Washblog

Don has worked in the environmental and labor communities from the early 1970s. He experienced first-hand the disruptive effects of the timber wars on the progressive community. It was a watershed time and many lessons have been learned from the experience by both labor and environmentalists. Fred Rose in Coalitions Across the Class Divide, contrasts the split of Washington's progressive movement in the timber wars with a different collaborative effort around the same time - the movement to transition from a war to a peace economy in Washington after the Soviet collapse of 1989. Rose also sees a restoration of broad-based coalitions across social divides as a precondition of restoring the progressive movement.

Ideological issues seem to define our political landscape now. Climate change, diminishing supplies of oil, soil and water depletion, and other environmental factors, however, may soon usher in an era in which matters of physical survival come to dominate politics. We cannot avoid our physical challenges - but if we heed the counsel of Don and others who have his perspective, we will find in this crisis many opportunities. This is our chance to transcend class, cultural, and political divides around common goals: survival, first and just as importantly, livable community that keeps us safe and nourishes democracy.  It's our chance to bring governance further under the control of people and communities.

A conversation with Don is a relaxed and congenial experience. He's focused on serious issues but always ready, it seems, to laugh or tell a story. I came across an evaluation that one of Don's students at Seattle University posted on the web: "This guy is a knowledge guru. Especially liked when he incorporated enchilada bake into this history class on the Spanish Empire after 1700s." I thought that the student had captured the essence of what I see as Don's friendly gravitas.

Noemie
The web site of the Institute for Washington's Future states a goal of realizing progressive values. What is your vision of progressivism in Washington State?

Don Hopps
I come at that from an historical perspective. The Progressive movement in the late 19th century made some of the great positive changes in American history, changes in child labor laws, the vote for women, establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, the income tax, preservation of public lands.  To the progressive mind, there was a center, a commonality to all these issues, the economy. Because of this economic focus, the movement was able to bring out the many commonalities among labor, agriculture, social justice advocates, professionals, and intellectuals.

Noemie
Did people at the time refer to what was going on as the progressive movement?

Don Hopps
There were Progressive Republicans as well as Democrats. Teddy Roosevelt was considered the progressive leader as well as the leader of the Republican Party. The Progressive movement self-consciously transcended both parties, both of which were badly split on this issue.

Part of what the movement did was to ultimately reform the Democratic Party, which was coming out of the legacy of the American civil war and was still quite conservative.

Noemie
Do you see what happened then, that helped us move past this stage, as serving as a kind of model for the rebirth of the Progressive movement now?

Don Hopps
Yes, in terms of a broad coalition that unites on economic issues and includes labor and agriculture and Populism. At that time, economic justice was how issues were integrated. So, for example, one of the elements of the progressivism of the early 1900s was conservation and we saw the founding of the national parks and forests. The impulse driving this change came out of the desire to save America's natural treasures, but it also came in large part out of the rationale that natural resources are the property of all people, not just the corporations. These natural resources should be nurtured and used for the common good.

Now what we have with the Progressive movement is many separate issues that are looking for a center. Sustainability could be the vehicle for a Progressive rebirth. Sustainability integrates the major issues of today: environmental concerns, concerns with economic justice, and community preservation and enhancement under the overarching need to democratize our economy.

Noemie
When I think of Teddy Roosevelt, I think not only of conservation and the national parks - but also trust busting, the breaking up of the corporate monopolies. This is a task we need to return to today, to control the excess power of these corporations.

Don Hopps
Much of the Progressive movement in the early 1900s did address the abuses of capitalism gone too far. It did focus on things like monopolization, abusive labor practices, as well as abusive environmental practices.

Noemie
So much headway was made at the time. But we seem to be even worse off now. There are even more and worse corporate abuses - and the stakes are higher, particularly on the environmental issues.

Don Hopps
You know, the late nineteenth century, the Gilded Age that preceded the blossoming of progressive reform, looked very much like today: a Democratic Party of caution and conservatism, Republican presidents in the back pocket of -- what else - big oil, a country distracted by foreign terrorists into dabbling in imperialistic adventures. That's why we need a rebirth of the Progressive movement.

