Power

Where it comes from, and where it's going.

Those who have followed The Owl Project know that we often focus on American liminal places. Sometimes this is geographic, such as in the case of southern Illinois – wedged smack dab between what many think of as here and there. Just enough in the middle of it all to be often overlooked. But mostly we explore parts of our country or groups of people who are in some state of transition – political, cultural, economic, or demographic. 

Transition is a word I seem to hear and read more often these days, for any number of reasons. The clean energy transition. Gender transition. A gentrifying neighborhood is one that is “in transition”. I suppose it is the word we have chosen to use for things that are changing. Or maybe they’re correcting, or adjusting, or revealing something. 

As we know, change tends to spook people. So I guess we call it a transition. There is something active about the term, or perhaps something incomplete. It signals things yet to come, an ongoing journey from one state of being to another – hopefully for the better, at least in some cases.

But transitions of all kinds tend to be controversial. Some want to hurry the transition along, while others might seek to slow it down or stop it from happening altogether. Others might take a stand by ignoring the road ahead and pretending that the changes don’t exist at all.

With things on the move, the question inevitably arises – how can we make sure that no one is left behind? Whose responsibility is it to steer the ship? Who will step in if we move too fast, or too slow, or don’t account for some unintended consequence? 

Southwest Washington has had us thinking and talking quite a bit about transitions. 

Speaking of in between places, shortly after departing Skamokawa Valley, and grabbing a bite to eat in Cathlamet (see Tim’s earlier post) we found ourselves in the middle of the Columbia River on Puget Island. With less than a thousand residents, the island is connected to Wahkiakum County by the Julia Butler Hansen Bridge, which owes its name to the late Congresswoman from WA-03 who called Cathlamet home until her death in 1988. 

For just $6, a car ferry is available from the southern side of Puget Island across the remaining section of the Columbia, dropping cars, trucks, and tractors in Westport, Oregon. The ferry trip takes about 12 minutes, and the boat leaves every hour, on the hour. Our 11:15 AM arrival to the dock meant we had some time to kill. 

Our readers know that we travel in order to listen. But for the purposes of The Owl Project, listening can take many forms. 

Sure, it's in the dozens of conversations that we have with bartenders, baristas, barbers, and anyone who happens to cross our path or pull up a chair next to us. But it's also in what we see advertised on highway billboards. It's the products we see on display in the window of the general store. It’s the arrangements on offer at the flower shop – do people have reason to celebrate? Mourn? 

It’s what we hear on local talk radio, and overhear on local public transit. It’s lawn signs, and t-shirt slogans, and bumper stickers, and graffiti carved into the bathroom wall. 

One of my favorite ways to listen is by way of the local newspaper, in the case that one still exists in whatever corner of the world we happen to find ourselves. 

On this particular morning, that corner of the world feels pretty close to the edge of it – on a concrete dock on Puget Island just feet from the frothing water of the mighty Columbia and just a few miles up river from the steep cliffs and treacherously surging Pacific Ocean that Lewis and Clark arrived to when they reached the end of their legendary expedition. 

So you can surely imagine my surprise and delight when standing alone on that dock we were faced with not one but two options for local news. 

Traveling on a budget means I reached for the free option, the Columbia River Reader.  

As we awaited our river crossing, Tim and I drove laps around Puget Island while the wind whipped our windows and a “wintry mix” (as the meteorologists call it) gave our wipers a workout. As we wound our way past houseboats that are more than a few decades past their prime, open fields full of grazing livestock, and the quaint white steeple of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church,  I sat in the passenger seat and began to dig in.     

Celebrating the centennial of the nearby town of Longview, Washington, the Columbia River Reader is publishing a 12-part expansion of its “People+Place” monthly feature to highlight changes in ways of life along the lower Columbia. 

The edition I happened upon is Chapter 8 – Darkness and Light. 

Journalist Hal Calbom neatly lays out the hundred year history of hydroelectric power and its impact on the economy of southwest Washington. He reflects from the jump on the fact that this has always been a story of “extraction” – a region’s journey to find the balance between the exploitation of a powerful wilderness rich with resources, and the preservation of an iconic ecosystem and sustainable, independent way of life.  

Calbom writes of the initial hydroelectric boom of the 1930’s:  

“Everywhere water pooled, or flowed downhill, seemed to stimulate an imaginative means of transport or storage. With logs plentiful, the woodsmen threw up hundreds of trestles, sluices and makeshift dams on the creeks and rivers of the southwest country. Then, like wild woodland cowboys they rode, bucked, corralled, poked and prodded – and even dynamited when necessary – their way downstream. 

The ability of their abundant water to create power, first through water wheels or heated to power steam engines, was never lost on the pioneers. Nor was the politicalization of power, whose generation and distribution was mainly in the hands of private parties and monopolies. 

Here the contradictory character of the Pacific North-westerner emerged dramatically: disenchanted by an ineffectual government and a prolonged depression, people began to call for collective action. But collective action required planning, administration, and regulation, and that’s what “governments” did. And in the politically charged 1930’s, “government” threatened that dread disease – socialism.

