HEAVY WEATHER

Sounds of windstorm

CBS Newscast: The town of Vernonia, OR was cut off from the world when a mudslide Monday blocked the road, and downed power lines left people there in the dark.

Brian Williams/NBC Nightly News: Big portions of the Pacific Northwest are under water this evening including a major transportation artery.

Mark Trenholm: You kept thinking that the storm would stop and it didn’t. It just went on and on and on. My house was on the beach and you know the walls would breath and the windows would shudder.

Kathleen Sayce: It rained and rained and rained and it blew and blew and blew and it just never let up. And it’s hard not to believe that global climate change doesn’t have something to do with it.

CBS Newscast: The one-two punch of back-to-back storms are the worst people here can remember. The scope of the devastation is staggering: at least 7 people dead, 111,000 people in two states left without power. Whole communities underwater.

KS: In December we had three storms in a row come ashore one right after the other over 72 hours. Basically one by one, all of the communications and support devices and systems we’re accustomed to in modern society got stripped away.

MT: You had a lot of people whose lives were really turned upside down from that storm. You had people who didn’t get power back from ten days to fourteen days, and living out in the woods, places that they couldn’t get around because so many trees had fallen, emergency services couldn’t get to them.

KS: It got a lot of people thinking that if this is where we’re headed, it’s going to change a lot of things about our culture.

In December 2007 an epic storm struck the Pacific Northwest. Along the Oregon coast hurricane winds blew almost non-stop for three days, toppling portions of forests throughout the coast range. Inland in Washington State, record rainfall in the Willapa Hills west of Interstate 5 swelled rivers and creeks that wend their way down to the floodplain, the land adjacent to a river, where water gathers when the river overflows. For nearly a week, the freeway, which traverses this floodplain, was submerged under 10 feet of water, closing a twenty-mile stretch between Centralia and Chehalis, WA, 90 miles south of Seattle.

Now, it’s the beginning of January 2009 and again the same 20 miles of Interstate 5 are closed due to flooding. Flooding is a way of life in Western Washington and Oregon, but the intensity and frequency of extreme weather in recent years has a lot of people wondering what’s going on.

You’re listening to Heavy Weather. For the next hour we’ll explore the connections between the increase in extreme weather and our changing climate and landscapes.

Phil Mote: We don’t understand the climate system well enough to know whether rising greenhouse gases will produce wetter winters, more extreme rain events, more extreme wind events.

Philip Mote is with the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at OSU. Until 2009, he was the Washington State Climatologist.

PM: There are some studies that show an increase in extreme precipitation events in the Northwest. The wettest one day of the year in most places has gotten wetter. It’s not necessarily the case that every flooding event is because of climate change but what it may be doing is changing the odds of flooding events. It’s like you have a revolver with 100 chambers and you know there’s one bullet in it. If global warming puts a second bullet in it and then you pull the trigger and a bullet comes out, do you really care whether it was the one that was there naturally or the one that was there because of climate change.

Brian Williams/NBC Nightly News: Water, water everywhere, that’s the story in Washington State as rivers overflow their banks. It’s closed Interstate 5 between Portland and Seattle. Dikes designed to protect this area failed, worsening the problem.

Mark Cook: What you hear from a lot of locals is that we’re getting a hundred year storm every year.

Mark Cook was formerly the county engineer and public works director for Lewis County in Washington State and now runs a consulting firm, Cook Engineering, in Chehalis, WA.

MC: What I think the local folks are seeing is that the flood levels are rising with ever increasing less amounts of rainfall. And that is directly attributable to the removal of storage within the system. And as they continue to fill you can imagine it will take less and less rain to see the same kind of flood.

When Mark Cook questions if the on-going commercial development in the floodplain between Chehalis and Centralia may be exacerbating flooding problems, he does not find many receptive ears. More often, responses are like that of Lewis County Commissioner Ron Averill.

Ron Averill: You know when people ask you know, what caused the flooding? . . . a lot of water.

PM: There’s no question that the rain that fell in December 2007 was near record.

Philip Mote, with the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

PM: There’s also no question that since the last big flood in 1996 there have been changes to both the headwaters of the Chehalis River in the Willapa Hills with clear cutting and also changes in the channel in the valley. Probably all three of those contributed to the intensity of the flooding.

KS: Chehalis stayed with business as usual behind dikes

Ecologist Kathleen Sayce is the science officer for Shorebank Pacific in Ilwaco, WA.

KS: and I think figured that if they raised the dikes and improved pumping they could cope with whatever came their way.

In February 1996, a 100-year flood inundated much of the Northwest, devastating communities across Washington and Oregon. For only the third time in its history, Interstate 5 between Centralia and Chehalis was flooded for several days. After the floodwaters receded, coastal communities in Oregon and the cities of Portland and Seattle reformed their land use practices. In Centralia and Chehalis little changed.

Emil Pierson: At that time our flood plain ordinance was very similar to every place else.

Emil Pierson is the community development director for the city of Centralia.

EP: You could build new structures in the floodplain. Single-family homes had to be raised 1 foot above the base flood elevation. If a certain home got hit harder in one area, then the new development that would occur in that area had to be one foot above that base flood.

Eric De Place: Centralia and Chehalis have added a bunch of impervious surface and a lot of sprawl.

Eric De Place is a senior researcher with Sightline Institute in Seattle.