Noemie
I look around and it seems that we're fighting the same battles.

Don Hopps
We haven't found our focus yet; we haven't found our feet. It took time for progressivism to emerge out of populism. I'd say that we're in a late stage of populism.

Noemie
What puts us at a late stage of populism?

Don Hopps
People are coming up against and identifying a whole host of problems. But we haven't come up with a central explanation. Nor have we developed leaders of the stature of a William Jennings Bryan or a Teddy Roosevelt who can articulate outrage, let alone vision and values, on the national stage.

In some sense, Progressivism took off the way it did in the 1920s because of the accident of the assassination of McKinley when Teddy Roosevelt was Vice President. The assassination put him into a position of national power to go along with his prominence as an up and coming reformer.

Noemie
It's strange for me to think about Progressivism being so closely connected in time with that fateful Presidential election of 1896 where McKinley's campaign manager, Mark Hanna, got the big corporations to "tithe" in support of the campaign and overwhelm the old-time organizing of the more popular Bryan. There is a very moving section in the Daniel Kemmis book, Community and the Politics of Place, where he talks about 1896 as the first time that big money determined the outcome of a presidential election - and how we've never found our way back from that. But now, what you're saying seems to suggest that this outcome helped lead to the Progressive movement taking off in the early 1900s.

Don Hopps
Well Mark Hanna said something very prescient when McKinley was elected. He said to his friends, "You've put that damn cowboy within a heartbeat of the presidency." He had argued against those who thought that Roosevelt's vice presidency would be a cheap, meaningless way to buy off the progressive insurgents in the Republican Party. Of course, Roosevelt ran with McKinley in 1900 against the second Bryan ticket.

Noemie
Could it be said that, in a sense now - in addition to all the groundwork that's going on, that we're waiting for an accident like the one that brought Teddy Roosevelt to the national stage? That's actually not such a bad prognosis if it's true - as they say: "Accidents will happen..."

Don Hopps
Well, it would probably be wrong to say that an accident brought the Progressive movement to power. The movement was already on that road. Just as it would be wrong to think all we need is a fortuitous accident today. In order for progressivism to move from where it is now, we need to find greater cohesiveness in order for the movement to be fully realized.

Noemie
What would that center be for a new progressivism, in your analysis?

Don Hopps
It would be sustainable community development.

Noemie
Can you explain what you mean by that?

Don Hopps
I see.  Sustainable community development would be transforming the base of our economy by encouraging smaller-scale, dispersed organizational structures that create industries realizing both environmental and economic benefits. Its chief economic focus is the creation of quality jobs - with the caveat of course that its benefits welcome all people in a community.

Noemie
Would you associate this with more place-based enterprise?

Don Hopps
Yes, a sustainable economy emphasizes the qualities available in a particular area and that realize the economic benefits of that area.

Noemie
What would be an example of that?

Don Hopps
Well, wild fish over farmed fish. Realizing that the Quinault Sockeye, for example, has unique qualities as a source of food. Their run in the Quinault River is one of the earliest in Washington. These fish are extremely high in Omega 3. They are extremely red and extremely tasty. Everything the red dyed farmed fish are not. Unique quality extends into economies and culture. These fish continue to be harvested and processed by the Quinault Nation.

Noemie
How does this relate to the kind of economic centralization we've got now? I mean, how do we get from where we are now to some place that's more reasonable.

Don Hopps
There's a reason centralization takes place. It's necessary in order to allow certain things to be produced. We need international institutions. We desperately need transnational institutions to promote world peace. There are problems in the world that are global and can be addressed only on that level. There are products, airplanes for example, which require a large and complex production system. The corporation is the best, if not only way to organize such an enterprise. But the effectiveness of global organization has been exaggerated by the capitalist economic system. It's come to be the model for everything. We're sacrificing efficiency and economic effectiveness by rewarding excessive centralization through tax breaks, by lack of regulatory oversight, through pursuing foreign policy objectives that are in the interest of corporations and not people, and by giving private interests almost unlimited access to resources that people once owned.