This conflict – individual liberty versus collective accountability, personal freedom versus organized action – raged around the world in the years before World War II. But especially for those in the brand new Northwest – so many of whom had come to escape constraints and breathe free air – the paradox of having it both ways would be stamped on their character forever.” 

Much of Calbom’s description of the post-depression sentiment in Washington feels as relevant as ever today.

Calbom goes on to describe the process by which voters ventured into the public power movement with the creation of a Public Utility District (PUD) in 1936. A “socialist” concept, Calbom writes that the Cowlitz County PUD flipped the dynamics of the local energy industry on its head – “rather than loosing wolves in sheep’s clothing, speculation run amok, it offered the tools of capitalism in the service of the public good. Roles were reversed: The sheep donned the wolves’ clothing and got down to business.”

It was the people seizing “power” in more ways than one. 

The timing was ideal for the creation of the PUD, as the first federally funded hydroelectric dam (Bonneville) had recently come online, and that harnessing of the Columbia River allowed for the PUD to offer the cheapest power in the United States. The structure of the PUD, however, also allowed them to sweeten the deal even further for local residents – the Cowlitz PUD cut rates twice in their first year of operation. The industry was off and running, and it would grow and thrive for the better part of the 20th century.

Today, almost nine decades later, the hydroelectric economy of southwestern Washington finds itself – yes – in a state of transition. 

Many of the industries that have put food on the tables of Washington families for generations are facing intense scrutiny and increased regulation in the wake of newfound evidence regarding the price that we pay for extraction. Whether it's mining, logging, or fishing, we know now that the costs of looting and manipulating our land and water are greater than we could have ever imagined. This problem is not unique to Washington, of course. A few coal miners in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky would also like a word with the powers that be about economic whiplash. The folks out on the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma are on the edge of their proverbial seats as well.

The hydroelectric dams along Washington’s major rivers represent a mixed bag of economic and environmental impact. Originally considered by many to be the first “clean” power, research conducted in recent decades has begun to quantify the massive damage that dams have caused to nearby communities as well as to river ecosystems and surrounding wildlife that relies on the river. We also now know that hydroelectric reservoirs produce massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, 80% of which are the potent and harmful methane gas.

To make a long story short, it seems that the dominant hydroelectric industry in Washington State is hurdling toward a much more abrupt demise than many observers would have ever predicted.

Politicians in the state, including the clean energy championing Governor Jay Inslee, are currently grappling with how to replace the benefits provided by the dams before eventually moving to remove them altogether. The prospect of their removal has been celebrated by many stakeholders including environmentalists and climate activists as well as the tribal leadership of the Yakima Nation, who hope for the return of the rivers to a more natural state in order to allow for significant improvements to the salmon runs. Opposing the transition, however, are barge companies, farmers, and other heavy-hitting corporations who use the reservoirs to move goods throughout the region. Not to mention those whose families have been employed by the dams and the corresponding plants for generations.

So, what to do?

The same tensions that Calbom lays out as having shaped the identity of early North-westerners is at the heart of much of what we have been hearing from folks on the road — individual liberty versus collective accountability, personal freedom versus organized action.

It seems to me that government will in fact need to play a leading role once again.

Blaine Harden writes in his 1998 book A River Lost the following:

“Simultaneously dependent upon and contemptuous of the federal government, their creed, as historian Bernard DeVoto once described it, was ‘Get out and give us more money.’ Applying a brand of logic peculiar to the government-planned, government-run, and government-financed damming of the Columbia as an affirmation of our rugged individualism. We incorporated the harnessed river into our mythic West.”

Harden goes on: 

“Odd as it may seem growing up in a place that owed its very existence to federal money, I cannot recall anyone ever saying anything good about the government.”

Economic populism and anti-monopolistic rhetoric have proven a formidable political force in recent years, across party lines. As Joe Biden said in his recent State of the Union, “Americans are tired of being played for suckers.”

I think the President is right.

Here in Washington, much of this centers on the concept of power – electrical power, political power, economic power, collective power and individual power. As Scott wrote about earlier this week, the power to turn what is promised into what is possible. 

If the formation of the PUD represented a seizing of power by working Washingtonians back in 1936, what opportunities do the people have to seize power today?

Perhaps it starts with things like Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez’s pushback against corporate control in rural communities by way of her right-to-repair legislation.

In some form, it probably entails that bit about “get out and give us more money”.

In both conversations and in store windows around Washington’s 3rd congressional district, we have picked up various signs of those who hope to blunt the impacts of the ongoing economic transition.

Whether folks like it or not, however, it seems that things are changing.

Rhetorical devices and rivers are a pairing that is probably a bit overdone, so I’ll spare you any poetry about stepping in the same one twice. Nonetheless, I can’t help but be struck by the irony of it all as Tim and I drive in circles on a small patch of land in the middle of the rushing water. Our ferry ride pushed off at noon on the dot and we were soon safely to the other side, cruising down the Columbia River Highway in Oregon.

As for those loggers, fishermen, and utility workers we briefly left behind back in Washington? Well, as Chief Brody would say:

“You’re going to need a bigger boat.”

More to come from the Evergreen State.

For those of you who made it this far, thanks for following along.

Have thoughts, ideas, or questions? Leave a comment or reach out to me directly at: warner@libertysquaregroup.com