Cascadia Scorecard News
December 2005
By Alan Durning

Page 2: Why, then, does progress still seem slow?

A movement is, above all, the intentional diffusion of a principle or value. That diffusion takes time, because it must move public opinion through stages from hostility to acceptance to action. None of the founders of the suffrage movement, for example, lived long enough to see the final victory. Historian Eleanor Flexner wrote of suffrage champion Susan B. Anthony, “She had lived and worked, without respite and without discouragement, through the years of ridicule, vilification, and apparent hopelessness . . . . When she died [in 1906], few thinking people denied either the logic or the inevitability of woman suffrage. The only question that remained was, ‘When?’”(3) In Cascadia, sustainability has traversed the same ground from ridicule to tacit agreement—but not yet adequate action—in just 33 years.

The phrase “without respite” warrants emphasis. The sheer magnitude of some challenges—moving the region’s energy economy beyond fossil fuels, for example—could easily overwhelm optimism if we lack a historical sense of what movements can do. Anthony’s successor, the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, summed up what it took to win the vote in the United States:

“. . . 52 years of pauseless campaign . . . . 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms; and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.”

Movements sometimes advance unpredictably. Their protagonists often have little idea whom they’ve touched. Consider Wyoming. In 1869, the tiny territorial legislature sent a suffrage bill to the governor as, on some accounts, a political joke. But 20 years earlier, the governor had attended one of the nation’s first women’s rights conventions. Silent on the subject during all the intervening years, he shocked the nation by enfranchising women for the first time in the United States(4).

Success for a movement, then, is measured not only in the “wins” of the day, but also—and more importantly—in the seeds planted for the future. In 1998, Sightline Institute published a book called Tax Shift that argues for an innovative approach to tax policy, in which taxes are moved from paychecks and profits to pollution and resource depletion. We knew the idea was so unorthodox that it would take years to gain acceptance. Yet adherents of the approach are moving into ever more prominent positions in the halls of power. Every few months, we learn of another influential Cascadian who is convinced of tax shifting’s promise. Sooner or later, one of them will find him- or herself in a situation parallel to that of the 1869 governor of Wyoming.

Of course, satisfaction with our progress is no grounds for complacence. Another thing Martin Luther King, Jr. said was, “No social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals.” That’s where Sightline—and you—come in.

You, the 4,000-odd recipients of Cascadia Scorecard News, are an extraordinary group: a diverse group of Cascadians united by your engagement in—and tremendous influence over—public affairs and by your concern for our collective future. At Sightline Institute, we are humbled by the attention you give to our work. And we pledge to do our all in 2006 and beyond to keep you equipped with the knowledge you need to advance the mission we share: a healthy, lasting prosperity, grounded in place.

Join the discussion! As part of our focus on progress, we’d like to hear from Cascadians (and beyond) about your work in the movement and what keeps your optimism afloat. Click here to connect to our weblog, where you can post comments.

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Sources and notes Page 2:
3) Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 239.
4) The story gets better. Wyoming’s suffrage law, initially an accident, gradually became a badge of fierce pride for the cowboy territory. When Congress blanched at making Wyoming a state because of its voting law, the all-male territorial legislature replied, “We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without the women.”