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Ecotopia
PARADISE, as it turns out, smells like bee glue. This is a very rocky river, and the worst is at the beginning, so if there's a chance of an accident, it's highest at the start [says the guide]. The boat is amazingly forgiving, but nonetheless, the river has a tendency to remind you that it's there. If we hit a rock head-on, the boat will come around, and we'll end up floating downstream, with time to recover. But if we hit it sideways, it's a little more risky. The boat doesn't handle it quite so well. What happens is that the boat rides up on the rock, and then gets pinned down by the force of the water. It happens with canoes, kayaks, rafts . . . It's a very uncomfortable position to be in. So we try to avoid that. But if we do hit sideways, jump on the tube closest to the rock. It's called highsiding. You almost do it instinctively, because the other side is going under. So leap for the far tube; everybody in the boat put their weight on it. It holds the boat down, and slowly it will come around. It does work. I will shout the command if it's necessary. It will all happen very quickly. Ha, ha, ha. Oh yes. "Highside! Highside!" everybody suddenly takes to commanding each other in slightly constricted voices. It's very early on a Sunday morning. There's a great deal of inter-est voiced in whether there's maybe not something good to read in the Sunday paper and maybe we could try this some other time. Now. If you should fall out of the boat, which is possible in this section, we'll try to get you back in right away. But whatever you do, don't get caught between the boat and a rock. If it looks like that's what's going to happen, just swim on down the river, and when we get to a quiet. place, we'll get you back on the boat. Of course, there aren't any quiet places for the next six miles, so . . . I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh. Really. We don't have many people fall out in this stretch. Just stay in the boat. If the boat itself should turn over, just stay with it. You'll all be together in the water. If you should come up under the boat, don't worry about it; there'll be an air pocket there that you can breathe. But it's very un-likely that the boat will turn over. I've only flipped a boat once or twice. In an eddy near shore, a kayaker does wrist exercises with a dou-ble-bladed paddle. This kayaker will escort us down the river like a fighter pilot accompanying a lumbering bomber. The kayaker is securely bound into the craft by a neoprene skirt attached in a theoretically watertight fashion to the boat by hooks, and to the person by a sturdy belt at the waist. Getting out of a kayak in an emergency is not the world's easiest task, because a person's au-tomatic reflex is to assume a crouched position when confronted by danger, and you can't bend your knees in a kayak; if you try, you may wedge yourself in there permanently. But as a help, the rubber shield comes equipped with a white plastic "Jesus ball." If you're in trouble, you grab the white ball, yell "Jesus!" and pull as hard as you can. The idea is that the bindings that hold you to the flimsy shell will promptly give way, leaving you to the water and the rocks unimpeded. We innocently ask the kayaker to show us a barrel roll, a basic stunt that involves turning the craft completely over and then righting it again, spending a few seconds head down underwater in the process. The kayaker drops a hand into the blue water for a moment, letting the chill slip between loose fingers. After a brief period of thought came the smiling but serious reply: "Only if you pay me." In relatively calm water some hours later, the guide will hand over command of the raft to one of the novice river-runners, who will discover that coordinating the efforts of six oarsmen with sharply barked commands is more of an intellectual achievement than he had thought. Running a river is a lot like running a pool table. A working knowledge of physics is mandatory. The main difference is that on a raft you are the cueball, and the surface on which you're rolling is itself moving. But just downstream from Paradise, no one except the guide was doing any thinking. "Left turn! Backpaddle! Forward! Forward! Lean into it! Stop!" carne the commands, and we obeyed with surprising alacrity and coordination, focusing completely on the small pieces of water against which we were pitting our backs. Miraculously, we found ourselves whizzing between boul-ders and over standing waves, the nose of the keelless craft pointed unerringly forward as the drill sergeant in the stern eyed the conditions far down the river and authoritatively positioned us for new surprises even as we huddled masses were greeting the cold shocks of the old ones. At lunchtime, on a gravelly clearing, came the first opportunity to get a really good look at the river guide and kayaker, who were so at home with the harsh forces of the river that they seemed a part of it, like the mountains and the Douglas fir and the ravens, like ancient Indians. Both of them were women. In some parts of the continent, it's not the most common thing for a man to stare at a woman's thigh with no more prurient a thought than marvel at the articulation of her muscles. But then again, in some parts, it's not altogether common to find a pair like this. Neither of them could have weighed more than 130 pounds, but they wore on their bones the mark of a vigorous life, shaped not by hours behind a desk under fluorescent lights that denied noon and dusk, summer and fall. These women blended into the Oregon landscape. They were healthy animals. It seemed a bit stupid to spend time pondering how it came to be that the difficult art of slipping into unquestionable command came so naturally to Jean Carroon, the guide. After all, this is the late twentieth century, right? Isn't this what the social revolution that flowed from the 1960s was all about? Why shouldn't she be unself-conscious about her prowess at close-order drill? No reason. Any more than an outsider should find it remarka-ble that in Northern California's Marin County, in the state whose southern half is dominated by the gasoline-consuming, nature-de-nying sprawl of Los Angeles, serious plans are advancing to trans-form a surplus Air Force base into a solar-powered city. After all, we've always said that human habitats that work with the planet, rather than against it, would have to be built sooner or later. Why should it be remarkable that in Everett, Washington, under the world's