers' market. What was next, papayas?
"Look at that parking lot, I haven't seen it for months!" Paul was amazed. The Mall Project was an ambitious plan to remove the pavement of the parking lot, convert the recovered land to food production and housing, and create multi-use interior space. Several schools, a community center, small manufacturing and food value-added businesses were planned. Whiteaker, River Road, and Spyglass Neighborhoods were working on this project.
The Mall's parking lot was a scene in transition. Areas closest to the River had been reclaimed first, several years earlier. Four acres were already "cleared" and producing vigorous crops. Ironically, thirty years under pavement had safeguarded the soil's fertility and protected it from ambient contamination. With several years of work, this was once again prime land for crops.
The parking lot project was the inverse of typical roadwork. Human power did most of the work, but this was one of the few places good old fashioned gasoline was also used. Machines manufactured in Portland cut the pavement into manageable chunks. We grew food in exchange for tools we could not produce ourselves. The work was hard. Today's meeting would consider increasing the number of credits for doing this work, making it more attractive. Vast acres remained to be liberated both at the Mall and all over town.
Ten years before, city policy had come around completely. Even those who, for the previous ten years, could not accept what was happening, were now totally on board. Reports from around the country and the world, combined with the local effects of the changes, left no room for doubt. The Proclamation was the icing on the cake. The community had to respond at all levels. The City now helped to coordinate this type of plan.
Inside, the scene was surreal. Remnants of the consumer culture remained, mingling with the Mall's makeover. A store filled with obsolete home appliances from the earlier part of the century sat across from a business offering low-tech alternatives to practically everything in the appliance store. A popular idea was to assemble various artifacts from the previous era still found at the Mall and create a museum.In what used to be a jewelry store, the meeting was about to begin.
"Meeting coming to order, places everyone. We have an agenda so let's get started."
Another meeting, I thought. It reminded me of all those meetings going back ten, twenty, thirty years before. Many of the networks, public educational events, and resources developed then were of great value now. Practically all of the ideas we had advocated thirty years before had been given lip service or ignored at the time. Even when most people had indicated support, those in control had been slow to accept change. Now, so many of those ideas were a part of everyday life. Cars were used by only a few, trucks for special needs. Smaller political units like neighborhoods were far more powerful and effective than larger ones. People lived much closer to work and play. Old complaints at times became new opportunities. The Mall Project was Eugene's most ambitious conversion plan yet for a single building complex. It would be a model incorporating community control and intelligent use of resources.
The meeting was in session.
A representative from Spyglass, a former stockbroker, was speaking. "We are behind in the five year plan. If we intend to remove ninety-five percent of the parking lot in two years, we need to pick up the pace. Agriculture is one of our most important commodities of exchange. The parking lot conversion deserves greater attention. It is very important to our plans."
To acquire the manufactured goods we needed, we had to grow food. We traded mostly with Portland, Salem, on occasion Seattle and even San Francisco. Frequently, trade meant barter. An entire new industry was developing, that of Transaction Facilitation. These were businesses that negotiated and managed barter transactions. Some were honest, some were not.
Portland was the most important city in Oregon. The solar and wind industries had taken off in the years after 2000. The timing was perfect. Since then, new policies and incentives encouraged off-grid electricity. Bonneville Power was decreasingly able to produce. A number of generators were already out of use, the huge dams in decline. Several key large users continued to receive dam-generated electricity--ironically, several of them photovoltaic factories.
Efforts to upgrade and encourage rail were paying off tremendously now, especially the switch to electric trains. Rail was vitalãthe primary means of transport for people and goods from Vancouver to San Francisco. Part of Seattle's once famous aerospace industry now produced electric locomotives.
Trains were so important that towns prospered or declined depending upon their access or lack of access to trains. Nodal development on a regional scale was a direct result of where the train was located. Meanwhile, the Interstate Corridor was well into decline. Though much of it remained usable, it was little used, because of limited resources. The massive amounts of money and materials that had gone into automobile infrastructure had been a monumentally poor choice. So much of that infrastructure was now either useless or in the way.
The meeting continued. Also under discussion was the ongoing mall conversion. The desired outcome was for the mall to become almost like a new town with new housing and farming replacing what was still parking lot. New business, manufacturing, schools, and cultural places were under construction inside.
With that part of the agenda finished, we moved on to defense. Whiteaker, River Road, and Spyglass were now joined by representatives from several other neighborhoods for a discussion about how to better coordinate Eugene's responsibilities towards the maintenance of the Border area.
Closing the border ten years before had been very difficult and was still an uncomfortable topic to talk about. With the deterioration of living conditions practically coast to coast, hundreds of thousands and then millions of people created a new version of westward and at times northward migration.
Some regions of the country had become uninhabitable even before the Proclamation. Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Phoenix, and many other Sun Belt cities had become reservoirs of human suffering and tragedy. The energy and food infrastructures they so depended upon were no longer able to provide even the basics. There was too much heat, not enough water.
