Reinventing myself at 70

The Raven and what came before

11 minute read

Starting on the county beat

This coming month I’m completing my 70th rotation around the sun, and as I have several times before in my life, I’m reinventing myself. So I’m taking this opportunity to get personal, tell a bit of the story of my previous reinventions and how I came to be doing The Raven.

In the late 1970s, in the second half of my twenties with a freshly minted journalism degree, I found myself working as a county beat reporter in the wilds of Eastern Washington. My intention was to do my time in the journalistic farm teams before moving on to a major metropolitan daily. I wound up covering Okanogan County for the regional daily.

The size of a small state, situated just south of the Canadian border, the county spanned from the crest of the Cascades to the foothills of the greater Rockies. For me, it was a lot like that 1990s show, Northern Exposure, in which a city boy winds up in a remote village in Alaska to encounter all sorts of unusual characters. The Okanogan had its share. Genuine mountain people, real cowboys, 1960s-70s back to the landers. I did the normal run of stories, covering town politics and forest fires, local festivals and rodeos, as well as the inevitable uproar over the school superintendent who had the janitor install gold plumbing at his house.

But another kind of story left a deep impression on me. One of my beats was the Colville Confederated Tribes. Growing up on the east coast, it was my first experience of native people. One of the stories I covered was how traditional tribal people were fighting the proposed Mt. Tolman molybdenum mine, a mountaintop removal operation that would have devastated the reservation, but was nonetheless supported by the tribal council. On the other side of the county, back to the landers were joining with farmers and ranchers to fight Early Winters, an Aspen-scaled ski resort at the north end of the Methow Valley. In the end, both struggles were successful and those projects were stopped. These stories impressed on me the possibilities for people at the grassroots to organize and win against powerful interests.

Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president. It hit me with the same impact that the election of Donald Trump later had on people. I could sense the turn to the hard right. Juxtaposed with my new insights on people power politics, and emerging dissatisfaction with the limitations of mainstream journalism, I embarked on a path of advocacy journalism combined with activism that would carry me through much of the next two decades.

The Portland experience

I found myself back in the city, living in Portland, editing and writing for the local radical rag, the Portland Alliance. Portland in the ‘80s was a rich brew, with lots of DIY – do-it-yourself – culture and activism bubbling up. Kurt Cobain later said they were inventing grunge there in the early ‘80s, and I caught a lot of the music scene. There were lots of DIY politics happening there too, and the Alliance was in the thick of it. It was essentially the house organ for the local direct action movement. The house in inner Southeast Portland from which we put out the paper was a center of the tree wars, where actions to block old growth logging operations were being organized. I wrote a lot about that struggle, and made it out to some of the frontlines.

Portland also had a vibrant anti-nuclear direct action community. In the ‘80s, affinity groups sprouted across the city to oppose the transport of nuclear weapons from their Texas assembly point to the Trident sub base on the Puget Sound. They came right through the Portland area. I will never forget covering the action when dozens sat on the tracks at the Vancouver, Washington rail yard, forcing a bomb train to halt. I covered other struggles as well, including eventually successful fights to stop a nuclear waste dump at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington and to shut down the Trojan nuclear plant. Located on an earthquake fault, it was the same design as the Fukushima reactor that melted down in the 2011 East Japan quake.

My writing and activism were not all oppositional. It was the early days of the movement for more sustainable, green cities, developing concepts for urban areas that moved away from auto dependence to walking, biking and transit, where building up rather than out was proposed as an alternative to sprawl. Today those actions commonly go under the moniker of new urbanism. Portland was a pioneer. It had one of the earliest urban climate action plans, as well as sprawl-constraining land use planning regarded as a national model. I wrote about those and other efforts for the Portland Alliance, and was part of a team that organized a community process to create a green city vision for the region. Though Portland, as all cities, still falls far short, much of that vision has become reality.

Moving into climate

By the 1980s, the world was already starting to see a succession of the hottest years ever. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen went up to Capitol Hill to testify that human-caused global warming had arrived. The climate challenge was starting to enter my writing. The great old growth forests we were trying to protect represented some of the densest carbon sinks on Earth. Cutting them down released massive amounts of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, green and sustainable cities that decreased auto use, with efficient buildings run on renewable energy, would cut back fossil fuel climate pollution.

These themes made it into a very early website which I edited called Cascadia Planet launched in December 1994. Bill Gates was to write in his book, The Road Ahead, published 11 months later, “Much of the Internet culture will seem as quaint to future users of the information highway as stories of wagon trains and pioneers on the Oregon Trail do to us today.” I like to joke I had a website on the Oregon Trail, and it was even in Oregon!