EdeP: That impervious surface then tends to magnify the effects of flooding because when the water comes through an area like that it, it doesn’t have as many places that it can soak into the ground. And so it will stand on top of a Wal-Mart parking lot or on top of a freeway. Where if it had been farmland, like it was decades ago, that water would have had more ability to return to the earth. Although it may still have flooded periodically and that’s a natural part of rivers in the northwest.

MC: We are standing on about ten feet of fill in the floodplain.

Mark Cook shows us around the parking lot of a large strip mall just north of Chehalis, filled with huge big box stores, including a Wal-Mart.

MC: In December ’07, these stores had between a foot and two feet of water in them. All of these companies that you see behind us have now been recovered, rebuilt using federal insurance money. There’s a business model that says, hey look, there’s a certain amount of risk here but if you’re going to get financial compensation for your loss from somebody else, it’s not a bad business model to site there.

PM: To put more dollar value in harm’s way and then expect the general taxpayer to bail you out is shrewd planning I guess, we can say from what we’ve learned from our friends in the financial industry that if your loss is big enough then the government has no choice but to bail you out.

RA: One of the criticisms is that the city of Chehalis around the airport has developed property, which is behind the levee.

The levee that Lewis County commissioner Ron Averill refers to was built to withstand a 50-year flood. But the one hundred-year flood in 2007 caused the levee to fail, contributing to the flooding that shut down I5.

RA: By FEMA practice, whatever is behind the levee is not in the floodplain. We argue that we aren’t doing any building in the floodplain that doesn’t meet the standards that are required by the state and the federal government.

MC: The flood insurance program allows local governments to site developments within the floodplain so long as they don’t exceed a one-foot of rise.

The “One-Foot-Rise Floodway” Standard, to which Mark Cook is referring, allows development in what’s called the “Floodway Fringe” as long as the height of water in a 100-Year flood is not elevated more than one foot.

MC: That’s encouraged a lot of development in the region and what many local agencies don’t do is track that incremental rise. When you think of the vastness of the floodplain and you put a Wal-Mart or a strip mall, maybe that in itself doesn’t rise it a foot but if you put five or six or seven of those you’re bound at some point to exceed that one foot rise standard.

EP: Since the 2007 flood the first thing the city council said was, it’s time to get on board and to be much more proactive. We created a floodplain overlay area and we required any new structures that happened there because we didn’t want to say you couldn’t do anything in this area, but we required those new structures to be three feet above the base flood elevation. We also limited the amount of fill that you can do. If you do over five hundred cubic yards of fill, we require you to remove the same amount of fill.

MC: One of the proposals that we had was to use compensatory storage.

Mark Cook, the former county engineer and public works director for Lewis County, was fired in 2007.

MC: If you want to put a cubic foot of fill in the floodplain, we required that you put a cubic foot and a half of storage somewhere else. As you put brick after brick in the bathtub it’s going to flow over and we’ve been putting bricks in the floodplain around here for quite awhile.

EP: A floodplain isn’t like a bathtub. My bathtub at home only has one drain and only one faucet coming in. A floodplain has multiple ways that water flows in, multiple ways that water flows out.

Pat Sorensen: A combination of the levee/diking system that we have now and that’s proposed,

Pat Sorenson is the city manager for Centralia.

PS: as well as damming, along with new development standards, can help mitigate further damage.

EP: You just can’t go eliminate a community of 6,800 homes and say well, because your whole community’s in the floodplain, we need to just move the whole community north or south or whatever.

Centralia community development director Emil Pierson.

EP: Maybe we do look at some of these technology ideas like levees or whatever it might take.

MT: Historically in this country, we’ve always tried to engineer our way out of any problem that we encounter.

Mark Trenholm works with the Wild Salmon Center in Portland.

MT: We try to build a levee taller or we try to raise the building higher or we try to build the bridge over it. Some of those work, but a lot of them don’t.

PM: We don’t know yet with any degree of confidence where or how much extreme rainfall and flooding events will occur.

Philip Mote, with the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute

PM: In the mean time certainly it’s prudent to think twice about building in or near what is now defined by FEMA as a 100-year flood plain, simply because there’s reason to believe that a lot of these will be riskier places than they are now.

EP: I think there can be a balance and I think you’re going to continue to see growth, especially along freeways.

Dean Marriott: People don’t have much of an appetite for looking at the root cause of problem.

Dean Marriott directs Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services.

They’d rather raise the elevation of I5, so the next time the river floods they can still get the trucks through.

90 miles south of Centralia, across the Columbia River in Oregon, you find a different perspective on land use and growth. Over thirty years ago, Oregon enacted statewide land use laws that have dramatically limited the type of suburbanization that sprawls along the I5 corridor up through Washington State. Dean Marriot wonders why Lewis County leaders don’t realize what seems so obvious to him.

DM: I think the takeaway message from that experience ought to be, what can you do to change what you do in the future to not make it worse and are there things you can do to undo some of the damage so that it in fact gets better.

But even though Washington enacted a statewide growth management act in 1990, the legislation is fraught with all kinds of loopholes, according to Lewis County Commissioner Ron Averill.

