From Oregon on a Slightly Less Green Leaf Sorry. We don't use nature poetry. Ours is an urban society. —Eastern editor, 1959 May we see some more of your ecology poems? —same editor, 1975 I'm still here, barefoot and lank-haired, at the rocky edge of the same ocean studded with arches, caverns and stacks. My song is about what it was. Thorny. Low-key as wild blackberry vines circling old logging spars on the burns. Inland, the same native rockroses hug their volcanic ground under high desert sky. At night you can still breathe in the stars. But you had a point. We lobby and legislate, preserve dunes, purify rivers, save rain forests, religiously lug back the beer bottles. At that, pollution now hangs over snowcaps. Dams and ladders threaten our salmon. Freeways kill neighborhoods. Towns choke on themselves. -Vi Gale The City That Might Have Been As E. Kimbark MacColl travels around Portland he sees the city not just as it looks to us today, but also as it looked to people who were here in 1940 and 1915 and 1890. As author of two excellent local histories, The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1885 to 1915 and The Growth of a City; Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1915 to 1950, MacColl has a unique perspective on land use planning (or the lack of it) in our city's past. He shared the following thoughts in an interview with Richard Plagge. Results of... laissez-faire are still all around us. . . . The city had a hell of a time when it wanted to put the municipal docks in, because the railroads had accumulated control of a good portion of both sides of the river. Southern Pacific fought the city for years in getting off what is now Bar- bur Boulevard. They used to run steam engines right through the center of town. Up to the 1920s, or even the '30s, a company could locate just about anywhere it wished and hell be damned what anyone thought about it. Sullivan's Gulch (site of 1-84) is a good example. It would have made a natural residential area, adjacent to Laurelhurst. But the Oregon Railroad Navigation Company ran a track through it back in 1880. Over the years, several companies located along this railroad until, by World War I, the gulch contained an enormous conglomeration of large factory operations. There was no public policy to limit the growth of these companies, no zoning at all. Finally, you end up with the present situation: a swath of heavy industrial operations 30 * running through a residential neighborhood ... an incompatible mix. Land-use is basic to everything we're talking about. Our society can't exist much longer with land ownership maintaining its sacred quality, where you can do anything you want with your land provided you don't literally bring death and destruction to your neighbor. Obligation to the public is going to have to accompany the purchase of land. We've gotten away with this kind of development over the' years because there was always more land, always more energy—we could somehow waste and still get away with it (at tremendous social cost, of course). But the noose is starting to tighten. We simply won't be able to afford this lack of planning much longer.
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