Last night I watched a documentary on Channel 9 about building the Trans-Alaskan pipeline. The only way this could have been done by private industry is that the federal government gave the oil to the companies that extracted it, giving away a great public resource for next to nothing. We subsidize all resource extraction in the United States. People who extract any natural resource - from wood to coal to oil to metals - pay almost nothing. In the case of Alaska, there are minimal state and federal fees. In our posture toward granting these privileges, we give away to private interests resources that are public, that are owned by the people.

Noemie
Do you have an example in Washington?

Don Hopps
Besides the $3 or $4 billion tax breaks for Boeing?

Noemie
In terms of natural resource extraction.

Don Hopps
When Washington became a state, as part of the deal we got a share of the federally-owned lands. We traded these lands to corporations, for logging or mining or other resource extraction.

Noemie
I'm reading Alan Durning's This Place on Earth, and he talks about the successive waves of resource extraction in the Pacific Northwest. He starts out with the otter, describing how there had been a delicate balance between otters, sea urchins, and kelp. When the otter population was nearly eradicated by hunters, this balance altered, probably irrevocably. There probably once was a forest of kelp along the Pacific Northwest coast that mirrored the forest of trees on the land - now we have what they call the sea urchin barrens.

He goes on to describe the "extraction" of the beavers, then gold, silver, and copper, timber, dirt (with a resulting loss of large amounts of top soil) and water used for energy and irrigation - the system of dams on the Columbia that has turned this river into a series of separated bodies of water.

One of the things that I find disturbing about his account is that it opened my eyes on how much of our current farmland in eastern Washington is arable only because of the dams on the rivers bringing up vast amounts of water.  So it seems to me that much of our agriculture is inherently unsustainable.

Don Hopps
There are a lot of dryland acres in Eastern and Western Washington. It is true there is a large area of land in Washington that is part of a reclamation projects where water is pumped from the dams to irrigate the land. But I'd be surprised if they constituted 20% of Washington's farming.

Noemie
Can farming in these areas be considered sustainable?

Don Hopps
It was probably not a great idea to put in these dams. But hindsight is 20-20. The dams were not built to create reclamation projects but to generate electricity, which is used overwhelmingly by urban houses, offices, and industries. Second, the reclamation projects had a social purpose - to give more people the opportunity to farm, to grow out of poverty in the 1930's.  This was radical and progressive, radical and progressive enough to inspire the poetry of Woody Guthrie, anyway.  If anything, rather than hurrying to pin the dams and the declining salmon runs on the farmers, we could and should learn a little humility. I think progressivism comes of age when we first take responsibility for our part by reducing our energy consumption.

Noemie
I think one of the things people are afraid of when they hear talk of land reform or economic or environmental reform is that the institutions and structures we depend upon are in danger of being torn down. This feels destructive, threatening. I was collecting signatures for the Clean Energy Initiative last week and someone asked me if it was proposing to tear down all the dams.  I told him no and asked if that's what he wanted - did he want them torn down?   He said, well the environmentalists were always trying to do that - and it would make things much worse for the fishing industry.  He had been a commercial fisherman and he had to leave his trade because of the depletion of the fish stocks. He said removing the dams would help the salmon, but reduce all the other stocks that the fishing industry depends on. He was really angry, too, at the Indian tribes.

Don Hopps
Obviously, the tearing down of dams is not going to happen with I-937 (The Clean Energy Initiative). There is a kernal of truth to what he was saying, though. When we muck around in our past and try to correct historic mistakes - particularly in the environment -- somehow it works out to the advantage of the large corporations and screws the little guy. And the environmental organizations are sometimes consciously, or unconsciously, the handmaidens in this process.

Noemie
Do you have an example?

Don Hopps
Sure. The spotted owl controversy and the preservation of the old growth forests.

In fact, I think the struggle over old growth forests in the Northwest is emblematic of where we are in the Progressive movement today and where we need to go. Understanding that part of our own history and acting on those understandings would be a great help in overcoming the barriers we are presently facing.

Let me explain.

Progressives were split right down the middle. I mean, at every level, from vision and value, through personal identity and class, to literally where you lived. The great gap in our politics between blue and red states was first manifest here in the chasm between timber counties and urban centers. Historically, rural timber counties in Washington were among our most organized and politically progressive counties. They were also among the most economically successful rural counties in the United States. No more.