largest building - the assembly plant for the Boeing 747 jumbo jet - lunchtime can find two hundred people in the sixteen-hundred-foot-long bomb shelter. Not grimly preparing themselves for Armageddon. But jogging. Or that in the urban parks of Berkeley, California, large signs have been erected, warning residents not to drink from the creek water because it may be polluted. After all, it's not Berkeley's fault that almost everywhere else in North America it would never occur to city dwellers that pollution control may be so far advanced that the water in their parks could be clean. Or that in Homer, Alaska, at the dedication of the first broad-cast radio station whose signal could reach the town, five hundred people - a large percentage of the entire population of the lower Kenai Peninsula - showed up at,a high school gym for the festivities. And I, a child of the sixties, now in a white shirt and tie, could slowly look around and have it dawn on me that virtually everybody else but me was on the "right" side of the age-of-thirty barrier. And that I was by far the straightest-looking person there, the others being dressed in strange ways - fringe, fur, beads -that I hadn't seen en masse for a long time. Not since those corny days when the word "counterculture" was new, to be precise. Even the elected officials were of that age and dress. Yet there's no reason why this should be considered odd. For a long time, now, there have been many visionaries saying that the future would be formed by alternative ways of life. The only thing that's remarkable is to find a chunk of North America where such ideas are not only not viewed as particularly flaky, but where such a future actually is considered logical, even inevitable, and seems to be taking hold. There are some paths into the twenty-first century that are very different from the bigger-is-better, growth-is-inevitably-good, sons-of-the-pioneers philosophies that are especially well repre-sented in the MexAmerican and Empty Quarter nations of the West. What's special about the Pacific Northwest is the number of otherwise ordinary middle-class suburban homeowners, major party politicians, and even captains of industry there who seem to be prepared to walk these paths. And not consider it remark-able. The name Ecotopia for the nation of the Pacific Northwest comes from the title of a melodramatic, but nonetheless brilliant, 1975 novel by Ernest Callenbach, who edits Film Quarterly maga-zine in Berkeley. In Callenbach's book, the year is 1999, nineteen years after Northern California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the United States. The inhabitants of these states had taken their final look at the nuclear-and-foreign-oil-addicted, materialistic, wasteful, polluting, military-industrial-oriented, racist, sexist, soul-mangling direction in which North America was galloping headlong, and decided they wanted out. Through implausible nuclear blackmail, they had forced the rest of the country to allow them to secede and had set up their own inde-pendent nation, which they named Ecotopia. Taken back to its Greek roots, Ecotopia means home place, but the more obvious meaning lies in the contraction of Ecological Utopia, which, in the novel, is precisely what the Northwesterners proceed to build, after sealing off their borders to the insidious influences of the rest of the continent. In the novel, the internal combustion engine is outlawed, and the capital city, San Francisco, is broken up into a chain of mini-cities wherein creeks flow where the traffic used to choke, and potholes are planted with flowers. The shrewd female president has guided the nation into a "stable state" economy, in which wastes are recycled, small-scale technology is the only kind there is, solar power is ubiquitous, and the work week is down to twenty hours. The country is pollution- and noise-free, and an ed-ucational-social-sexual work-play ethic stresses the equal func-tions of men and women as tool-bearing animals capable of im-proving the quality of life. Violent urges are channeled into war games, and sexual promiscuity is allowed at the four annual holidays of the solstices and equinoxes. And, oh yes, from time to time people have a meaningful relationship with a tree. Utopianism is as North American as the Mormons, the social-ists of Saskatchewan, and the textile mills of Lowell, Massachu-setts. There is hardly a white person in the whole continent whose ancestors did not arrive with the firm, if starry-eyed, idea that they were going to build a better world than the one they left. Yet it would be difficult to analyze seriously an entire seg-ment of the continent from the perspective of a melodramatized tract except for two things:
But the focus could just as easily have been extended to Northern California, including the state capital, Sacramento, where such institutions as the state Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT) matter-of-factly pursue the mechanics of windmills and harnessing the steam from the mantle of the earth. Meanwhile, the state Arts Council has reorganized itself administratively into "bioregions," arguing that whether you work with nature or against it, the planet is going to influence your operations, so you may as well work with it, and not draw your political lines as if mountains and river barriers do not exist. Such ideas are so distinctly Ecotopian that Governor Jerry Brown was dismissed as "Governor Moonbeam" during his 1980 race for the presidency of the United States. In New England, he said things like "You don't hear much about holistic medicine in presidential primaries," and seasoned eastern political reporters turned to each other and said, "You know? He's right. You don't hear much about holistic medicine in presidential primaries." Yet the point that Brown was making might not have been regarded as particularly strange in the Northwest, where, once some unconventional assumptions are made, hundreds of new conclusions can be arrived at. In Ecotopia, holistic medicine can be seen as having considerable internal logic. If you've got a Social Security or Medicare system that is financially on its last legs, the argument goes, perhaps it's time to take a look at what we're spending our money on. Perhaps it's wrong to gear our medical system to the heroic treatment of biological catastrophes. Perhaps it would be better, and ultimately cheaper, to view patients as whole (hence "holistic") organisms, with complicated interrelated systems. Perhaps the thrust should be at keeping these systems