Cascadia Planet may have been one of the first websites to embody the bioregional idea of creating a sustainable society from the ground up. Even then, addressing climate and other ecological challenges from the national and global scale seemed intractable. We could begin making changes by organizing and moving in the places we live, an idea that informed my work before and since. About a year into the project, I noted another group had a similar vision, Atmosphere Alliance based in Olympia, Washington. I started to run the group’s newsletter on my site, and through that was increasingly drawn to focus on the climate challenge.

That commenced yet another reinvention. My writing up to that point had been mostly in the journalistic mode. In 1997, working with Atmosphere Alliance, I would begin a long career writing high-level research papers on climate science and solutions. One, connecting the increase of El Nino ocean warming events to climate disruption would become a Sierra Magazine article that informed then Vice President Al Gore’s 1998 press conference on the issue.

I would move to Seattle in 1998, where I still live today. Over the years since 1997, I wrote many papers on the potentials for renewable energy and on building a power grid that could handle mass amounts of variable wind and solar generation. Returning to earlier themes, I wrote about how cities could become dynamic actors in advancing clean energy, and how sustainable farming and forestry could soak large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. I did papers on related topics such as advanced ways to supply water and treat wastes with local and green infrastructure, and how we could reduce municipal wastes by cutting materials uses along the entire supply chain. I even co-authored a couple of books, Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change, and Solutionary Rail: A people-powered campaign to electrify America’s railroads and open corridors to a clean energy future.

Launching The Raven

In recent years, I circled back to some earlier themes. I meshed crafting high-level research papers with grassroots people power organizing and direct action. In 2014, I was part of the Delta 5 tripod action blocking an oil train at BNSF Everett Delta Yard, which in 2016 resulted in the first climate civil disobedience necessity defense argued in a U.S. courtroom. Then in 2019, as part of the campaign to have Chase stop its climate-destroying investments in fossil fuels – It is the largest investor among banks – I was arrested in a Seattle bank lobby.

Though my years, I have written about many solutions to our growing climate crisis and the general ecological and political crisis in which it is embedded. The ideas are out there, and I can look back and see where the many papers I have written helped make a dent. Nonetheless, while there has been progress, the climate crisis continues to worsen, and our human inhabitation of this planet is increasingly in question. We are leaving a troubled legacy to our children. All of this as political systems are frozen up by powerful interests, and in many ways are going backwards, while wars break out and the threat of global conflagration seems at its highest level ever.

It was with these thoughts that I embarked my latest reinvention, reflected in this blog you are reading. I launched The Raven in March 2021. This month marks the 1-1/2 year anniversary. I started The Raven because I believe a deeper approach is required, one which looks past the blockages of the current system to envision that other world we have said is possible. I applaud all the people who continue to do the work of mapping practical actions we can take in this system of things. But at this point in my life, I feel driven to make the deeper exploration, to look at how we can unblock those blockages and turn around the crises that face us.   

I have written about our divided politics, which many call a cold civil war, and endeavored to imagine alternatives based on the regional and bioregional ideas that have informed my writing since the 1980s, recalling seminal thinkers in this area such as Lewis Mumford and William Appleman Williams. I have explored the roots of our crisis, going back to the origins of civilization itself, such as in this series. Returning to an issue which galvanized me in the 1980s, and unfortunately is more relevant than ever, I have written about the danger of nuclear war and the need to abolish nuclear weapons. Throughout, I have looked to the potentials for people power and civil resistance to turn our crises around and bequeath on our children a habitable world. I will continue to explore these themes in The Raven and other related venues.

I supported myself writing research papers, both in nonprofit venues and independently, from 1997 to January 2021, when I closed up the last project. Now I am embarked on the challenging venture of building a base for this next reinvention.  For this, my friends, I will need your help. Some of you are paid subscribers to this web journal, and I am deeply grateful for your support. Many others have signed up to receive The Raven for free, and I am heartened by how many are coming on board. Rarely does a day go by without multiple new sign-ups. Now I am asking my free subscribers, as many of you as can and are so inclined, to take out a paid subscription. If you are already a paid subscriber, please consider going to the Flying Higher level. Also, please consider gifting subscriptions to people whom you think will benefit from what I offer here.

If you would like to make a larger donation, or if the subscription fee is a bit too steep for you and would like to make a smaller donation, I have other avenues to receive a contribution. Please write me at the email address through which you receive this journal, or at cascadia2012@gmail.com.  

I’ll be honest. My years in activism and nonprofit work have not left me much of a retirement. But I’m not a retiring sort anyway, and I will continue this work until I take my ride from this world. I’m benefitting from our limited social democracy, so I just need to fill some income gaps. I don’t need a whole lot, but I do need some. I hope you will consider supporting my work. Please hit the subscribe button below and sign up for paid, or to go to the next level of support. I thank you for whatever you can do. And in any event, I am committed to continue putting out The Raven. So paid or free, you can expect a new post from me every Friday, exploring the deeper questions of our survival, and, I hope, pointing to solutions.