RA: The legislature in the last session passed a law that says that you can’t expand your urban growth areas into floodplains unless you can show that there’s no other possibility to provide development. Most cities have already established their urban growth areas into the floodplain and because of ex post facto constitutional protections you can’t take them back unless you go buy them out and nobody has that kind of money to go buy out everybody that’s built into the floodplain.

Tim Josi: Well this is our third flood event that we’ve had in Tillamook County this year.

It’s the morning of January 8, 2009 and Tillamook County commissioner Tim Josi’s office, on the Oregon Coast, is surrounded on two sides by floodwater. To the north, highway 101, the coastal highway that runs through the center of Tillamook is inundated, and Highway 6, the road over the Coast Range east to Portland, is underwater just as you enter town. But despite this flooding, bypasses built since 1996, allow traffic to continue to flow between Highway 6 and 101. In contrast, floodwaters submerging I5 near Chehalis are keeping that stretch of freeway closed.

TJ: A few years ago this type of flood would have been much more damaging but we’ve done a number of things in Tillamook County that have caused the flood events to be much shorter and not raise as high.

MT: The Tillamook is basically a massive alluvial plain. The city of Tillamook kind of sits up a little bit slightly elevated over this really impressive flood plain.

Mark Trenholm is the former director of the Tillamook Estuaries Partnership.

MT: When the Europeans came over they looked out over this lush bountiful wet plain and looked at this as incredible fertile soils for agriculture and for dairy.

Mark Labhart: Tillamook means lands of many waters.

Mark Labhart is a Tillamook County commissioner.

ML: There’s essentially five river systems that come into this basin.

MT: And these rivers use to move back and forth across this plain. And periodically they would jump out of their main channel and they’d move through a slough for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years and then they’d move back. And what we have done is effectively kept them in their existing channels and really restricted their movement. Over time what’s happened is we have had gravel build up in the lower rivers and that has exacerbated flooding but ultimately the bottom line is that area is a floodplain.

TJ: We ended up allowing development in areas where we should not have and we’ve really paid the price for that.

Mark Gervasi: The city annexed that large commercial strip on 101 back in 1980.

Mark Gervasi is the city manager in Tillamook, OR.

MG: It helped increase the tax base of the city, helped employ more folks but it had its drawbacks too, in that it was in a floodplain and some of the farmers were saying, why would want to build out there when you’re in a floodplain.

TJ: I remember talking with the economic development administrator from the federal level four or five, six years ago and she said that was one of the big mistakes that she had made in her career was allowing the funding for that sewer extension that allowed for this strip type of development.

MT: When the federal government invested in Tillamook to run infrastructure going north along 101, which basically led to all the development, these dairy farmers, who had been living there for five, six generations thirty years ago said in these meetings, you can’t build here, you should not be building here. This area will flood.

TJ: We’ll never forget the ’96 flood. It came in, it came up and it stayed up, the worst we have ever had. There was all kinds of damage. Highway 6 had like 17 slides, that sort of thing and our railroad was out, people’s homes were damaged, businesses were dislocated and damaged. It was just a terrible time.

KS: In addition to a lot of building destruction during the floods in 1996, as a dairy valley they also had a lot of farmers lose a lot of cattle.

ML: I was down at a dairy farm to the south of here and I drove by I bet you 150 dead cows piled up along the road and those cows drowned in the floods. They stood there and cried and cried and drowned. We were isolated for a significant period of time and people were up in arms and saying, we need to do something about the flood.

KS: And I think it was that personal business level of damage that really drove them to make major changes.

Ecologist Kathleen Sayce.

KS: When you drive through Tillamook now you see that there are a lot of buildings up on platforms that have been raised up several feet above the historic grade. Almost every farm now has a new barn on high ground and they also have areas where the cattle, if the whole 500-acre field floods, there’s still significantly higher ground where the cattle can get there. They may be miserable and wet and knee-deep in mud but they will be out of the water in the next severe flood.

ML: The dairy farmers over the years have gotten used to flooding and they built their farms away from the floods and it actually creates better pasture for them in the long run.

Tillamook County commissioner Mark Labhart

ML: But business owners do not want floodwaters in their businesses so they say, keep the water away from me.

MT: There is this feeling that if you dig the hole deep enough, the flood waters will go away. If you build the levees high enough, the flood waters will go away.

When Mark Trenholm directed the Tillamook Estuaries Partnership, his job was to help build consensus among diverse factions and interest groups throughout the Tillamook Bay. Many government leaders were open to solving flood problems in part by emulating, rather than just trying to re-engineer natural systems. But he was confronted by a very different attitude among business leaders.

Doug Rosenberg: Well, we should continue to push for restoration and dredging of the channels.

Doug Rosenberg used to own Rosenberg Lumberyard, a property that constantly gets flooded, at the north end of Tillamook, along Hwy. 101. He would like to see a return to old practices like dredging the lower reaches of rivers and mining gravel bars near the headwaters of streams, practices that were abandoned years ago in order to protect salmon habitat.

DR: In the early days, gravel bars, which build up five and six feet deep every winter were excavated down to the waterline, the summer waterline and removed and used for gravel and sand and rock operations. We now have coarse gravel and rock flowing all the way down through tidewater rivers and actually nearly to the bay. We just simply have to restore the channels.

ML: A lot of people say, well, all you’ve got to do is just dredge the rivers and that will solve the problems. Okay, who’s going to pay for that? And as soon as you do that what happens in another ten years? Sediment continues to flow, I mean, it’s a natural process. So the federal government finally said, we have to move businesses out of the way of the floodplain, or figure out ways to get the water to the bay quicker.