well, rather than responding to them only when they're screwed up beyond belief. It's the same logic that a careful automobile owner applies when he's scrupulous about what he puts in the gas tank, how he applies a rust preventive, or when he changes the oil - that it's a lot less expensive than replacing a blown engine or a rotted quarter panel. The hitch with a holistic medical system is that it requires people to pay far more attention to what they eat than they generally do now - perhaps forcing changes in the chemical-dependent agribusiness system. It requires changes in "life style" - like banning tobacco. And it makes your head hurt to think how you would administer a holistic medical system through existing massive bureaucracies. You'd have practically no choice but to decentralize. But, then, in Ecotopia, none of those propositions is always viewed as crazy, either. The Ecotopian vision extends to southeastern coastal Alaska, the economy of which, unlike the oil regions of the far north, is based on renewable resources, like salmon- and king-crab-fishing and timber. And to western British Columbia, which is the warmest place in Canada - the only point that is normally above freezing in January. "We are a temperate island," I was told, "surrounded by a sea of envy." And even to western Washington state, although it's the home of Boeing's cruise missile and the base for the Trident submarine - two of the most devastating weapons systems ever devised. Christopher M. Little, the publisher of the Everett (Washington) Herald, tells of the culture shock he encountered when he moved to Everett from the East Coast. "They're not into recreational deviousness around here," he said. The point he was making was that office intrigue for its own sake was a foreign concept in his new Puget Sound home - a very different situation from the Washington, D.C., law practice he had been accustomed to. In fact, he could only numbly answer no to the very first question he was asked at a staff meeting, which was "Are you into mellow?" Similarly, he tells the story of his chief production man. Newspaper production types are rarely described as the greatest triumph of human evolution. Newspaper production devices - notably the presses - are big, dirty, loud, and dangerous, and the men who run them tend to respond in kind. The system is also fast, complicated, and unforgiving, so when a newspaper production manager has a bad morning, it tends to define the top end of the scale of bad mornings. This is why Little was so intrigued by how this Washington state production manager dealt with stress. Most of his kind release it volcanically. In Everett, the man, who is in his fifties, walks out the door of the building on his lunch break, picks up an apple or a hamburger at a nearby shoreside greasy spoon, and buys a round-trip ticket on that part of the highway system that is the Puget Sound ferry. He gets on the boat, absorbs the rhythm of the water, gazes at the snowcapped Olympic Mountains to the west, marvels at the clean, attractive city skyline to the east, and, at the end of the hour, he comes back to the office. Feeling like a new man. I guarantee you that this is not the way it works at the Washington Post. Ecotopia, for the purposes of this book, has boundaries somewhat different from Callenbach's, in that they are not hindered by arbitrary political boundaries, either of states or countries. The real Ecotopia, appropriately enough, follows biophysical borders more faithfully than any other nation. Mountains that snare the Pacific clouds and force them to drop their rain define this nation exactly. Ecotopia is the only place in the West that is blessed by bountiful water. The entire Chile-like thin coastal strip is lifted out of aridity by twenty inches of rain a year or more - sometimes much more: one hundred inches. In the West, where thirst is a preoccupation for over a thousand miles in any direction, Ecotopia is special, and the mountains that collect the moisture make it distinctive. As mentioned in the MexAmerica chapter, Ecotopia starts where the Tehachapi Mountains meet the Pacific at Point Conception, effectively shutting off the Los Angeles urban ooze, which some Northern Californians refer to as "slurbs." Ecotopia then hugs the ocean along the central coast of California, with its back to the Coast Range, separating it from the dry, hot, heavily irrigated, agribusiness-oriented MexAmerican San Joaquin Valley. Past the beauty of Monterey Bay, Ecotopia crosses the peninsula that encloses southern San Francisco Bay to include "Silicon Valley," the home of the semiconductor industry, which has been referred to as the basic manufacturing component of the future - the "steel of the twenty-first century." It includes the city of Oakland, which is rare in the West in being heavily black, but which has a bright future because of the supermodern containerized port facilities that have drawn most of the ocean freight. business away from the capital of Ecotopia, San Francisco. (San Francisco's first industry is tourism, but it is also a major financial center and corporate headquarters town.) It then curves around the East Bay to include Berkeley, the crown jewel of the University of California system and the ideological birthplace, in the sixties, of the counterculture. It follows the Sacramento River Delta, which empties its northern waters into the bay, past Davis and Sacramento itself, across the San Joaquin Valley to the Sierra Nevada, effectively splitting California in half. On the other side of the Sierra Nevada - Spanish for "snow mountains" - whose winter snowpack feeds the valleys to its west well into the summer, is the Empty Quarter desert of Nevada. Heading north, Ecotopia follows the mountains as they open at the Donner Pass, the crossing from the east named after the immigrant party that got trapped there in the winter of 1846-1847, ultimately surviving only by resorting to cannibalism. After passing by the bulk of the played-out gold rush fields of the famous Forty-niners, the Ecotopian border then picks up the Cascade Mountains, as the Ponderosa pine yields to Douglas fir, passing towering Mount Shasta, which looms over the California-Oregon border. Douglas fir is a stronger building material, for its weight, than is pine, and is the basis of Oregon's most important industry - timbering. One of the things that is hard to get used to about this area, for those accustomed to the rest of the West, is how often the vistas are framed and blocked by forests and mists. It can