Seeing Green
Keeping it simple isn't so simple
Alan Durning and his family, who use the Burley bike trailer instead of a car for as many daily tasks as they can. It's as an experiment in choosing to live without a car, with results they hope to share with others. From left: son Peter, wife Amy, son Gary and daughter Kathryn.
****************************************
WHEN ALAN Durning's son, Gary, totaled their ancient Volvo last February and the insurance company sent a munificent replacement check for $594, his family made a decision that would land them on national TV: They would go for a year without a car.
CNN's Anderson Cooper featured it partly as a protest against gas prices (it really wasn't), and the camera crew followed Alan and his wife in a mammoth van, creeping at 3 miles an hour as they walked — walked! — the eight blocks from their Ballard bungalow to the neighborhood's business district.
Their decision sounded so outlandish that Fox Network's "Trading Spouses" offered them $50,000 if Durning would wife-swap for a few days on TV, presumably with a materialistic Hummer-hugger. The family turned them down after concluding the other spouse would be so nutty it would likely amount to "televised child abuse."
The Seattle Weekly's Knute Berger praised the experiment but charged that the Durnings were "mooching" by accepting rides from friends. Times columnist Danny Westneat noted that Durning was being portrayed by the media as a "carless freak." The environmentalist's blog on his experiment, at www.sightline.org/carless, has drawn a steady stream of comment and debate.
It couldn't happen to a more boring guy.
Which makes Durning, his wife, Amy, and their three children — Gary, 19, Kathryn, 13, and Peter, 12 — so interesting. They're a typical middle-class Seattle family trying to live the values their dad promotes as founder and director of a downtown environmental think tank called Sightline, but in a way we other boring people could emulate.
They don't live in a yurt, march in Birkenstocks or subsist on tofu. Alan has a respectable professional salary. Kathryn's father makes a living as an environmental thinker, and her grandparents were prominent environmentalists, but she, for one, doesn't like camping. "It's dirty."
They go to soccer practice (and buy players Slurpees), rent DVDs, bribed Kathryn and Peter with cell phones to go along with the carless experiment, and give each other presents at Christmas.
Just not so many. Amy recalled that it was a little awkward when, after agreeing with relatives to "try to de-escalate the arms race of holiday gift-giving," they gave candied nuts — and got back a breadmaker. Who knew to take their pledge seriously?
In his writing and speaking, Durning has been humorously candid about the pros and cons of using mass transit, Flexcar (membership car sharing, see www.flexcar.com) and his feet. There was that time a ride didn't materialize, and the soggy family took shelter from the rain in a closed post office, sitting on stacks of newspapers while a neighborhood woman kept inquiring if they were all right.
It's timely to discuss the Durnings because Christmas, after all, celebrates the birth of the ultimate anti-materialist, a man who chased money-changers out of the temple and urged his followers to give to the poor and stop being a slave to wealth.
We all know what happened to him.
So Durning, who's 42 and a Seattle native, prefers to persuade rather than preach. Gentle, self-effacing, wry and dressed like the downtown-office-dad that he is, he proposes realistic social and governmental reforms that could make experiments like his common some day. What keeps him down-to-earth (pun intended) are his three kids.
Gary, who is working before college and living with friends, wants his own car. What 19-year-old wouldn't? Kathryn and Peter have more mixed feelings, given the celebrity that carlessness has granted. "They say, 'You don't have a car? Poor baby,' " Kathryn mimicked.
Amy, a substitute teacher who also teaches self-defense to women and children, good-humoredly figures these experiments are part of the package of marrying Alan.
Unlike some busy American clans, their family regularly dines together, plays games together, bicycles together. Each parent has lost 10 pounds since giving up a car, and the family saves $200 to $300 a month.
One of the biggest issues has been the social stigma of not participating in the endless carpooling to kid activities, a problem solved with Flexcar.
Their modest but pleasant 1920s Ballard home, with a total of 1,800 square feet including finished attic and basement, was remodeled to high-energy standards. Recycled wood and doors were used. The Durnings chose to buy in Ballard because the neighborhood was walkable.
