The seed of the idea for Earth Day, which celebrates its 41st anniversary this Friday, was planted in Seattle on September 20, 1969. That's when Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, fresh off of a harrowing tour of an oil spill off the coast of California, spoke to a fledgling conservation group at the University of Washington about the possibility of an environmental teach-in, analogous to the events being held at the time to support the civil-rights movement and protest the Vietnam War.
Kevin P. Casey
Kevin P. Casey
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"Fledgling conservation group" are Wikipedia's words. In truth, the only people who know how big or small the talk was—some insist it was a formal speech; others say Sen. Nelson was just shootin' the shit—are all dead. But what matters today is that everyone, everywhere, thanks in part to Sen. Nelson, has some reason to feel guilty about the environment from the moment they wake up in the morning. And nowhere is that shared neurosis felt more profoundly than in Seattle.
Besides birthing the holiday, our city also had one of the country's first curbside recycling programs. City Light was promoting energy efficiency in a time—the early '70s—well before dropping those words might get you laid at a green-jobs happy hour. And prior to allowing a Sierra Club lawyer (more on him later) to steer Seattle with both green thumbs wrapped around the wheel, we had Greg Nickels, the man who jabbed his finger in the eye of the Bush (Jr.) administration by getting 300 other mayors to ratify the Kyoto Protocol when the President wouldn't.
We are, by some measures, the greenest city in America. Which only means that when we fall, we fall harder. In identifying some classic cases of ecohypocrisy—instances when someone says one thing then does another, and whose contradiction contributes to our mutually assured environmental destruction—Seattle Weekly talked to some of the area's most prominent environmentalists. All agreed that, when it comes to ecohypocrisy, there are often more shades of gray (or green) than in most issues. As one environmental leader put it, "One person's advocate is another's hypocrite," and creating a more sustainable world is like "trying to fly a plane and redesign it at the same time."
Digging for the Truth
At this point, nearly everyone we spoke to is suffering from tunnel fatigue. Some environmentalists claim replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with the world's widest underground highway is the area's biggest blind spot: the place where our values and actions most jarringly diverge. Others just want to "get the damn thing built already."
But some say that, by opposing construction of the tunnel, Mayor Mike McGinn is actually violating his own green principles. If you want to preserve green space and promote density, two things McGinn approves of, there's no better option than pushing heavy rush-hour traffic deep underground.
"The greenest option is the tunnel," says one environmentalist who feared retribution if named. "Those cars will have to go somewhere. Having emissions and stormwater runoff underground is actually the best option."
Call it the Richard Conlin argument. Last July, in an interview with the local bike blog Bike Intelligencer, the city council president said the same thing. "Creating an underground corridor takes your traffic away from the waterfront and keeps it going through the city while you create an urban waterfront center that you're looking for," said Conlin. "I see that as good management strategy."
The mayor disagrees, dispatching a series of environmental vassals to explain why there is nothing green about the tunnel. Those charges—Eric de Place from Sightline, a carbon-emissions-focused think tank; Roger Valdez, most recently of Sightline; and Mike O'Brien, the only city councilmember to vote against the tunnel—instead offer a new ecohypocrite to be tarred and feathered: Gov. Christine Gregoire, whom Valdez points out signed a law to decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 50 percent by 2050.
"This is so politicized," O'Brien says of the tunnel fight. "The folks in the environmental community that I have always had a ton of respect for, that have asked the really hard questions, the ones that are on the table with the governor, have all told me behind the scenes that this is just awful. I was in the room with one of them [former King County executive and surface/transit option supporter], Ron Sims, a couple days before they announced the tunnel. I told him it's too late to be making this kind of mistake, and Ron said, 'I know, but I'm with her.' "
Terry Brown, a spokesperson at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development where Sims is now deputy secretary, said that Sims "recalls plenty of conversations with O'Brien, but none about the tunnel."
Not Evergreen Enough
Like many forward-thinking academic institutions, The Evergreen State College has set a goal to become completely carbon-neutral. To do that, however, the school will have to ditch its primary source of heat and electricity: a natural-gas boiler that produces about 4,500 tons of carbon emissions each year.
The college's Sustainability Council thought it'd found the solution: a "gasification chamber" fueled by wood chips left over from local logging operations. But a group of concerned citizens has succeeded in derailing the project by claiming it was not quite green enough for Evergreen.
