by Mark Worth

The Free Press

And as much as the salmon represents the region's god-given bounty, its near-obliteration is a symbol of the Northwest's 150-year pursuit of The Good Life through the extraction of any and all natural resources there for the taking.

Congratulations, Washington liberals! While you've been peeling and sticking bumper stickers, and honking in support of each other at red lights, you've allowed the following to happen under your tulip-sniffing noses:

• Many wild salmon runs are extinct and at least 214 other runs are knocking on death's door. Only a few wild runs are considered to be in good shape.
• More than 90 percent of the region's native forests have been hacked down, and much of the resulting timber has been sent oversees raw, a process that has cost us thousands of jobs.
• Opposition to nuclear power in Washington is so weak and fragmented that a plan under serious consideration would have a WPPSS plant or two completed and weapons-grade plutonium used to generate electricity.
• Aluminum smelters and chemical plants lining the Columbia River and other waterways have been allowed to run amok, spewing some of the planet's nastiest toxic wastes into the environment.
• More than 70 dams have been built on the Columbia/Snake river system alone; no one is sure how many hundreds of dams there are statewide. We don't have to be reminded how destructive these walls of death are.

Or do we? We've been reminded of these sickening truths so often, so passionately and so thoroughly - yet the destruction has been allowed to continue.

The only conclusion I can reach is that, for the most part, Washington liberals suck.

That's right, suck. The state's reputation, particularly in Western Washington, as a pillar of environmental and political enlightenment is a crock.

Perhaps no region of the country is so arrogant about its purported progressivism and environmentalism than the Northwest (listening to some of these people, you'd think they personally planted old growth). And perhaps no other group of liberals more self-righteously criticizes other parts of the world for environmental damage while ecological destruction continues in their own neatly primped back yards.

Blessed with millions of acres of pristine forests, hundreds of roaring rivers and tremendous biological diversity, the Northwest has made a cozy home for liberals. It's been easy to brag about being an environmentalist, for example, when the thought of running out of trees to hug has never entered your mind. It's only now, with a timber crisis on our hands, that liberals are being put to the test. And many are failing.

Scads of small businesses - ergo, thousands of jobs - depend on the Northwest's timber, aluminum and fishing industries. This softens many an erstwhile liberal whose spouse works, say, for an an insurance company that would be threatened if half the state's timber mills shut down because of environmentally-driven logging cutbacks.

Many of you liberals probably have direct or distance relatives whose job is dependent - directly or indirectly - upon the timber, fish or aluminum industries. If they got laid off, what would you tell them while standing around the barbecue at the next family reunion: "Sorry you lost your job at the docks, Uncle Ted, but you had it coming."

Hardly. Folks tend to be so polite around here that personal feelings often stand in the way of political stridency. A bumper sticker rarely personally offends anyone. It's when you call an official with a logging company a "money-grubbing scumbag" to his or her face that feathers get ruffled.

What's that you say? You don't care for that aggressive brand of liberalism? Well, the way most Northwest progressives have expressed themselves up until now hasn't worked for shit. Try giving the direct approach a whirl - maybe you'll get somewhere.

Am I offending some of you? Good. Now take that anger and redirect it at someone who's in need of an attitude adjustment.

You may have realized by now that I'm not from the Northwest. Growing up in South Florida, I was mainly exposed to folks from the Northeast and Midwest. A lot of New Yorkers, a lot of people from New Jersey. If they didn't like something you were doing, you better believe you'd hear about it. So the next time you tried pulling some shit, you stopped and thought about how someone might react to it.

Popular Northwest lines like "Won't you please consider" and "Why don't you look at things this way" need to be replaced with "Look, buddy, I don't think you want to see 1,000 pissed-off people down here protesting in front of your office." Trying to nudge corporations in the right direction is a good place to start, and I'm all for positive-oriented activism. But if push comes to shove, get mad!

This works. In Mississippi and Louisiana, for example, low-income people - many of them minorities - are stopping huge chemical plants from cracking up. How? They're making the Big Guys look like the jerks they are. But they're doing it with direct action, not by sending a $25 check to some environmental ivory tower inside the Beltway.

Sure, many of these groups do great work and need financial support. But environmental rapists here in Washington won't stop the raping until they see the faces and feel the breath of angry people shaking their windows and rattling their walls. They're wondering where you are. They're laughing at your inaction.

I think we all remember that scene from "Network." No, I'm not suggesting that we all scream out of our windows, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." But I like the concept.

So let's try a sedate Northwest version of it. On Monday, April 11 at 10:30 in the morning (late enough for all of us to be awake), we're all going to call The Trillium Corp.'s President, David Syre, and tell him to stop violating the Forest Practices Act. (Our cover story this month exposes poor timber practices by Trillium and others).

Call Trillium at (206) 851-1653 and ask for the president himself. Then, next month, we'll do a story about this action. And because we send the Free Press to several hundred government officials and media people, the word will get out that the way Trillium is doing business is pissing people off.

Unless informed otherwise, people like Syre will continue to think that Beltway enviro-types are the only people who give a damn about forests and their ecosystems. Elected officials say that every phone call or letter they get represents 100 other people. The same applies for corporations. But instead of voters, corporations are (at least theoretically) accountable to consumers, who vote with their dollars. And with an uncertain economic future lying ahead, the last problem companies need is bad P.R.

The challenge to Northwest liberals to get more aggressive is nothing short of a referendum on liberalism itself. Voting is important. And I guess in their own little way even bumper stickers can do some good. But let's try picking up the phone and calling Trillium. It's only a start. But given Seattle's timid past, it's a step in the right ... er ... left direction.

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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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