"I like the size of this house because it's cozy but still spacious enough," judged Peter.
But his father is the first to point out the experiment would be far more difficult in a less urbanized neighborhood. "Developers have to put in roads but don't always have to put in sidewalks," Durning said. "It ought to be the other way around."
ENVIRONMENTALISM IN the 1960s and '70s went from protest to legislation to regulation, and achieved astonishing successes. Then came the 1980s anti-regulatory backlash that has gradually emasculated federal environmental leadership. No one is immune from this hostility, and Durning's think tank recently changed its name from Northwest Environment Watch to Sightline to reassure that its information is nonpolitical, that both liberals and conservatives can be green.
The retreat of environmental activism in the Other Washington has pushed greenies in this one to increasingly concentrate on local pragmatism. They've moved beyond mere doom-and-gloom prophecy to run quiet campaigns that acquire land, encourage individual stewardship and promote green economic incentives.
The Seattle area has long been a center of the "voluntary simplicity" movement and individual action. Local writers and thinkers include Cecile Andrews, John de Graaf, Vicki Robin and the staff of Bainbridge Island's "Yes!" magazine.
Sightline's focus is supportive, but despite Durning's personal experiment it concentrates more on changing the system than on reforming the individual. The group promotes eco-friendly incentives and tax breaks, green technology and dense, urban condo living. Its research on the hard statistics of health, wealth and happiness has led its staff to point to advanced societies in Western Europe and Japan as examples we can learn from.
Durning is the son of prominent former environmental attorney Marvin Durning, who ran unsuccessfully for governor and Congress, and Jean Durning, former Northwest representative of the Wilderness Society when it played a key role in preserving old-growth forests.
"Alan was always independent and stubborn," his father recalled. "And he said since he was little that he wanted to be a writer and tell people how to live better in this world." Durning's books include "This Place on Earth," "The Car and the City," "Green Collar Jobs" and "How Much is Enough?"
While they try to do the right thing, Durning and his staff don't believe that setting a good example is good enough. America's realities have a way of tripping up idealism. The group's research director, Clark Williams-Derry, cites examples.
"I wanted my own behavior to line up with my personal values," he said. But first came a surrender of his eight-year experiment as a vegan (a person who doesn't eat meat or animal products such as eggs, milk and cheese) after the birth of his two girls. "It's a lot easier to share food," he said.
Then there was the attempt to cut back on cross-country airplane trips by not vacationing with family on the East Coast and persuading his sister to move from San Jose to Seattle. But the grandparents are now flying west instead of Williams-Derry going east, and his sister's husband commutes frequently by air to the job he still has in the Bay Area. Net result: a 50 percent increase in family air travel.
"When you try to reduce your own consumption you can get into a cycle of despair," he said, "because the system pushes back."
So Durning and the Sightline staff of 10, sustained on $1 million a year in grants and donations, want to change our American system so doing the right thing is also the cheapest, easiest and most fun thing. Neighborhoods where it's easier to walk than drive. Roads and insurance that cost by the mile. Homes and appliances that use less energy. Healthy habits. Using bus drivers to lead platoons of kids on walks to school instead of driving them even the shortest distances.
"Sightline's job is to be the watchdog for the long-term future," Durning said: not just a two-year election term or even a 20-year planning window, but a century or more.
With its Web site, books and speeches, Sightline tries to measure Pacific Northwest progress or decay in our quality of life by comparing us to parts of the world that rank first in particular indicators, such as health or energy use.
Cascadia is their term for their region of study, stretching from southeast Alaska to Northern California. Over the past 25 years, they judge the region has overall improved, but after encouraging progress in the 1990s we've stalled since 2000. We score well in health, economy, birth rate (a low 1.81 per woman), and show improvement in sprawl as cities infill and high-rise condos increase. We are doing poorly in reducing energy use, saving wildlife and reducing the amount of pollutants so deeply embedded in the food chain that they show up in women's breast milk — another Sightline study.