MG: We didn’t have a floodway designation until 2000 when FEMA did a restudy of the whole Wilson River Floodplain area.

A floodway is the channel where water flows when it spills over the banks of a creek, river or slough during a flood. Tillamook city manager Mark Gervasi

MG: They put a floodway designation on a fairly large portion of the 101 corridor out there, which pretty much put a halt on any development.

Lisa Phipps: Tillamook County itself does not have a moratorium on building in the floodplain and frankly the rules don’t prohibit building in the floodway.

Lisa Phipps is the director of the Tillamook Estuaries Partnership.

LP: But the level of scrutiny that is applied to an application for building in the floodway is extremely high, but it still can happen.

MG: You can build in a floodway but there are certain things you have to do. You have to elevate your building and if you’re going to build on a ground that’s vacant, you have to show that what you’re doing does not put water on anyone else.

ML: Also there are certain businesses who continually get flooded and continue to ask for FEMA flood insurance, that have voluntarily said, we don’t want to be in the floodway anymore, can you relocate us?

Tillamook County commissioner Mark Labhart.

ML: FEMA will pay 75% of the cost of relocating your business from the floodway into a spot in town that’s out of the floodway. Then that property is demolished and then that’s kept as an open space and given to the city of Tillamook and then the floodwaters can drain out of there and get to the bay quicker.

Mike Burough: That’s how high the water was. Five and a half feet.

Mike Burough owns Tillamook RV Repair and Sales, which he opened in 1998. The shop is located in the middle of the floodway on North Highway 101. Right after he moved in, he experienced his first flood.

MB: Thanksgiving Day of ’98 we got flooded and we got three inches of water in here and I thought, oh geez, this is not good. On December 27 we got four foot of water in here and we’ve had numerous floods since.

The flood in 2007 convinced Mike that it was time to move to higher ground.

MB: We came in here with a boat, but what’s really spooky is our power’s right there. And I’m coming through here and water’s up to my chest so I’m going like this, oh geez, I know I’m going to die sometime but not here, I don’t want to die in this, you know, because I’m trying to not make very much waves because the electrical’s right there, and I get through there and open up that door and I got on the other side and it was just brown water. Boy, if that wasn’t a mess to clean up.

Until the city of Tillamook annexed the land north of town, most of the city’s commercial development was concentrated downtown. Downtown Tillamook provided all the basic services you would expect to find in a small town, including a Safeway that had been there since the 1920s.

MG: In 1980 when the city annexed all of north 101, Safeway relocated out here to be on 101 where there’s a lot of traffic. They felt that, that would help with their business as did a lot of other businesses out here.

We’re standing with Tillamook city manager Mark Gervasi in front of an empty storefront on Highway 101, that used to house a Safeway store.

MG: And then there were repetitive floods in ’96 and ’98, ’99, 2000, and they had had enough and so they bought a piece of ground we owned downtown and they built a new store.

MT: The Safeway building has been vacated now for several years and the shell of the old building still stands there.

Mark Trenholm, former director of the Tillamook Estuaries Partnership.

MT: There was an effort made to move that building out, create a wetland and this is a place where it ran into some resistance from a number of members of the community.

DR: It’s a very valuable piece of the local economy and it should be in use and it could be in use without being flooded.

Tillamook business leader Doug Rosenberg.

DR: That’s a very easy structure to flood proof.

MG: If this building were gone and all of the asphalt were torn up, you would have more storage capacity for floodwater and less property damage.

DG: I get very frustrated to see money spent on removing fill and calling it flood relief. To pass it off as flood relief or to not admit that it won’t do any good until we get the drainage created all the way down to the bay, is just foolishness.

ML: As climate change becomes more severe, they’re talking about more rain and that definitely means more flooding, we need to do some long term thinking and strategic planning about where’s the best place to locate the human beings and the facilities.

Tillamook County commissioner Mark Labhart

ML: Should we be taking dikes down, should we be breaching dikes, should we be creating more salt marshes, wetland areas for the water to accumulate in? When we’re gone and our children are even gone, did we do things that were right for the problems that we see facing us in the future?

You’re listening to Heavy Weather. In the second half of this program we look at how climate change is creating new challenges for urban communities, as they recognize the urgency to think and act sustainably.

Kathleen Dean Moore: We owe the future generations both human and non-human, a world that’s at least as rich in possibility as the one that was left to us.

Environmental ethicist Kathleen Dean Moore is a philosophy professor at Oregon State University.

KDM: And if that’s the case, then the things we’re doing to the land now are a gross violation of our obligations.

Rex Burkholder: When you look at the climate change maps and what the impacts might, North America is one of the least impacted areas in the whole world and yet we cause twenty-five percent of climate change.

Rex Burkholder is a council member of Metro, the regional government for Portland and the area surrounding the city.

RB: Lima, Peru, a city of 8 million, relies on high glaciers and ice fields in the Andes as their main water source. They’re almost gone because it’s getting too warm for the snow to stay. And you look at who produced the CO₂, they produce hardly anything compared to what we produce.

KDM: We realize that the old way of living can’t be sustained. How can these structural institutions be dismantled and reimagined?