By 2010, environmental refugees were flooding the more northerly States. At first, they were welcomed, but that didn't last long. In California, what had been agricultural inspection stations were now updated versions of frontier forts from the wild west. Oregon and Washington had constructed similar defensive positions. Northern California was considering such protection from the South. In accord with the Proclamation of nearly ten years before, States were now behaving as virtual sovereign powers.
The toll of human suffering and disappointment became legendary. Tens of thousands died. Fraud was rampant. Self proclaimed "guides" promised safe passage, even documents to enter Oregon or Washington. Betrayal on the road was a constant possibility. Bandits preyed upon many.
Some people actually made it as far as Eastern Oregon. Attitudes toward these unfortunate refugees were similar to, if not more severe than those once reserved by some towards foreigners coming into the former United States in the late twentieth century. At first, the decision to close the border had been met with widespread opposition. It was delayed several times but as the reality of potential millions making Oregon, Washington, and California their desperate destination, with the stress of already thousands allowed in, there was finally agreement. There was just not enough room to accommodate everyone.
Volunteers from Eugene were part of the Border Defense Militia. The neighborhood militia representatives were discussing how to improve the function of providing for defense. A strictly volunteer force was not adequate. The idea of conscription was very controversial.
Similar regional defenses were common worldwide. Global adjustments took their own forms, particular to local history, geography, and culture. Few people could have imagined how fragile the New World Order would prove to be. Its rise was in inverse proportion to the well-being of the natural world upon which it depended. All over the world, cities built in the desert or cold were abandoned. Ill-conceived industries that employed millions went out of business. Countless opportunities for new goods and services took their place. A new culture, way of life, and economics were in the making.
One of the most unusual examples of social renewal occurred between the years 2010 to 2012. In quick succession, like giant steroid inflated dominos, professional sports as we knew them came to an end. Resources for lavish new stadiums were memories. Ever fewer fans were able to afford the extortionate prices for tickets. The corporate sponsors were no longer able to pay the cost of advertising. Tires, beer, gasoline, and cars were just not selling.
Marx could not have imagined this. Pro sports had become an anachronism. This icon of alchemy, creating something out of nothing, had withered and died from disinterest and irrelevance, if not ill regard. Tens of millions of ex-fans were left with empty Sunday afternoons. Savvy sociologists in the public interest were quick to recognize the trend and opportunity. Millions of newly available sports refugees were recruited for the public good. It was called "Bubba Power."
In a parallel way, millions of kids left the video game screens. Untold examples of the "Diversion Industry" were fading into history. As an idle pastime, television itself became a relic, its entire corporate message no longer of interest. Its decades-long drone of better living through consuming became ever more visibly at odds with community, healthy individuals, and a healthy environment. The culture that it created no longer listened, had ceased to exist.
Meanwhile, local broadcasting exploded. Each neighborhood had its own micro broadcasting stations. Community TV was an essential resource for helping the public adapt to the changes. Public service became desirable. Millions of people were discovering their own unique talents and potentials. Art and culture became everyday experience.
Eugene benefited immensely. These new volunteers helped remove acres, if not square miles of over-built streets and parking lots. There were massive expansions of urban gardens. Schools and public places were upgraded at an unprecedented rate. Kids had mentors and parents, environmental restoration projects attracted young and old, seniors programs flourished. In fact, many seniors became leaders in this community renaissance.
Pensions and IRAs from earlier times had little value. Many seniors had to work. Most agreed they felt far more fulfilled with community service than with what retirement used to be. Their experience and wisdom were invaluable.
Reflecting on all these changes, I found myself wishing more people, years before, could have realized their capacity to bring them about. So much suffering could have been avoided.
Paul and I made a quick visit to the rooftop wind farm and started home. It was late afternoon. Dozens of people were out in their gardens. It was a pleasant sight: families, coops, individuals. Some were chatting, some just enjoying the warm late afternoon breeze. We were the lucky ones.
In retrospect, it's hard to imagine why so many were so unable to accept that an entire way of life was at its sunset. Although some people idealized the changes, some of those changes had been brutal. We now had a fortified border with Idaho. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide had perished. Fundamentally, most of us were responding to need and self-interest. But the new opportunities included possibilities for fuller human relationships and experience. Many people were discovering talents and ways to contribute that were truly wonderful. We didn't really have that many choices. Is there virtue in necessity or can necessity create virtue?
At least here along the River, with gardens, windmills, people closer to each other and the source of their needs, I felt a sense of gratitude. We are the lucky ones. I closed my eyes to focus on the gentle sound of the breeze in the leaves. In the distance I heard someone shout they saw a salmon in the river.
Jan Spencer, an activist and resident of Eugene's Whiteaker neighborhood, is a volunteer with several public interest groups in Eugene and is also a mural artist. Jan has played a key role in creating the annual Green Eugene celebration. He can be reached at [email protected].