They are, in a sense, the weather forecasters of the environment. Time needed for us to catch up to the best countries in the world? An estimated 44 years.
Means to get there? Persuade society's government to make systemic changes, similar to Seattle zoning changes that have encouraged high-rise condos, "urban villages," bike trails, sidewalks and mass transit.
City to emulate? Downtown Vancouver, B.C. It's dense, livable and beautiful.
WHAT SETS Sightline apart from some green groups is that the Establishment actually listens. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, city councilman Peter Steinbrueck, Whatcom County planning director Hal Hart, and the innovative Seattle architectural firm Mithun are among its fans. Its data is interesting. Its graphics are slick. And its solutions are doable. There is nothing frightening about its prescriptions.
Annabelle Jaramillo, a Benton County commissioner in Oregon, has used Sightline's books to promote sustainability programs in the area around Corvalis. "They bring information forward that political bodies don't," she said. "It's a good indicator of what's really going on in the Pacific Northwest."
"There's no one else who does what they do," said Michelle Long, director of Bellingham's business-based Sustainable Solutions. "So many think tanks are invested in defending the status quo that we need one that's progressive. And Alan lives his values. He's a very thoughtful, caring, intelligent person."
"A lot of what they do is ask, 'How do you measure success?' " said Rex Burkholder, a councilor in Portland's Metro regional government. "It's credible. It's a data-based approach with rigorous analysis. And it's not government trying to tell you what to do."
"I believe policy is necessary because our sustainability problems can't be solved by personal change alone," said John de Graff, creator of the PBS documentary "Affluenza" and promoter of a campaign to encourage Americans to get a life by taking more time off. "I appreciate that's what Sightline is trying to do."
Bill Roach, a former market developer for King County Metro, has worked closely with Sightline in promoting the idea that car insurance (which can be as expensive as gas) should be tied to mileage. "People who drive less should get a break," he argues. Durning, he said, adds a good strategic sense to such campaigns and is able to work easily with people across the political spectrum.
"Sightline gives fuel to organizations that create change," said Laura Retzler, a board member and Capitol Hill resident who tries to minimize the adverse environmental impact of her young family. But, she adds, "It's really hard to live a sustainable life."
"Alan Durning is an intelligent but noble person," she said. "He's also an optimist."
DURNING IS AN optimist, but he amends that to say, "It's the best of times, it's the worst of times." Best because so many people are doing so many personal experiments at building community and leading sustainable lives. Worst, because their government is gridlocked and pinned to mediocrity by its "legislate for the next election" status quo.
Durning was an Oberlin University philosophy major (with a companion degree in music, playing the trombone) whose writing skill landed him a job at the Washington, D.C., Worldwatch Institute. There he co-authored several of its annual reports, which tend to be gloomier than he is. He gave that up before age 30 to return to Seattle in 1993 to found his own think tank. His writing has shown up in more than 100 publications.
"We will eagerly talk to anybody," he said, "but especially those folks who are not from big cities, folks who don't consider themselves environmentalists."
He understands why his carless experiment has drawn such attention. "There are lots of layers of meaning about cars that are enmeshed in our culture," he said. "Neighbors and friends don't always know how to treat us. People assume it's a pledge of self-denial, but it's really just a decision not to buy a car and see what that's like."
Weird. Isn't going carless against the law or something?
Environmentalism is hard because the goal posts constantly shift. As one problem is addressed, new ones pop up, like dandelions. Durning's Big Five today are climate change, the crumbling of ecological systems, diminishing bonds between people as we move so frequently, a loss of faith in our society's ability to solve problems, and the widening disparity between rich and poor.
What politician dares even talk of such things, let alone solve them?
So will Durning get his father's bug and some day run for office?
Probably not. He is, at heart, a wonk: intellectual, global more than local, happy in his independence, too honest, too nice, too funny at times, and too necessary. Sightline sustains its perspective by staying aside the fray.
Read more........
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