KS: Well, we have to rethink where we get our goods and services and our food from. Where we get our energy from. And we have to think about how we can diversify that as much as possible.

Ecologist Kathleen Sayce.

KS: So that we’re not striving for the cheapest local point of distribution, we’re striving for the most durable and resilient points of production and points of distribution.

Ethan Seltzer: Making marginal changes in how we currently live is not going to be adequate to the task. We’re talking about really much deeper changes.

Ethan Seltzer is the director of the School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University.

ES: Maintaining the same sprawling land use patterns and just switching out gasoline-burning cars for electric cars is probably not going to create the change that we need. Will it be important and significant? Well, sure because probably about 40% of our carbon emissions in Portland are due to transportation. But on the other hand, all we’re doing really in some cases is transferring the tailpipe from the back ends of our cars to a coal burning plant somewhere in Montana.

The city of Portland has a long history of making conscious sustainable choices. One of the most often cited examples of Portland’s visionary thinking was a decision in the early 1970s to stop a planned freeway from being constructed and instead use those federal dollars to build the city’s first light rail line.

ES: At the same time we have communities in this metropolitan region that continue to expand as if there’s been no change since WWII. It’s about growth, the expectation of an endless supply of cheap gas that will enable people to commute long distances to work, to shop, to play, to socialize and so forth.

Sam Adams: Portland does really well in terms of making the linkages between transportation planning, land use planning and access to transit.

Sam Adams is the mayor of Portland.

SA: The fact that we have an urban growth boundary helps to sort of reign in sprawl and growth.

EdeP: There have been several analyses over the last couple years that have compared what happens to carbon emissions at on a per capita basis at the urban fringe with what happens in an urban center.

Eric de Place, with Sightline Institute in Seattle.

EdeP: Emissions are much higher on the urban fringe. People are driving longer distances and they’re living in larger places, which means more heating and cooling. And to that end we’ve tried to encourage compact development in the Northwest, because it is one of the ways that we can live lighter on the earth.

Oregon’s statewide land use planning has helped confine sprawl around its cities. But while Portland has contained growth along its southern, western and eastern edges, Oregon law has no impact on what happens north of the city, across the Columbia River in Vancouver, WA.

Tim Leavitt: Living in the urban environment isn’t for everybody and when you have four or five kids and you like to have a little bit of backyard, if you cannot afford to buy a home in Portland, where are you going to go? You’re going to look probably outside of that urbanized area and I think in large part many folks did come this way because of that.

Tim Leavitt is the mayor of Vancouver, WA.

TL: So that’s why I say we’ve got to provide options that cater to our community as a whole and not get too narrowly focused on trying to social engineer folks’ behavior.

RB: Good urban development’s actually the salvation of our communities.

Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder

RB: If you have a good, well-designed urban area where people get what they need in their urban area, they don’t need as much energy, they don’t need as much materials per person. So well-designed cities actually have less impact on the natural environment.

According to Dean Marriot, Portland’s environmental services director, climate change is redefining what is good urban design.

DM: We have to be prepared for the fact that our weather is going to change as the climate changes. As we continue to make investments in infrastructure, we need to be sure that, that infrastructure is flexible enough to deal with what’s changing around us. Relying on green infrastructure gives us that flexibility. You know, nature is flexible by definition and grey concrete infrastructure is not.

Mike Houck: We put 1.4 to 1.6 billion dollars into building the combined sewer overflow pipe that is going to remove the sewage that normally flows into the Willamette River. Well, that pipe can only hold so much water until once again we’ll have sewage overflows.

We’re standing in Oaks Bottom with Mike Houck, director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute in Portland. This 160-acre wetland and wildlife refuge along the east bank of the Willamette River is about five miles south of downtown Portland. More than thirty years ago Mike was instrumental in saving this natural area from being drained and filled and turned into a site for a museum or sports field.

MH: It’s by protecting and actually enhancing areas like Oaks Bottom that allows us to take that water that’s going to be coming in, in ever greater quantities and actually infiltrating that water into the ground rather than putting it into pipes.

SA: Every single watershed in the city of Portland gets a failing grade in terms of habitat health, and our goal is to turn the city’s existing streets, roads, roofs to mimic the natural hydrological cycle.

DM: The way we’ve managed storm water in a place like Portland, that gets a lot of rain, has been to channel it in an engineering sort of way, put it in the road, have it send down the culverts, disappear into pipelines and send it to the river for disposal.

Portland’s Environmental Services Director, Dean Marriott.

DM: As much as half the surface area of Portland that was once porous and available for rainwater to soak into the ground is now artificially covered,

so the rivers tend to receive their water dramatically different. It doesn’t come in a slow, metered, filtered way, it whooshes into the creeks. The smaller creeks tend to be blown out, they’re just a remnant of what a creek should be and we’re paying the price here in the urban areas of Oregon and everywhere in the country to try to restore those.

Mary Wahl: We get 37 inches of rain a year in this city.

Mary Wahl manages the watershed services group at Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Service.

MW: If you let the rain go into the ground so that it can be groundwater and be the life blood of a watershed, it’s much less expensive over time, to deal with it that way than have it be a waste.

The job of renaturing the city of Portland primarily belongs to its bureau of environmental services, under the direction of Dean Marriott.

