to save the WHOOPING CRANE, you need two WINGS

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Peter Warshall

Down in the trenches of local politics, labels lose their meaning and odd bedfellows arise

I entered political office in a town of 3,500, soon after the 1971 oil spill that devastated beaches and wildlife north of San Francisco Bay. Serendipitously, it was a time when the town had been discovered by a younger, more adventurous constituency that, for better and worse, was politically naive, and unsophisticated on many subjects--such as how to bridge the gap with many old-time residents.

The town couldn't help but notice that it was releasing raw sewage into Bolinas Lagoon and Bay, and that polluted waters were not just the fault of a tipsy oil-tanker captain steering in the fog. Many of the old-timers had spent years trying to resolve the sewage problem, and had, as was customary at the time, given the responsibility over to a large engineering consultant firm more interested in its own profits than in appropriate solutions. President Nixon had just signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required a document called an "Environmental Impact Statement" that no one had previously heard of or written. Local, state, regional, and national policies were in flux, allowing for experimentation and surprises that caught the engineering firms and entrenched bureaucracy off-guard.

The point is that "left" and "right" had little meaning to this local politics. There were, as usual, those who wanted to connect everything they liked to everything else they liked, so that a sewage controversy became somehow associated with the Symbionese Liberation Army. But as an elected official, you learn to avoid clustering too many projects under one set of ideals or ideology. My cauldron for melding constituencies was "environmental health" (although the phrase did not exist at the time); and voters trusted that my love of water and non-human phenomena (birds and the ocean) would dictate my decisions. Oddly, this freed me from too tight an association with any one lobbying group. Water and watersheds, as taught by Lao Tse and John Wesley Powell, became my framework. Viewing the human dilemma "sideways," through waterflows, still seems to generate a more transcendent and inclusive politics.

Voters who watched the 1971 oil spill--surfers and fisherfolk, middle-class professionals who walked the beach, artists, poets, local biologists and naturalists, "self-sufficiency" advocates, concerned moms, and old-timers who were more at ease with change--grew into a tight voting block. But equally important was the initiation of a "shadow government," a citizen future-studies group who acted as the leadership (though still out of power), and kept the votership informed about problems and alternatives. It was this volunteer group that eventually took over the town administration and persuaded the town to vote for bonds to build a total-recycling (zero-discharge) sewage system. It became the centerpiece of a greenbelt and bird sanctuary that (with a host of other activities) would frame many town land-use decisions for a quarter century. I was part of this group.

"Shadow governments," a kind of limbo between virtual politics and realpolitik, are important first steps, for the everyday citizen, into the mire of constituency politics. They remain (under many names) more important than contacting media or policy wonking. As part of the shadow government, I started talking to skeptical surfers (about 5 percent of the voting block) who quickly taught me to drop what I'd recently been rewarded for in the Ivy League: big and fancy words. Phrasing, simple statements, humor, and a charismatic heart--the essential theater connecting populist politics to power--can only be learned by being tried.

The irrelevance of left or right, conservative or progressive, became even more apparent when the town divided over moving the schoolhouse. Were you "leftist" if you wanted to preserve the historic site and its buildings? Were you "rightist" if you felt that new buildings in a new location were part and parcel of raising educational skills? Ultimately, I decided to vote to keep the school in place because of personal feelings--about traffic on the winding road to the proposed new school location, and my naturalist bent that liked the old school near the town's only perennial stream. Perhaps I intuited that the move was a first step toward gentrification and the exclusion of the less wealthy. I conservatively favored small tax burdens, and the school move required a questionable bond issue. The skills required of an elected official sometimes include the ability NOT to state your thoughts or reasons. Citizen emotions are too deep and their rationales unclear. Keep quiet, vote, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Navigational skills can lead to rueful ironies. During my sojourn, Gov. Ronald Reagan vetoed plans to construct a dam on the Eel River. He said it was an unfair expropriation of private (ranchers') property. He "saved" the Eel even after the legislature had voted for funding. Later, Gov. Jerry Brogan lost his fight to stop the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River, in part because he focused the controversy on environmental damages and frightened the California ag-biz forces, who turned the dam into a symbolic win-or-lose proposition. One river saved by a property-rights advocate; another lost by an environmental sympathizer. The overriding force: navigational skills among constituencies. There are longer-term ironies: FDR's "leftist" public funding of dams on the Columbia River ("your power will bring our darkness to dawn"), for instance, had devastating impacts on fishermen and salmon a half century later. How "progressive" was his advocacy? During my tenure in elected politics, Richard Nixon signed more pro-environmental laws than any Democrat who followed him. There is really no interesting writing on how political ironies can be anticipated, or what is the most effective strategic voting in a democracy. None of my friends would ever have voted for Ronald Reagan in order to save the Eel River!