Mumford to City Club: Are You Good Enough for Oregon? The time was July, 1938. The place was the Crystal Room of the Benson Hotel at the regular Friday luncheon meeting of the City Club of Portland. The speaker was Lewis Mumford, the great social thinker and conscience of the urban American landscape. Mumford had been touring the Portland region and was visibly impressed with its awesome natural setting—the bountiful trees, mountains and the Columbia Gorge. His message, characteristically probing, had that prophetic quality which becomes obvious only after a considerable span of elapsed time: 'T have seen a lot of scenery in my life, but I have seen nothing so tempting as a home for man as this Oregon country. . . . You have here a basis for civilization on its highest scale, and I am going to ask you a question which you may not like. Are you good enough to have this country in your possession? Have you got enough intelligence, imagination and cooperation among you to make the best use of these opportunities? "Rebuilding our cities will be one of the major tasks of the next generation. While people are grasping for personal gain the necessary cooperative spirit for this task cannot develop. . . .In providing for new developments you have an opportunity here to do a job of city planning like nowhere else in the world. Oregon is one of the last places in this country where natural resources are still largely intact. Are you intelligent enough to use them wisely?" Shortly after Mumford's visit to Portland the Second World War began, and following that came an era of unparalleled expansion, dominated by automobiles, freeways and parking lots. Lewis Mumford's address to the City Club was filed away for history and he was never invited back. the essence of traditional American optimism. But in the early 1970s that historic pattern began to shift, and by 1978, for the first time according to the polls, the pattern had reversed completely. Americans believed that the past was better than the present and that the future would only get worse. American optimism seems more and more to be a scarce commodity. What are the changing social circumstances that evoke such lowered expectations? One might guess that people have been reacting to prevailing conditions— inflation, unemployment—things we have been told are cyclical and which will eventually go away. Unfortunately, the evidence has been filtering in for some time that such problems are only the symptoms of larger, structural conditions in the industrial system, or even the environment at large—things that will not go away with a change of administrations in Washington, nor be fine-tuned into oblivion. Americans are not that imperceptive. Our whole way of life appears to be undergoing some kind of major shift. Economist Robert Theobald has captured some of these larger conditions in his concept of "driving forces." Put 38 simply, a driving force is a societal trend whose occurrence is extremely probable. A driving force will not likely be altered no matter how we respond to it; it can only be acknowledged, adapted to, dealt with. Several major driving forces, says Theobald, are in effect today that will have a sustained impact on the United States through the rest of the century. These include structural changes in the social system forced by past population growth, continued population migrations within the country, strong ecological pressures to mitigate the environmental impacts of industry, rapid decline of inexpensive energy and resources, and accelerated development of telecommunications and microelectronic innovations. Of all these trends, perhaps none will have as immediate an impact on the American lifestyle as the decline of inexpensive, nonrenewable energy and resources. Dr. Ian Adams, an urban geographer and longtime observer of the Portland area, has analyzed this trend in his new book. The Land of Opportunity in the Age of Limitations. During the postwar period (1945-1970), he says, American technology and capital were utilized to exploit world resources on a massive scale. In fact, more energy and minerals were consumed by Americans in those 25 years than all nations in all of history up to that time. The dominant political value during this period was what Dr. Adams calls a "politics of Yes." The political system openly promoted access to abundance for most individuals as well as large corporate interests. The result was a material standard of living unmatched by any nation on earth. That era of abundance, Adams says flatly, is now dead. The United States is being dragged into a world economic system where such driving forces as a declining resource base and accelerated population growth have intensified competition and inflated energy costs tremendously. As these impacts ripple through our economy, the American standard of living relative to other nations is beginning to decline and our predominance in world markets is eroding. A "politics of No," not unlike the austerity politics of Britain, is emerging in the American system. Initially, this may translate into the current cutbacks in federal government programs and services. Ultimately, Adams concludes, it will mean an increasing denial of access to abundance, particularly for individual taxpayers and citizens. One of the most telling fatalities of this decline in abundance will be our historic patterns of development. In the postwar era, American-style development capitalized on cheap energy, abundant land and lavish personal mobility. The automobile dominated our lives in every imaginable way. Our cities and especially our suburbs—those agglomerations of low-density dwelling units often miles from schools, stores and jobs—reflected the reality of a resource-rich society. But such development patterns were rife with hidden costs. By way of example, the small farms of the fertile Tualatin Valley, which up until World War II had been Portland's main source of food, began to disappear in the postwar era. From 1940 to 1978 total farmland in Washington County declined by 38 percent—a decrease mainly attributable to rapid suburbanization. In the emerging age of limitations, inflated land, energy and construction costs—along with interest rates—are shattering such extravagant options. In 1971, for example, 45 percent of Americans could afford to enter the new «
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