DM: I’ve been here almost fifteen years and we really have accelerated the conversion from a traditional public utility to an environmental services organization. That means not just relying on grey infrastructure, concrete and pipes, but including living systems, to help us deal with the environment.

Vivek Shandas: What we’re looking at is essentially kind of a big bathtub that has soil on the bottom and a number of native drought-tolerant plants that have been planted in the soil.

We’re standing by a curbside swale in a busy industrial neighborhood near the Willamette River in Southeast Portland, with Vivek Shandas, an assistant professor at Portland State University’s school of Urban Studies and Planning.

VS: Since they’re native they’re also used to a lot of water so when the water pours in, as it does in some days in the winter, what we see is the water essentially being funneled off of the road and off of the sidewalk into this big facility.

DM: It actually detains some of the runoff off the street or off the sidewalks, allows it to percolate into the ground while the vegetation and the top layer of soil kind of cleans the impurities naturally.

Along with swales, ecoroofs are becoming a popular method of capturing rainwater on site rather than having it drain off rooftops into storm sewers. An ecoroof consists of a layer of vegetation growing in soil on top of a synthetic, waterproof membrane. Portland already has nearly 10 acres of ecoroofs, including one on the rooftop of the Portland Building where Dean Marriott’s office is located.

DM: They trap the first amount of rain that hits the roof, doesn’t have to be dealt with, doesn’t add water to our local creeks that tend to cause flooding and over the long term they may prevent as much as half of the total amount of rain that would hit that roof from getting off of the building.

Ecoroofs also help cool buildings, by providing shade and insulation that reduces the heat island effect. This serious problem will only worsen as the climate warms. Portland State faculty member Vivek Shandas has been studying what causes urban heat islands.

VS: The biggest contributor of urban heat is concrete. Concrete absorbs heat during the daytime and then at night, the soil or vegetation would absorb heat but lets it go relatively fast, but the concrete holds onto to that heat and lets it go really slow and so by the next day sunrise, it begins to heat up again. So the cumulative effect of that concrete is what creates these urban heat islands, but when we put in this vegetation there’s something that actually intercepts that solar radiation and is able to temper the amount of solar radiation hitting the concrete.

The swales that Vivek Shandas is showing us are part of a pilot project in Southeast Portland that incorporates ecoroofs, curbside and parking lot swales and tree planting to replicate the course and function of a historic creek that flows under the streets of several neighborhoods on its way to the Willamette River.

DM: A lot of people in East Portland don’t even know that they live in a watershed of any kind because there’s no visible streams anywhere around them. Brooklyn Creek Basin is a great example. We’re showing people that historically this use to be a whole network of streams. And so it’s starting to make sense to them now because it explains a lot about why so many buildings have damp basement problems, cause there used to be creeks and springs and seeps in the area and some of it still behaves that way.

VS: We are entering the Brooklyn Basin, in fact just behind this big cedar here is Mt. Tabor.

Brooklyn Creek’s headwaters start on the west slope of Mt. Tabor, a dormant volcano that dominates the eastern skyline of inner Southeast Portland.

VS: The mainstem of the Brooklyn Creek we’ll be entering probably in a few blocks and then we’ll work our way down the creek a little ways, although we won’t know that it’s a creek because we’re walking on the sidewalk and the roads.

DM: So what we’re finding when we go in the area from Mt. Tabor to the Willamette and talk to folks about what used to be there, there’s an appreciation for the fact that they came along later, so they’re more open to ideas about how to make the area more sustainable. I think there’s great potential in the next five to ten years to see a pretty dramatic change in the way the whole community looks.

At the end of our tour of Brooklyn Basin we visit a large bioswale, created several years ago in the corner of a church parking lot. This miniature rain garden gives an idea of what many of the streets in the area will look like in the near future.

VS: There’s a place for water to enter into this central channel and it meanders and ends up at a basin. You can see some bees, we can start seeing a little bit of habitat, a few songbirds jumping around on the paper birch.

DM: Portland’s one of the very few communities in the country that has actually lowered its carbon footprint in the last 20 years. And so as the city redevelops, we’re trying to make sure that it redevelops in a way that’s sustainable over the long term and I think that will have some benefits for how we as a species prepare for climate change and try to head it off.

Guy Dauncey: We’ve got to get a turnaround in our emissions within ten years globally,

Guy Dauncey is an author and activist living in Victoria, British Columbia.

GD: and so preserving existing trees is really important.

SA: When you have more trees and you have more shade in the summer, you have less demand for air conditioning.

Portland mayor Sam Adams.

SA: Less demand for energy for air conditioning when it’s really, really hot means we’re contributing that much less to the climate change problem.

GD: As the global temperature rises you will get warmer summers. The more trees you have in a city, the cooler the temperature in the city, the less the need for air conditioning, the more shading and quite frankly the more delight people take in it all.

RB: 40% of our CO₂ emissions come from cars.

Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder.

RB: So I think we’re going to redesign our cities so that they aren’t as car-oriented. We’ll start removing parking, redeveloping those parking places to be homes and businesses, instead of just parking lots and making the streets much safer.

SA: People don’t want to live next to a freeway interchange. They do want to live next to transit options, especially rail like streetcar and light rail and even if they don’t use it for every trip, that’s a huge plus for everyone that lives in the region, less congestion, less pollution.