be claustrophobic. As in an eastern city dense with skyscrapers, sometimes the only view of the blue can be obtained by a person's looking straight up. This is the exact opposite of the "big sky" country across the mountains. Its endless lush variations on the color green also contrast markedly with the reds, browns, and grays of the rest of the West, and contribute to its being perceived as "God's country" - the perception that has led to a sharp rise in immigration, and, in turn, to antidevelopment politics objecting to the "Californication" of this wilderness. At the Columbia River, invariably described as "mighty," and correctly so - it's second only to the Mississippi in quantity of water carried - Ecotopia crosses the Oregon Trail, the ancient immigration route to the West, made a great deal more comfortable by the existence of Interstate 80 North. (Interstate 80 South cuts the mountains in an equally historic spot, the aforementioned Donner Pass. Of all the places to cross the mountains made available by the technology of modern road-building, the inter-state planners, interestingly, liked best the spots identified by half-wild, hulking mountainmen over 150 years ago.) In Washington, while the Cascades continue north, what's on either side of them changes. The east benefits from the dams and lakes, including the quite Grand Coulee, to the extent that the region is called the Inland Empire, despite relatively thin population. Here you can find wheat like Montana's, rather than unrelieved desert. But you can also find unreconstructed, Empty Quarter-like devotion to the Hanford nuclear works, where the fuel for the second atomic bomb, the one dropped on Nagasaki, was produced. It is now the largest complex of experimental and production reactors in the hemisphere, if not the world. So beloved by the populace are these elsewhere-controversial bummers that the politics of the place are Empty Quarter- more akin to Utah or Nevada than they are to Ecotopia. To the west, the politics and economics have been shaped by renewable resources - particularly the bargain-priced hydroelectric power from the Columbia Basin complex. There are thirty hydroelectric dams there now, and the Grand Coulee is still the largest single source of electricity in the hemisphere. Such a massive undertaking were those dams in the thirties that Woody Guthrie wrote twenty-six songs about them. Uncle Sam needs wool, Now, however, their legacy is the basic industry here - strong, light aluminum, the manufacturing of which requires inexpensive energy as its most important raw material. It takes twelve times as much power to create a pound of aluminum as it does to make a pound of iron. A good-sized aluminum plant uses as much power as a city of 175,000 people, and there are only seven cities bigger than that in all of Ecotopia. A third of the continent's aluminum comes from here. The higher, related industry is Boeing, the world's largest airplane manufacturer. It is, of course, a natural complement, being a major consumer of aluminum, but that is not the reason it is located here. William E. Boeing, the founder of the company, was from Seattle originally, and that obviously contributed. But more to the point, in pre-World War II days, Boeing benefited from being strategically located near a different strong, light aircraft-building material - spruce. A flight from San Francisco to Seattle aboard one of Boeing's products is the best way to take in the most breathtaking part of the border - the volcanoes. The most scenic at two and a half miles high is the dormant Mount Rainier. But the most awesome is Mount St. Helens, which, on May 18, 1980, vaporized undreamable millions of tons of earth and rock and a medium-sized lake, and threw the result sixty thousand feet into the atmosphere of the rest of the continent in the largest explosion of any kind in North America in recorded history. These volcanoes are the eastern edge of the Pacific "Rim of history. which extends to South Asia. The bulk of British Columbia is so vacant as to be clearly Empty Quarter, but Vancouver, the third-largest city in Canada and the West Coast exit for its grain, is on the shores of what amounts to an inland sea. The Strait of Georgia is the northern end, and Seattle's Puget Sound, the southern. That, plus its highly civilized tr your fellow man. Thus, it should be very encouraging to Ecotopians that a lot of their ideas are being used by a general contractor not simply because they're holy but because they make money. The future of any great idea is always made more bright when it's found to be profitable. Village Homes, in Davis, is sited on a sixty-nine-acre former tomato field in this college town. Its developer, Michael Corbett, has built 70 percent of the $38,000-to-$130,000 homes there, and other contractors who build in Village Homes must adhere to extensive covenants and restrictions that Corbett has established. The solar-conscious subdivision's innovations include extra-narrow and tree-shaded streets that absorb (and therefore radiate) less than the usual amount of heat, at times cutting air temperature by as much as 10 degrees. The drainage system is simple and highly unusual, in that it is essentially a series of manmade streambeds and pools. It's calculated to return more than 85 percent of the rainfall to the local water table, compared with the 40 to so percent return rate of standard and more expensive underground systems. Energy conservation is encouraged by the simple expedient of building carports that are too small for a gas guzzler. "Wasted" front lawns are all but eliminated by building the houses only fifteen feet from the street. Backyards, on the other hand, are large and contiguous with commonly held land so that neighbors must garden together or hire a gardener, and most people prefer to get to know each other. Some of these areas have flowered in row crops, vineyards, white clover, and small orchards. A corporation controlled by a homeowners' association is developing a small commercial center and building some apartment units, and a community center featuring a pool and a clubhouse is also run by homeowners. "I knew there was a homeowners' association, and that's all I knew," Joyce Vermeersch, a nutritionist, told the Los Angeles Times. "Then I began to sense I wasn't just buying a house, I was buying a way of life," and she started to get very nervous about all this enforced neighborliness, cooperation, and self-reliance. She complained to the developer, who offered to return her deposit, but while she