What I saw happen here in the early nineties was a conflict that should not have happened. Progressive environmentalists were united in advocating for the protection of the remnants of a great forest and the maintenance of important ecosystems rapidly being clear cut out of existence. I joined with them. I agreed with them. I still do. Progressive Labor activists and residents of small communities were fighting for good jobs and the very viability of their local communities going under to the effects of economic concentration and globalization. I joined them. I agreed with them. I still do.

This conflict between equally good and important values soon escalated out of control and beyond reason. I was there when environmentalists genuinely seeking solutions were shouted down and physically threatened. I watched and listened as urban progressives cited as fact a Disney cartoon - and I mean cartoon in every negative sense of that word - which characterized timber workers as beer swilling, Bambi killers. They went so far as to use the cartoon as education for their children.

In this sweep of emotion, positions solidified and litmus tests became the order of the day. While environmental fundamentalists took over their side, industrial ideologues took over the other. And, guess what, big timber corporations took over the middle and manipulated both sides. What got covered over and lost was that the economic depression in timber communities and the destruction of old growth forests had the same root cause!

The root cause of both problems was the concentration of capital and ownership in the forest products industry leading to the industrialization of the forest in order to feed high-tech, high-volume mills. The forest products industry cut and milled and even exported record harvests in the eighties while the work force shrunk. Small, local mills shut down and the only jobs in town went away and local consumers disappeared. Local stores and businesses slowly went the way of the mill, no doubt taking the same road as the large trucks hauling the great trees to some distant mill or a dock for a ship bound for Japan.

In the end, a newly elected Democratic president orchestrated a solution. The solution was an agreement accepted by the corporate industry and the national environmental organizations. The environmentalists "won" the protection of much of the remaining stands of old growth timber. These stands lived almost entirely on public lands, our national forests. The corporate industry maintained their "right" to harvest their land in the way they saw fit; temporary regulation that threatened the right was withdrawn. Even log exports could continue unabated.

Timber communities, workers and the small, independent forest products industry were bitterly disappointed. This agreement pulled the threadbare rug out from under them. Why? The "solution", artfully engineered by the corporate interests, shifted the entire burden of protecting forests and saving the spotted owl to public lands. While the corporately held lands were left free to be exploited, public lands were locked up. The harvests from public lands, which the small towns and small mills depended on, plummeted. Job loss accelerated. Local economies fell into even steeper declines. In my view, the environmentalists literally saved the trees and lost the forest.

Ten years later, the spotted owl is more endangered. All old growth timber exists almost exclusively in the public domain. The private "working" forests are becoming less and less natural as monoculture intensifies, the favored hybrid Douglas Fir has become even more over-bred, and the trees are planted in rows. On the urban fringe, much of the forest has been lost to panic cutting and conversion of forest land to other uses. Politically, once proud timber communities helped elect a corporate clone to replace a progressive State Lands Commissioner. Key initiatives for the sustainable management of state lands have been trashed.

The tragedy is that a better solution was possible. In fact, it was proposed by two leading progressives - Representatives Jolene Unsoeld and Peter DeFazio. They were pilloried at the time by both the big corporations and the big environmental organizations.

Unseold and DeFazio would have divided federal land into three distinct areas conforming to their physical attributes. First, the old growth forest. That would have remained off-limits. Then there were the industrial forestlands that had been in monoculture and had been cut over several times. No old growth trees are left. This would have remained open to immediate, transitional harvest. Third, there was the largest area of public lands. That was transitional forestland. It had been logged, but it hadn't been subjected to the industrial regimen to the extent where it couldn't be restored to sustainability. This land would have been placed under new, sustainable management practices designed to maintain natural forest values and continuous yields. This land would have rested while the second area was harvested. Over time, harvests from the third area would replace those from the second. The second area would have been intensively restored. In the end, we could have gotten healthy communities and a healthy, natural working forest.

This solution would have allowed sustainable logging on this transitional land. And logging practices on privately-held land, including the land held by the `Bigs', would have continued to be regulated.

Noemie
Land that had been largely granted to them through a government subsidy or give-away.