EdeP: Because Portland and Seattle are both growing fairly rapidly, there will for the foreseeable future be a demand for transportation space of any kind, whether that transportation space takes the form of a seat on a street car, or behind the steering wheel of a car.

Eric de Place with Sightline Institute

EdeP: It turns out if you give folks wide open highway lanes, many of them will choose to drive on them, just as if, if you build a bike lane, there are lots of people who would like to ride their bicycles. Or if you provide frequent bus service there are lots of people who want to hop on the bus. North America has done a wonderful job of providing people with one really good choice, driving.

Portland often gets cited as an exception to the North American model of car-centricity. Over the past few decades the city has drastically improved its bus service and built networks of light rail and streetcar lines and bicycle paths.

ES: On one hand we’ve got an intentional effort to make the city more sustainable.

Ethan Seltzer, with the School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University

ES: Still, we’re talking in Portland about building a green bridge to Vancouver. Well, what the heck is a green bridge? Fundamentally it’s just a way of furthering the same highway capacity that’s gotten us into this pickle.

The so-called Green Bridge between Portland and Vancouver would replace an aging structure where Interstate 5 crosses the Columbia River. Business communities of both cities are promoting building the widest bridge possible, while sustainability activists question the plan to expand the current six-lane bridge to 12 lanes and some even challenge the need to replace the bridge at all.

SA: If you build a 12-lane bridge, there’ll be a lot of pressure to use all twelve lanes for vehicles. It will fill up very quickly just like the I205 bridge filled up years before they contemplated it. People will think it’s faster and easier to make more trips across the Columbia.

The I205 bridge that Portland mayor Sam Adams is referring to was completed in 1982. When the bridge was built it connected the eastern suburban fringes of Portland with farmland across the river in Clark County. In the eyes of Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt, that makes a big difference in how much sprawl a new bridge on I5 might spawn, since it feeds into the heart of downtown Vancouver.

TL: It’s not as though we’re putting a new bridge in East County where the land is fertile and there are lots of farms. We do have an I5 corridor that is built out and the thought that it’s going to induce further sprawl in Clark County is not something that should heavily impact the design of the project.

SA: The whole purpose of doing a new bridge for me is to get more of those drive-alone trips onto transit and that’s why light rail has been a make or break issue for me. We know that if you double bus service you often times get four times the riders. If we maximize the access to transit from the state of Washington on light rail and other busses, do we need all those lanes or not? Those decisions need to be made together.

TL: You know, if we provide mass transit, folks will make decisions about how they want to get back and forth. I don’t see it as my job or my responsibility to try to social engineer behavior. People will make those decisions themselves. My job is to provide them options.

EdeP: In 2007, voters in the Puget Sound area took a look at a large transportation package. It was on the ballot and it would have expanded the highway network by about 181 lane miles and it would have added a fairly large light rail network. It was the first time in American history as far as we know, that concerns about global warming tipped the scales and voters in Puget Sound rejected it by a fairly hefty margin. In 2008, the Puget Sound leaders put on the ballot just the rail package and it passed overwhelmingly.

VS: We could have the dense environments, we could have everyone reducing their carbon footprint by dramatic amounts and that will certainly help,

Portland State University faculty member Vivek Shandas

VS: but we need to switch now towards an adaptation mentality and start getting a sense for what will more water mean in our region, what will extended heat waves mean, how will we adapt to that?

EdP: We’ve been using flood maps based on how rivers and our hydrological systems have behaved in the past. But they may not behave like that in the future. I think the kind of emerging challenge for planners in Oregon and Washington is to start to figure out how are we going to deal with a situation in which sea level may rise by an inch or a foot or more. What are we going to do if we start seeing really intense spring flood events? Is there a way that we can plan for this that doesn’t bankrupt us and that keeps us more or less protected?

RB: Most of the distribution centers for goods that fill up our stores are located north of Centralia in Washington, and I5 in Centralia is built in a floodplain without proper drainages, the culverts are too small and it was shut down for four days because of the big flood that covered I5.

Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder

RB: You could imagine if we had landslides in the Willapa Hills where the pipeline comes down from the Puget Sound area that carries 80% of our fuel, at the same time that I5 would be shut down because of a flood, you’d really have no fuel to run our city. How do you create resilient cities that have everything you need?

Creating resilient cities means being able to rely on nearby resources. Where a city gets its food and how the food is grown, determines not only its ability to be self-sufficient but also the size of its carbon footprint. Conventional agribusiness is the source of significant greenhouse gas emissions, from the gasoline used to run farm equipment to the huge amounts of methane emanating from the manure lagoons of feedlots. But the surrounding countryside around Portland is still dotted with many small farms. Not only does it take less fuel to get food from these farms to consumers’ plates, these farmers, unlike large agribusiness, don’t practice carbon-intensive methods to grow food and raise animals. Big Table Farm in Gaston, Oregon, about an hour’s drive from Portland, is one of a number of sustainable family farms that have started up in the Willamette Valley in the last decade. Clare Carver co-owns Big Table Farm.

Clare Carver: When you have to farm conventionally and when you have to use petroleum-based fertilizers and when you have to use huge tractors to rake up that hay and make it into huge round bales to feed to the cows that are in confinement, you have to use a lot of fuel. And if you’re just using the grass that’s naturally there and fertilizing it with the cows, you’re actually not using any gasoline at all.

Michele Knaus: The practices that family farmers use are a closed circle.

