Oregon: Mosaics of radical enviros by Jeffrey St. Clair

“Oregon was where it was at in the 1980s,” St. Clair said. “The new conservation movement: This is where it was born and really erupted. It was a grass-roots movement that took on one of the largest industries in the country — timber — on its own turf and nearly brought it to its knees.

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I wanted to be a part of it and understand how you could put that
template of activism to work in other parts of the country. It was a
confluence of ideas and exceptional characters.” Having cut his
activist teeth in the late 1970s protesting construction of the Marble
Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana with what he calls “a mosaic of
radical environmentalists, farmers and rednecks,” St. Clair began
visiting Oregon in the 1980s.

He and his wife settled here in 1990 and
raised their now college-age children. They live in Oregon City. Ever
since his Indiana experience, St. Clair has been drawn to indigenous
and endemic uprisings and kind of strange, unexpected coalitions. “My
interest is in searching out the resistance, sometimes in odd fusions
of left and right,” he said. “I have a Midwestern sensibility, rooted
in skepticism.”

To this St. Clair attributes what he calls his profound suspicion of government institutions and their ability to solve fundamental social and environmental problems. There was great hope after the years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for what the Clinton administration might achieve environmentally, he said. But from his perspective, that promise soon faded as environmentalists got positions in the administration.

“There was too much compromise.” He worries that the same pattern may repeat with Obama. “A new generation of activists is invested in Obama with even more expectations,” he said. “We’re in an ever more tender state this time, with so much faith being placed in Obama as a change agent.” St. Clair also worries about the faith being placed in technology as a social and environmental cure-all.

He’s leery of those who view green technology as a way to salvage the economy. “Green consumerism is very perilous all around,” he said, particularly the idea that “all we have to do is transform our consuming habits.” And he remains skeptical of technology as a panacea for what he calls real social networking. “On the one hand, technology is uniting us in ways we’ve never been united before, but I worry about one-click activism. It seems easier than it should be.

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