Washblog

With I-933, the property rights movement is also calling attention to some of these important issues connected with place, ownership, and community. The narrow view of these issues as framed in the property right rhetoric, one which pits private welfare against the common good, appears to be dominating the mainstream dialog.

Durning notes a seeming paradox in This Place on Earth. People will passionately defend home, community, and country. If we're so willing to defend our homes, why aren't we doing better job of "saving the world," which after all, is the home we all live in? He concludes, in part, that "the world" may be a concept too large and abstract to sustain the passion required for the task. Saving the world may require that more of us are better connected with place.

Connecting people with place -- and the private good with the common good are two central tasks we face. An emerging paradigm related to both aspirations holds profound potential to help us "save the world" -- both the earth and our local homes and livelihoods. This is the recognition that to protect either the environment or people, we must do both. Some of the longstanding conflicts between labor and environmentalism, for example, are creatively realigning into new forms of collaboration, as programs like the The Apollo Alliance attest. I see Sightline as being at the forefront of these ideas and recognitions.

I arrived at Sightline Institute's office on Third Avenue in Seattle damp and chilled, having run through the rain.   Alan brought some hot tea and, after a few pleasantries, we began our discussion.  He spoke quickly and I captured only a few words at first:  "A lean, healthy prosperity grounded in place."  He stopped and asked, "do you have a tape recorder?"  Um, no, I answered.* So I start off here, as usual, with the advisory that this based on notes.

Alan Durning: The ideology that informs Sightline's work is strong communities, fair markets, and responsible stewardship. We get labeled as everything from "progressive" to "neo-libertarian" for that. But we have a sort of agnosticism on the means for getting to the goal of a healthy, lasting prosperity.

We do share some similarity with Libertarian thought. Actually, there's a surprising degree of overlap, as we both look for solutions in markets, incentives, and institutional structures. If you consider what organizations like the Reason Foundation are proposing on congestion pricing*, for example, you see that, although details differ, there is agreement on important underlying concepts. But market incentives and ownership-based incentives can get us only so far.

And there's a fundamental philosophical difference too.  For Libertarians, ownership is the end.  Part of the philosophical basis of I-933 is the "ownership society" meme that the Bush administration picked up from the Manhattan Institute.  For Sightline, ownership is not the end.  It is a powerful tool through which society can achieve its shared objectives of prosperity, individual choice, freedom, and stewardship of land, water, and community.

Very clearly, ownership is a bedrock part of the American dream -- ownership of our homes, businesses, and farms.  Ownership aligns people's interests with the long-term.  We're against short-term thinking at Sightline (smiles).

Noemie:  What you're talking about, up to this point, is legal ownership, not so much ownership in the sense of civic investment or identity.

Alan Durning: Yes, I'm talking about legal ownership.   Our understanding of ownership is that it exists through rules that society establishes.   There is no "absolute ownership".  There is only conditional ownership, created through collective societal decisions.  The Libertarian philosophy is that ownership is an absolute that precedes government and that the individual is the only basis for rights, never the community. In this view, rights to property are so fundamental that government can't grant them.

I-933 is based on this misconception. It defines a change of society's rules as a "taking" from the individual owner.  But ownership is a contingent characterstic that is granted by people collectively through government. That's how societies work.  We have to plan for growth.  There are painful consequences when we don't.  The idea that changing the rules of ownership in order to meet current needs is a kind of "taking" is nonsensical.

These ballot measures keep coming back and back.  Ultimately, we will win tactically and in the grassroots as we come to a better understanding of the foundations for prosperity in our society.  It is a fact of our lives that we are all in this together.  No individual exists on his or her own.  Have you seen Zillow?

Noemie:  No.

Alan Durning:  I have this crazy, sneaking suspicion that Zillow can help us win this battle.