considered the offer, Vermeersch looked at "every house for sale in Davis in my price range," and the result was that she stayed in Village Homes. "As the economic situation gets worse," said one UCLA analyst, "I suspect this kind of living will become more and more attractive to people in the so-called mainstream. Village Homes strikes me as the kind of place that might be more difficult to accept were it not for the economic squeeze." In a doctoral thesis, Janice Graham Hamrin determined that Village homeowners tend to be "young professionals, well educated (often with graduate degrees), earning a moderate income, white, single or newly married, and active in a variety of leisure time activities, especially sports activities of some type," and that they tend "to consider themselves to be politically liberal, independent thinkers, artistic, to value self-sufficiency, and to believe they [can] influence what happens in the world around them." That is, they're dreaming upper-middle-class Anglo dreams. Of course, one shouldn't sneeze at upper-middle-class Anglo dreams, because they are the ones that are in cultural control in a lot of the continent. And Ecotopia is a decidedly Anglo place. Outside the cosmopolitan Bay Area, blacks and Mexicans average i or 2 percent of the population, and, as in the Breadbasket, there are relatively few people of southern European ancestry, compared with the number of residents of Scandinavian and German stock. And they don't call it "British" Columbia for nothing. This does raise the question of how exportable some of these north-western ideas are. In North Carolina, for example, there are simply tons of beautiful old log cabins in scenic settings, each heated by wood and graced by a yard full of chickens, the inhabitants of which participate in a cooperative life style. But the people who live in them do not consider themselves Ecotopians. What they consider themselves to be is poor and black. If pressed, they might describe as Utopian a situation in which they never again split another log or messed with another stupid chicken. The idea of a young, educated white couple voluntarily living the way they do - even seeking out the experience - would be, to them, almost beyond belief. In fact, all this Ecotopian marching off into a golden future can become just a tad irritating. Ecotopia was originally settled, after all, by descendants of New England Puritans, and to this day, even its search for new futures is burdened with some moralistic self-righteousness. It's not hard to find people in the Northwest who get as rigid with distress over the idea of a person eating an additive- and sugar-laden Twinkie as a devout Empty Quarter Mormon does about someone imbibing strong drink. Enough smugness accompanies some aspects of Ecotopia that I took a perverse pleasure in noting that the Integral Urban Chickens had a bad mite infestation that made their rear ends look as if they had been forced into a window fan. This gets at some of the perhaps unfortunate directions all this alternative and sometimes elitist thinking can take. Marin County is the unspeakably hip / chic suburban community north of the Golden Gate that thrives on tall redwoods, octagonal barns, alfalfa sprouts, walls made of planks nailed on the diagonal, hanging plants, and the highest achievement of the modern economic version of people taking in each other's laundry: crafts. In places like Marin - and this includes enclaves from Santa Cruz to Mendocino to Eugene to the Seattle water-front - there is no end to the cozy shops featuring locally made pottery, woodworking, and leather-tooling. Much of it is marvelously innovative and of great technical quality, but that sometimes gets lost in the overpowering grooviness of it all. Like too much health food, it can make you sick. Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, shared in the 1979 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Meritorious Public Service. In the tiny Marin County weekly, the Point Reyes Light, he helped to expose the Synanon cult. He swears by Cyra McFadden's book The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County. "Every damn word of it is true," he fulminates, as he tells of hearing conversations in which stock dividend checks arriving late held up the purchasing of food stamps. "It doesn't even go far enough." A sample: When he flashed on Sam Stein, sitting in the gloom at the bar of the Velvet Turtle, Harvey hardly recognized him. Here he'd been looking for a freak in acid glasses all these weeks, and Sam, with a haircut so short he had skin showing over his ears and wearing a polyester leisure suit, looked more like Bob Haldeman than Hunter Thompson. Sam was going through changes for sure . . . You can laugh at this kind of culture clash, but it can take some terrible, tragic, bizarre turns. In 1979, Dan White, a San Francisco supervisor elected from the outnumbered white "hard-hat" constituency of the city, shot and killed George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, and Harvy Milk, the councilman who was the de facto representative of the large homosexual population. When White came to trial, his defense, essentially, was temporary insanity brought on by an overdose of junk food (!). And he was let off with a wrist-slap sentence (!!). The result was a large gay riot, in which police cars were overturned and set on fire. The point of this recitation is that in San Francisco, at that time, White's actions were often interpreted as being provoked by frustration at how little power and sway working-class "straights" had in the city. They were, in effect, an oppressed minority, in a land in which it is possible to hear otherwise intelligent, educated people seriously discuss "astrological birth control" and think nothing of it. Considering how often, in Ecotopia, issues turn on questions of life style, and the most emotional debates are reserved for the questions of how one's life is affected by a nuclear power plant, the use of pesticides and herbicides, or a plan to clear-cut hundreds of acres of wilderness, this nation's economics have a certain through-the-looking-glass quality to them. At the same time that Ecotopia is made a very attractive place by the ease with which a person can live simply, and relatively close to nature, Ecotopia's manufacturing base is heavily dependent on high-technology industries. The same nation that, in its every architectural manifestation, demonstrates its affection for natural wood and its loathing of plastics is one of the world