Don Hopps
Right. We lost a real opportunity here. This proposal would have put us on the road to accomplishing the most important environmental gain, to achieving sustainable forestry practices on both public and private land - to phasing out clear-cutting and the worst monoculture practices altogether and phasing in the practice of selective logging. By instituting sustainable practices on large areas of public land, it would have proven that these practices yield as much lumber and profit as clear-cutting. It would have disproved the myth that the Douglas fir is the only tree that's profitable for the timber industry. And the other thing is that selective logging is much more labor intensive. This proposal would have restored quality jobs.

Noemie
The practices you're describing, monoculture, clear-cutting, the use of less labor and cheaper labor - all bring to mind a post that Natasha Celine did recently on Pacific Views called In Praise of Inefficiency, where she shows how the purportedly efficient practices of industrial farming actually lead to long term loss of productivity, harming the farmers - and leading possibly even to economic and ecosystem collapse. In other words, short-term efficiency leads to long-term inefficiency.

What was the effect of the loss of all those independent timber companies, all those companies going out of business. Was there a large impact on what kind of economy we have in Washington?

Don Hopps
Besides the devastating effect on communities and individual people?

This is where communities lack a sense of history. The high point for the economy in Washington State - in the United States - was 1974. We had the highest wages, the greatest distribution of income, the most reasonable distribution of wealth. We were taking steps to reduce poverty. Since that time, there has been a radical redistribution of wealth to the upper levels of the pyramid. The decline of the timber industry started when they introduced more and more technology. More and more was done mechanically. On the forest scale, the industrial forest became further and further removed from what the natural forest looks like and grows like. First, it's become a monoculture - all Douglass Fir. Second there's the clear-cutting - wiping out all of the growth in an area so that we'll have uniformity of size and harvest. But that's not good enough. We're going to plant them in rows. And we're going to plant hybrids, we're going to create the fastest growing trees possible that will reach their maturity at a uniform time as fast as possible. Natural Douglass firs mature in a 125-135 years. Weyerhauser has reduced that down to 18 or 20 years.

Noemie
What does that do to the soil?

Don Hopps
(Makes a slurping sound and moves his hands upward). It makes for weaker lumber, too. The water content for these trees is much greater. The grain becomes more porous. If you compare old growth lumber to Weyerhauser lumber you'll immediately see that the grain on the old growth is wonderful. It's tight. It's not uniform. It has wonderful strength. The wood is straight and has only a few knots. The Weyehauser lumber is, by comparison, knotty and weak. It warps easily.

Noemie
It sounds to me like disposable lumber. But that's ok, because the houses they build with that lumber now are disposable - like everything else. I spoke with someone who buys old houses and restores them and sells them for a profit. He says he won't buy houses that were built after a certain year, because they start deteriorating so quickly. We're living in a world where lumber and labor and houses are all disposable.

Don Hopps
The big environmental organizations bought into that at the time of the timber negotiations. They were fixated. They got trapped in their own myth, an image of the very last old growth tree crashing down some slope in the Pacific Northwest.

Noemie
Did it help the spotted owl?

Don Hopps
Apparently, according to the latest studies it did not. More habitat is preserved. But much of it is in protected islands that are vulnerable to a predator, the grey barred owl. The grey barred owl is a bigger and more effective predator than the spotted owl. It's like an English Squirrel instead of a chipmunk.

Noemie
I like squirrels... they're cute. They eat garbage and turn it into beautiful acrobatics.

Don Hopps
Do you know how they came to the United States - and all over the world.

Noemie
Wasn't there some Shakespeare enthusiast who made a point of exporting all the animals mentioned in his works to the United States?

Don Hopps
Something like that. The grey squirrel is not native to the United States. It was introduced purposefully and has taken over the habitat of native animals. It's another case of - rather than maintaining a local thing, we went for universalizing. The English Garden is wonderful in England. But now we have it all over the world. But enough about that. When you get me on English invaders, my ethnic biases begin to show.

Noemie
The Institute is working on several local projects that involve community-based approaches. With the Yakima dairy waste project, you're producing liquid and compressed natural gas from the methane from manure conversion.