SIGHTLINE INSTITUTE Sightline Institute is an multi-issue think-tank that provides "Cascadia's community problem solvers with practical vision and innovative thinking, inspiring and empowering them to bring about a healthy, lasting prosperity." In the years since its founding in 1993, Sightline's work has supported many regional victories for sustainability, including phase-outs of toxic flame retardants throughout the Northwest in 2004 and 2005, a center-city strategy in Seattle to make the city's downtown a vibrant, walkable zone modeled on Vancouver, BC, and clean-car standards in Oregon and Washington in 2005.  Sightline's Accomplishments page cites: "high-quality, on-message coverage over the years (with) 1,500-odd placements in reputable media outlets, reaching a staggering media audience of nearly 80 million." Sightline's three primary outputs:   Cascadia Scorecard project   Research, Books, Maps, Commentary   Systemic Solutions

He moves over to his computer, types in a URL, and asks me for a home street address. I give him mine, and he types it in.  My house, in the midst of green, appears.

Alan Durning:  Zillow is a beautiful library.   It's a map of all the houses in the United States.  It gives you an aerial view of neighborhoods and the property values of the homes within them.  It's clear when you look at the Zillow Quilt that the value of your property rises and falls with the value of the homes around you. This is a graphical representation of our interdependence.  As these kinds of tools get more use, people can't avoid understanding how we are interdependent.  It takes us into the other meaning of ownership, that we are stewards.

Noemie:  There's a group called Citizen's Alliance for Property Rights that proposes that property rights are the foundation for human rights.  It seems to me that valuing economic ownership so highly -- as an absolute -- diminishes any other kind of ownership, for example the sense of investment in community that we want everyone to have, whether they own land or not.

Alan Durning:  The way I understand that relationship, there's not so much a competition between legal ownership and ownership-as-civic-investment, but one supports the other.

When we operate with an idea in our heads of "cowboy economic ownership mode"  we put ourselves in a peculiar scenario: 'I am autonomous on an empty plain, just me and my property, isolated...

We need to get to a place where we understand the reality that Zillow demonstrates.  We are in this together.  Our retirement system is a perfect example.  Everyone's investments are connected with everyone else's.   Ultimately, the value of what you own depends on the success and prosperity of the whole society.  Healthcare is another example.  Not everyone has insurance.  But those who do are all connected to each other through the insurance pool.

So we're having a discussion now at the extreme altitude of metaphor.  We can look at this in the light of two different concepts of individuals and property.  One way says "We're all in it together, our wellbeing, literally, our health, depends on the health of the whole."   The other way to look at it is more Libertarian.  I am an individual, I am not  connected with you.  I can do whatever the hell I want.

The former model is factually correct. You live within this model and you look around you at other people and you recognize the connections.  You see yourself as connected to your community -- you're all in it together.  You see your community's future and you see, "This is my future.  This is my culture.  These are my grandchildren.  This is my life. It is an experience of community that is common for indigenous cultures.  For 13 years, I have tried to grow into this conception, to understand it better.

The second model is the aberrant, dysfunctional model of ownership that says that property rights literally precede community and governance. That view is nonsense.

If we could have a philosophy cafe with all the voters in Washington, we would get to that first understanding together, that we live in interconnection.  But the political issue is fought out over stereotypes.  Property rights folk are running on resentment, although there are legitimate problems at the center of their complaints.

Noemie: The disconnection from each other and from community that you see in this I-933 view, that everyone is separate, is associated with a feeling that people and government are separate too, that there's no connection.  The I-933 campaign depicts government as a malevolent force that is stealing from us, rather than as a flawed human institution that people run.

Alan Durning: What do Americans think of when they think of government?  Well, they don't think of it as trustworthy.

Noemie: They don't think of themselves as being the government.

Alan Durning: Right.  They don't think of themselves.  There is a positive aspect to the way we think of government, the DeToqueville strain of self-reliance that involves people coming together to solve their problems collectively.  But, in general, when people think of government they think of faceless bureaucracy, wasteful, Kafkaesque, bickering windbag politicians -- dysfunctional and corrupt.  Most people definitely don't see themselves in that picture.  

But the Northwest faces so many challenges  that require government action.  There's so much waste.  Our tax system is grossly unjust for low income people and bad for entrepreneurs and investors. It's like tea at the mad hatter's.