centers of superadvanced computers and the latest designs for blowing the whole planet away with nuclear missiles. Take the semiconductor manufacturers of Northern California's Santa Clara ("Silicon") Valley, the world capital of advanced computer circuitry. The manufacturer of a semiconductor, through a photography-like process, makes several patterns on a wafer of silicon, a component of sand (hence the nickname of the valley). The last pattern is made up of metal spun far finer than human hair. All of the patterns - etched, diffused, metallic - make up the circuit that performs the computer function. The resultant package is very small, very mass-producible, and therefore cheap. Each of these little gadgets, as of this writing, is smaller and thinner than your smallest fingernail, and the technological revolution you keep hearing about in this field is in the advances that are being made all the time in how much "stuff" - how much circuitry - you can print on this silicon without the whole thing either shorting out or the patterns becoming so fine as to be nonexistent. Ironically, it's at least partially an accident of this technology that these things end up being so small. When they were being developed, there simply were not that many markets which actually required semiconductors to be so tiny. How many satellites were there in the universe in which weight was so crucial? A semiconductor chip could be much bigger than it is and still fit comfortably in a hand-held calculator. While small chips are faster than big ones, a major reason for their size was a manufacturing consideration. These chips are not made one by one. They are printed in a batch on a silicon wafer, say, four inches in diameter. Each time a layer of stuff is printed on this silicon wafer, it must be, in photographic parlance, "fixed." That is, the wafer must be treated so that the stuff you've laid on will stay there. As it happens, this fixing process is achieved through the application of monumental quantities of energy. In effect, as each layer of the circuit is laid on, the whole wafer is "baked" at temperatures sometimes high enough to reach the outer limits of technology. Each time you fire up a furnace to bake these four-inch wafers, you make an investment in energy, whether there is one complete circuit on a wafer or a hundred. Obviously, the economics of scale dictate that you want to put as many of these circuits on each four-inch wafer, and as many wafers in the furnace, as you can, thus cutting your energy costs. Then, when you've finished the entire circuit-laying process, you can cut apart the individual but identical bits of each wafer and proceed to use these computer chips however you wish. It's the same economics of scale that make the cost of small photographs less than the cost of large photographs. You can print four 4-by-5-inch photographs on the same piece of paper that one 8-by-10 would require. If the 4-by-5 will do the job for you, obviously, you go with it. The semiconductor industry's concern with energy costs helped lead to this microminiaturization. That it will change all our lives is a side effect. "Who knows what you can do with these things on the low end of the scale - at the consumer end?" asked Kirk Lindsay, the headquarters sales manager of Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale. Advanced Micro Devices is considered an average-sized "quality" house in the semiconductor business. Everything it pro-duces comes up to strict military specifications. "We're mainly just serving the top end of the market - satellites and military applications and the communications industry and things like that. And we're expanding as quickly as we can to do that." Writing about semiconductors is invariably embarrassing; because no matter what your projection, it ends up being outstripped by reality in no time at all. Say you accept the standard explanation of what these can do, which is to replace many mechanical controls that have slow, breakdown-prone and bulky moving parts. That's as if Marconi described what he did with radio by saying, "I've transformed sound waves into electromagnetic waves." It bears no hint of the future. There would be no way of anticipating, from that, that television would end up being used as a narcotic that effectively neutralizes the hyperactivity of jangled urban nerves. Walking around the manufacturing operation at Advanced Micro-Devices is a similarly frustrating experience. Men and women wear the most perfect science-fiction surgical white robes and slippers designed to prevent dust from settling on the silicon wafers containing the tiny devices. They operate in rooms that are in "positive pressure." That is to say, the air pressure inside is slightly higher than it is outside so that when a door is opened, air gusts out, not in, again to control dust. That air in the photo room is bathed in a warm, orange-yellow light, because light at the other end of the spectrum - ultraviolet - is what's used to create the image on the wafer. Electron microscopes project enormous magnifications of the tiny elements of the chips onto television screens, where they are examined for flaws. But this doesn't tell you how these chips will change the world. Lindsay attempts to offer a couple of examples of semiconductor uses that may someday seem routine: Take the technology of watering your lawn, he says. Okay, the first level is the guy standing with his thumb over a garden hose. At some point, he decides to replace his thumb with a lawn-sprinkler attachment to the end of the hose. All he has to do then is turn the faucet on and off. But then he gets tired of coiling and uncoiling the hose. So he puts pipes underground. Then he gets tired of turning the faucet on and off. So he installs a mechanical timer with little pegs on it that turns the sprinkler on and off automatically. But that results in ludicrous situations in which you see sprinkler systems running in the pouring rain. The really efficient way of watering your lawn would be to put tiny probes in the root system of the lawn that would tell whether the roots were thirsty or not, and then hook those probes into a microprocessor, which would decide when to turn a water pump on and off. This would be cost-effective only where water is more expensive than semiconductors - but in some parts of the continent, someday soon, that's going to be true. Or take energy conservation, he says. People right now use window shades or louvers either to let heat from the sun come in through a window or to keep it out. But louvers break, and the system doesn't work at all if you're not around during the day to play with it, and anyway, it doesn't do anything about glare. So maybe what you want to do is take your double-glazed window and coat each layer with some chemical that would change colors as an electric current was passed through it. One layer would adjust for heat, the other for glare, so that you'd have one combination on a cold day when light was bouncing off a layer of snow and a different one on an overcast but muggy day. You then hook the windows up to one end of a chip, the other end of which would be attached to some simple sensor on the roof. And it would run your solar heating system with maximum efficiency. Of course, microprocessors are already controlling fuel flow in some cars to increase mileage, and others are being worked into your phone system to make the automobile partially obsolete by, for instance, eliminating your trips to the bank. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to pay your bills and conduct your financial affairs by phone. The pushbutton keyboard, after all, is no different from a calculator. Just remember that, as these visions of an alternative future change your life, it is no accident that Silicon Valley is in Ecotopia. First, it is there because it is near Stanford University, in Palo Alto. In a successful attempt to lure high-technology scientists from the East at the dawn of the computer age, post-World War II, Stanford, which is called the Harvard of the West, offered its staff an important concession. It allowed scientists to profit personally from discoveries they made in the course of university-related research. That is, a Stanford professor who came up with a technological breakthrough could patent his device and go into business manufacturing it. Once there was a community of thinkers at Stanford doing just that, it was natural for them to put their operations in the nearest town hungry for clean, smokeless, high-paying industry, which happened to be the San Jose area, next door. In this fashion, they could keep their eye on their constantly changing operations while maintaining face-to-face communication with others who spoke their extremely exotic high-tech language. Second, the Silicon Valley - is in Ecotopia for the same reason the aluminum industry is. Although finished semiconductors can be assembled into final products anywhere there is a population with manual dexterity - from Massachusetts to Malaysia - the actual manufacturing sucks a lot of electricity, so it is important that the electricity be cheap, which often means renewable hydro. Third, the engineers and other key people at the cutting edge of this industry are scarce, the competition for their services is fierce, and the salaries they command are handsome. Where such a person is considering three similar job offers in, say, Massachusetts, Texas, and Northern California - all semiconductor centers of one sort or another - it is hardly unusual for the decision to be made finally on the basis of: Quality of life. Which, of course, links up with the environmental concerns of Ecotopians exploiting simple technologies like solar hot-water heaters. Many semiconductor firms are now seeking to locate new facilities outside the Santa Clara Valley, simply because there is little flat ground left there on which to build plants and housing. And because of that quality-of-life concern, many companies are examining locations in northern Ecotopia: Oregon and Washington. There is another aspect of Ecotopia's economy that is, you'll pardon the expression, disorienting: its trade with Asia appears to be more significant than its trade with the rest of North America. It's tough to nail this down because, of course, Ecotopia does not literally have customs inspectors measuring its trade with the rest of North America. But: "We don't want to rely anymore on the establishment of the eastern states. They're Europe-oriented, and our future is with Japan and the Pacific Rim," said Richard King, director of the California Office of International Trade. "The Japanese see California as part of their Pacific co-prosperity sphere, and we better be responsive to that," he added. Presumably, when he said that, he was not recalling that "Co-prosperity Sphere" was the precise term used by World War II Japanese militarists to justify their far-flung Pacific empire. "But, of course we do see it that way," said one smiling Japanese banker in San Francisco. "We see California already as part of Japan. Oh, yes. California Prefecture." When China began to open up its economy to the West, Seattle and Vancouver saw dollar signs. Before Mao, they had been the ports from which North America's trade with China had flourished, simply because they're the closest. And, of course, Vancouver had been shipping Canadian Breadbasket wheat to China throughout the seventies. One of the first things the People's Republic bought when it started looking through the North American industrial candy store was a Boeing jet, which ended up going nonstop from Peking to Paris on its maiden flight. In fact, when I was at the Boeing 747 assembly plant, a plane destined for the PRC sat gleaming in its Vaseline-green protective coating, peacefully co-existing next to a plane with Taiwanese markings. It's politically unthinkable to export U.S. oil, and oil is Ecotopian only in the sense that the Alaska pipeline ends in Valdez, but to illustrate geographic economics, Alaskan oilmen nonetheless keep pushing the idea of a new triangle trade. The idea would be to ship North Slope crude to Japan, which would reduce Japan's imports from Mexico, and the Mexican oil thus freed up would in turn be pipelined to Houston. That would be cheaper than shipping the Alaskan oil directly to the Texas refineries, as is done now. (Actually, Ecotopian attitudes do play a large role in this calculation, in that goo-laden supertankers are out of the question for Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay residents. As a result, the crude ends up being lightered through the Panama Canal to Gulf Coast refineries. The all-Empty Quarter, trans-Canada, Northern Tier pipeline is alive as a proposal largely because it's one of the few direct ways to get Alaskan crude to the Breadbasket without facing kamikaze Ecotopian environmental opposition.) On any city street in Ecotopia you can see the extent to which it is a Pacific Rim nation. There are twice as many Japanese automobiles as there are in the East. It's been suggested that one of the