Michele Knaus, a grassroots organizer for Friends of Family Farmers in Oregon, is staffing an information table at the Moreland Farmers’ Market in Portland.

MK: The inputs that they use tend to come from the land, in other words, manure from the animals will fertilize the fields and what they grow on the fields will feed the animals, so it tends not to be a whole lot of trucking in of feed or fertilizer or pesticides or anything like that.

In his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan features a farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley that has become an inspiring model for sustainable agriculture. Polyface Farm is run by self-described farmer, food choice advocate and dream-doer Joel Salatin.

Joel Salatin: This is where Michael Pollan had his epiphany. In the wintertime when we run out of grass, we feed hay in these hay sheds. Those cows are dropping fifty pounds of material out their backend everyday. Well, if it gets wet, it wants to leach into the ground water and go down the Chesapeake Bay. If it gets dry, it wants to vaporize, we all know what that smells like. What we want to do is lock it down with carbon. As the bedding builds up and we add woodchips, sawdust, old hay, they’re tromping out the oxygen so it’s anaerobic, it’s fermenting. Well, we want it to go through an aerobic composting cycle before we spread it back out on the field. We just add whole shelled corn it to it, the cows tromp it all up, mix it in. So in the spring, when the cows come out, we put in the pigaerators. All pigs have a sign on their forehead will work for corn, they then seek that fermented corn and in doing so, aerate it, flip it all up using their noses to oxygenate it and this whole thing becomes big compost piles all turned by the pigs. So the pigs do all this work, they don’t need petroleum, they don’t need spare parts, they don’t need mechanics, they don’t need minimum wage and what a retirement program, when you’re done with them, you eat them. So there’s no social insecurity.

CC: The animals absolutely work in concert with each other. Where the chickens are right now, the cows just were and that’s very close to Joel Salatin’s model. The chickens will come into the area where the cows were and break up all the patties and they eat all the bugs that are in the cow pies and then they also serve to spread the cow pies out.

Joel Salatin, who has inspired many young farmers, like Clare Carver, models his livestock practices on nature. Rather than allowing his cows to spread out across wide expanses of pasture, he uses electric fencing to herd them into concentrated groups, which he moves to a different piece of pasture every couple days, mimicking how buffalo or elk graze in the wild.

JS: Everyday they get a totally fresh salad bar of diversified, multi-speciated, vegetative fresh forage and it duplicates exactly the moving, mobbing and mowing paradigm of herbivores in nature. If everyone in the United States who had cows would practice this natural model, we would accumulate so much solar energy into biomass that in less than ten years we would sequester all the carbon that’s been emitted since the beginning of the industrial age.

Eating locally and sustainably grown food helps reduce our carbon footprint, learning to grow your own food goes one step further. On the southeast outskirts of Portland, in a low-income, semi-industrialized/semi-rural and forgotten part of town, Zenger Farm is both a sustainable working farm and an educational center for the surrounding community. Jill Kuehler is the executive director of Friends of Zenger Farm.

Jill Kuehler: We’re not only demonstrating what can be done on a farm scale, but also what can be done on a home scale. So when adults come out here for classes on raising backyard chickens or organic gardening, they’re learning what they can do at home, not only about eating sustainably but also about how to maybe grow some of that on their own in their own backyards.

MK: The farmers’ markets have been an amazing piece of reconnecting eaters with where their food have come from, where they can look the farmer in the face and talk to them about their practices.

Michele Knaus with Friends of Family Farmers

MK: I’ve always thought that it’s the duty of the people who can afford to pay more for the right kind of food to go ahead and do that now and that’s what’s going to drive the price down, that’s what’s going to make it more accessible.

JK: One of Zenger Farm’s programs is the Lents International Farmers’ Market. The goal of the market was to provide this neighborhood with access to healthy food and to also provide area immigrant and refugee farmers who may not be able to get into some of those bigger markets with a place to sell. We have the lowest vendor fees of anyone in town.

Eliza Davenport manages the Lents International Farmers’ Market.

Eliza Davenport: One of the things that I really admire about all of the vendors here at the Lents International Farmers’ market is that they are farming maybe on a piece of land in their backyard and then also have another fulltime job. Farming and growing your own food is actually really a part of their daily life whether it’s actually their main source of income or not. I think that’s something that most Americans have totally lost any kind of connection with.

KDM: What is a good life? How can we create it?

Oregon State University philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore.

KDM: Those questions have to be asked all over again, we got it wrong the first time when we thought it was being rich and powerful. Let’s reinvent it. Let’s come together in communities and ask ourselves what is that we most value and how can that be achieved?

ES: In many ways it’s about making different choices

Portland State University’s School of Urban Studies and Planning Director, Ethan Seltzer.

ES: and that’s a far more difficult thing to do and really isn’t so much about technology and is far more about politics and culture and community.

DM: Well, we’re now living with the choices made by previous generations, choices based on the belief that engineering can trump nature.

Portland’s Environmental Services Director, Dean Marriott.

DM: For more than a hundred years people in the Pacific Northwest—and for much of the world, for that matter— have changed the landscape to suit their needs. Well, at the same time we’ve pumped enough greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to change the climate, forcing us to rethink how we interact with our built environment. Now that the burden of past decisions rests with us, what choices can we make to lighten the burden on our children and their generation?