And we're not getting to the solutions as we should.  That's because we don't believe that we can solve large problems together collectively.  If we want to get to the solutions, we've got to find a way for more people to believe in their power to effect change together through government.

If your view is that there's no trustworthy institution commensurate with the challenges that face you, your natural response is going to be to disengage.   That's where you get to that philosophy: You're on your own, look out for yourself. At that point the tendency is to see government itself as the problem.  There's a joke I heard recently, where a young adult was told he should vote and he replied:  "why should I encourage the bastards?"

Noemie: How do you think we can get to that level of connection that inspires people to want to accept stewardship for the land and community -- to accept responsibility for joining in collective problem solving?  

Alan Durning: I'm a policy wonk.  Policy wonks are part of the political ecosystem. But we're in just a small niche.  Most people make decisions based on what they love, on their values and identity, on the kind of people they want to be.

We face a large movement-building challenge.   It comes down to personal connections.  It's only personal connection that can overcome the tendency toward isolation and inaction.  That's what allows people to have a sense of personal power that allows them to act.  Now people feel there's nothing they can do to improve things.  We've got to move past that to empowerment.

Noemie: Out of the learned helplessness.

Alan Durning: Exactly.  Political movements need powerful and compelling visions.   They also need policy experts. Sightline's role is in articulating shared values and promoting key policies.  Movement-building happens through people's connections in their workplaces and homes.

We need a sense of belief that we can solve our problems.  We need empowerment on the level of the individual.  Look at climate change.  The United States should be the leader on addressing climate change.  The world environmental movement started here.  We have the most fluid and dynamic capitalistic economy, the most climate science.  And we are the biggest emitter in the world.  Why aren't we the leader in solving this?  

It's not because we disbelieve that climate change is happening.  It's that we don't believe that we can change it.  This is the battle of our times.

Noemie: Changing gears here a little bit.  I recently heard two people speaking on their visions of the built environment of the future.  Burt Gregory, Mithun's CEO, spoke of cities as living environments. He gave this incredibly inspiring talk.   He said something like (and I might have my numbers off here) 80% of the buildings in our cities in 2050 will have been built between now and then.   So we have this tremendous capacity to change how we build. We can make our cities into dynamic and living environments modeled on natural environments, green-friendly, built to last, human-friendly, beautiful to move through and live in.  My head was buzzing.  It was a dream.

The other vision was from Howard James Kunstler, who spoke recently at Town Hall.  Kunstler basically portrayed Americans as a bunch of clowns driving around crappy suburbs in clown cars eating clown food.  He said we're surrounded by throwaway food and buildings.  In the Long Emergency that he predicts is coming soon, we simply won't have enough energy to heat and electrify all these buildings and get water to them.  We won't even have enough energy to dispose of all the useless decaying buildings and other junk we've created, let alone building something more sustainable.  He does hold out hope, but predicts that, if we don't make rapid and radical change, it's going to be really just a terrible mess.  What do you think of these visions?

Alan Durning: Kunstler's fun. I love his writing and he's more right than he is wrong.   But I think that to a certain degree he's left the reality-based community.  He's had a lot of success and attention and reward by playing to the worst fears of the left. But I think maybe he intentionally overplays.

I know Burt well.  Most of his buildings are amazing, break-through architecture.  My vision is more like Burt's.  But it's simpler.  I would say my vision of the built environment of the future is that everyone has a home and that every eight-year-old can walk to a library.

* I've balked at the idea of using tape recorders during interviews because I feel they change how I pay attention and the depth with which I remember the interview afterwards.  Somehow, a recording doesn't replace the memory that it seems to discourage from forming.   Plus, I had a bad experience the one time I did tape an interview -- years ago.  I relied on the recording, which failed, and so I lost everthing.

* Reason  Foundation's mobility page provides some background on pricing techniques to address mobility.  A simple example of congestion pricing might be charging more for a toll lane during rush hour.  Daniel Kirkdorffer at On The Road to 2008 reported on a recent public policy discussion covering the possibility of HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes, an idea also espoused on Reason Foundation's mobility page.