Don Hopps
The model we're operating on with the Yakima project is to maximize profits for the farmers while maintaining local benefits in ways that are synergistic.

When you're manufacturing ethanol, the second greatest cost goes to the electricity for running the machines. You need to generate heat to cook grain and to preserve the spent grain that's left over after you remove the ethanol. Our idea is to co-locate the electrical generation from manure conversion with the operations for ethanol production. So you dispose of the manure in ways that meets environmental standards and you provide electricity to lower the cost and energy use involved in ethanol production.

Note: Washington's recent renewable fuels standard, which just recently became law, will require a huge step-up in ethanol production in Washington State. This production is not yet as economically viable as that of current fuels. IWF's project may provide one of the keys to making this production profitable by lowering its electricity costs

Once the grain is cooked, the alcohol is cooked off, you're left with a mash, which is grain and water. It's called distilled grain or spent grain. You can make feed for animals out of it.

These projects are dependent on local connections. That's what makes them profitable - not centralization, but dispersion and synergies.

Noemie
There is a project going on with Sustainable Seattle now on the local multiplier effect in our food economy. It's looking at the economic benefit that comes from expanding local market links and relationships - keeping the profits in circulation in the local economy long enough that we truly realize the value of our resources and labor. Viki Sonntag, the economist on that study has agreed to write a piece for the Back to the Roots program.

Don Hopps
Our present concentration and centralization isn't really in order to make production easier or more efficient. Production can be done on a local level very effectively - more efficiently than centralization allows, really.

The reason for our current centralization is that it allows the concentration of capital. Resource extraction is perfect for this. You move into an area and extract the value from it. You substitute machines for labor and standardize practices not because it makes production more efficient - but because it magnifies the value of your capital. The terrible inefficiency is compensated for by low wages, free use of all things natural, and high-volume production which creates market dominance. These are extremely exploitive practices.

The bigness has reached its next level. Money is an abstraction of capital. It concentrates and mobilizes the means of defining value and transferring value. The value of the corporation is not what it's producing, but its ability to concentrate and mobilize capital. It can be anywhere in the world in a second; anywhere labor is momentarily cheaper to buy or a dictator is selling a natural resource for a song.

Noemie
Are you saying that the focus of our economy has shifted from creating goods and services that are useful - to servicing the needs of capital and capitalists?

Don Hopps
Farming is a concrete example.

Ag-business works on farms that are thousands of acres in an industrial style. It eliminates most human labor and substitutes machinery. But it hasn't changed the basic dynamics. We're not producing more effectively. In fact, an individual farmer produces more per acre on 10 acres than industrial agriculture produces on 1,000 acres. The individual producer is more effective on this level. But Ag-business can afford to make less an acre because it has many more acres.

You throw money at your operations. Marketing becomes more and more central to what you do. You expand access to more and more markets. Big markets need big producers and the small guys are driven out. You take your capital and go to Mexico or New Zealand or to China. You hire producers to produce food. You hire people to transport. You have enough money to organize a global venture where you seek the best deal wherever it is. You go to places where the environmental and labor regulations are the most favorable to you. You can aggregate and disaggregate human resources on a global scale. It's not efficient, but it is fiendishly effective.

Noemie
I'm thinking of an interview I did with Ali Salaam last year. He's a Seattle Imam, who relates this separation of people from the meanings and consequences of their work to the continual state of war we find ourselves in.

Don Hopps
Yes.

Noemie
Here on the Washington State level - what do you see that can be done that can help reverse the excesses of this centralization, bring it back more to the human scale? Do you see the way that we build our new infrastructure for the alternative energy industry - for example the kinds of projects that the Institute is doing with the Yakima Manure conversion - do you see this having an effect on a larger level, creating models or tools for moving into a more reasonable way of life?

Don Hopps
Invention and creativity begin with the human person. Stimulation of solutions takes place on the human level. I like the scale of the state. It's big enough so that what you create here makes a difference. You can develop more generally applicable models. It's small enough too for human community, for face-to-face interactions to have more meaning and continuity. History and necessity are the mothers of invention. If we're talking about the scope for the invention and change that we need, why not talk about what we can do in Washington.

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