reasons North American auto-makers were slow in meeting the Japanese challenge is that they didn't live on the West Coast, and weren't physically confronted day after day by the magnitude of the Asian success. You look out your Detroit window, and you still see people driving Chevys. Here, you don't. In fact, there is some concern that Ecotopia is being reduced economically to nothing but a resource colony of the Asian industrial powers - surrendering its vital natural resources in exchange for much more costly manufactured products. Again, trade figures are slippery, because they are not usually gathered along the boundaries this chapter describes. But Pacific Rim U.S. states ran up a $ 3.6 billion deficit with Japan in 1978, twice the 1976 trade imbalance. Oregon pulp is fueling the Asian bureaucratic paper-shuffling explosion. British Columbia logs arc used to build Kyoto homes, and Vancouver doesn't even get to keep the sawmill jobs that would result. The Japanese just want the logs. Their lumber specifications are different from North America's, and far more customized. A two-by-four is not a meaningful concept in Japan. Huge self-sufficient Japanese trawlers ply the Bering Sea, catching bottom fish North Americans are not used to eating, and not even landing in Alaska to pick up provisions, much less to generate cannery jobs. Japanese interests are buying up western farmland, thus reducing the importance even of agricultural exports. And now, of course, Japan is going after the semiconductor market. "The question is whether we want to become a banana republic," said E. Floyd Kwamme of the Silicon Valley's National Semiconductor. "The problem is that manufacturing creates more jobs than agriculture. If we think we are going to balance our trade with the Japanese by selling them beef and grapefruit, we'll end up killing our industrial base." "The exporting of the raw materials from which our jobs spring," says George Cassidy, president of the Portland-based Lumber Production Industrial Workers Union, "is the exporting of our jobs." "We are getting in the position of selling all our logs and fish for TVs," Ed Furia, co-chairman of the North Pacific Ocean Protein Coalition (a lobbying group), says. And now China has started producing an airplane with startling similarities to those first Boeing 707s it bought, along with a suspiciously large supply of spare parts. At Boeing, the Chinese knock-off is matter-of-factly called the 706, and the pirating seems to be shrugged off. "What the hell," I was told. "It's twenty-five-year-old technology." But a consideration of the 707s and China and the through-the-looking-glass aspects of the Pacific Northwest's industries raises another topic. There is a very, very real Looking Glass. It's flying somewhere over North America right now, refueling in midair, coming down only when its engines run low on oil, and then only after an identical sister ship takes its place. It is definitely nothing but state-of-the-art technology. It has been referred to as the "Flying Fuehrer Bunker," and it is piloted by a man with perfect vision who has a black patch over one eye. If a Soviet nuclear missile explodes within his field of vision, searing his exposed cornea, the pilot will switch the patch from his protected eye onto his now useless orb, and fly on. For the Looking Glass plane is designed to run the world's last war after all the generals on the ground are gone. It's the command post that will further the strategy of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - so it's designation as the Looking Glass is apt. And, of course, it's Ecotopian. It's an EC-135, which is the military configuration of a Boeing 707. That's not Ecotopia's only contribution to MADness. Boeing builds cruise missiles on Puget Sound - twenty-foot-long, ground-hugging, pilotless little jets, with megatonage cargoes, thousands of which will be unleashed from the bellies of the B-52s if it ever comes to that. They have little semiconductor brains that read the terrain they fly over, telling them to take a left turn at the Volga River. Those semiconductors were probably built in Ecotopia. And that's not all, either. In Bremerton, Washington, less than an hour's soothing ride from Seattle aboard one of the Puget Sound ferries, is a naval shipyard. When I took the ride out, it was harboring something I didn't ever recognize at first, nestled in among the Douglas fir and the steep hills and the pebbled beaches and the vacation homes and the sailboats tacking in the wind and the clouds washing in off the Pacific across the Olympic Peninsula. All I saw was some sort of strangely architected squarish building isolated on top of a low but very sheer gray cliff, and I looked harder and harder because, even in this land of surprises, I'd never seen geology like that, much less the building style. "That's the Enterprise," said a friendly local who noted my concentration. "Just back from the Middle East." The Enterprise. The world's largest nuclear aircraft carrier. The "building" was the operations tower. The "cliff" was the hull supporting the flight deck. For that matter, about fourteen miles up the Hood Canal from the Enterprise, Kitsap County property values are soaring. Not long after this book comes out, a vessel longer than the Washington Monument is high, probably escorted by the killer whales, which like these waters, and which it resembles, in a certain way, will round Cape Flattery into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, shortcut Puget Sound by using the Hood Canal, pass the bridge that sank during a winter storm the other year, pass South Point and Lofall, and then dock in Bangor. It will be a Trident submarine, the Ohio, the largest submarine ever built. At a length of two football fields, it will be, without a great deal of competition (save from the likes of the Enterprise), one of the world's larger naval vessels. It's the ultimate weapon. That's what its designers meant it to be. It warehouses twenty-four four-story-tall Trident I missiles. Each of these missiles carries ten independently targetable warheads, each of which is aimed at a city. Not a military target; a civilian city. Each warhead is designed to produce an airburst that would cause flash blindness, hurricane winds, spontaneous combustion, thermal radiation, and radioactive fallout. .And that's at the edge of its effectiveness. Closer to ground zero, it's supposed to vaporize its targets the way Mount St. Helens vaporized. Two
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