Cascadia Scorecard News
December 2005

By Alan Durning
December 9, 2005

In Cascadia and beyond, the movement for sustainability—for a healthy, lasting prosperity grounded in place—is advancing in a slow-motion revolution. From the Pacific Northwest’s faith communities to its labor unions, from its government leaders to its business executives, we northwesterners are increasingly acting on the values at the heart of sustainability—strong communities, fair markets, and responsible stewardship. 

Consider a few current trends: Increased energy efficiency and windpower are now the region’s fastest-growing sources of electricity. Building complete, compact communities is entering the mainstream in the region’s real-estate industry. Sales of more-sustainable products—organic foods, certified lumber, hybrid vehicles, super-efficient jetliners, wild salmon—are on steep growth curves. Teen births are at record lows and lifespans at record highs.

Unfortunately, remaining challenges such as climate change are so daunting, and countervailing trends such as private property “takings” initiatives are so menacing, that it’s easy to get discouraged. A look at the history of social change movements offers one antidote to such dejection. Setting the campaign for a sustainable economy beside similarly audacious causes of the past, such as the crusades for emancipation and suffrage, makes clear that our movement is advancing as quickly as can be expected, if not as quickly as we might hope.

Movements for fundamental change always unfold over many years, in fits and starts. Even the most visionary leaders cannot predict their course, only their ultimate success. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Twelve men meeting in a London booksh op in 1787, for example, launched the cause of ending slavery in the British Empire—a movement whose chances of success at the time appeared infinitesimal. Slavery was far older than the Empire and more than half of humans then on the planet were held in slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, or debt peonage(1). Worse, channels to reform were few. Scarcely one in ten Englishmen—and no Englishwomen—even had the right to vote. Yet within half a century, every slave in the empire was emancipated.

Similarly, five women meeting in a parlor in upstate New York in 1848 launched the women’s suffrage movement(2). At the time, nonslave women were legally wards of their fathers or husbands. Forbidden from signing contracts or testifying in court, even married women had legal rights to neither property nor earnings nor even their children. Yet in just three quarters of a century, women could vote not only in the United States but also in Canada and parts of Europe.

Slavery and disenfranchisement both became untenable, and their end—long thought impossible—became inevitable. What explains this extraordinary progression? The same two things that explain the success of history’s other great social change movements: an unarguable moral principle—in these cases, freedom and equality—and a corps of people, initially few, who would not rest until that principle was reflected in society’s norms and laws.

The sustainability movement arguably began with the 1972 UN World Environment Conference in Sweden. There, the agendas of environmental conservation and of human and economic progress met and synthesized into the living principle of sustainability: reconciling people and planet. One third of a century later, the relative few of 1972 have become tens of millions around the world. A month ago, I heard Prince Charles, the future king of England, give as profound and radical a plea for sustainability as any of my peers in the mid-1980s.

Why then does progress seem slow?

Read more about social change in Cascadia: Page 2.
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Sources and Notes Page 1
1) Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
2) Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1973).