Formulating a plan to clean up the Portland Harbor Superfund site is only the most recent chapter in the Willamette River’s sullied past. Ever since Europeans settled in the Willamette Valley, people have been dumping their waste into its most prominent and useful water feature.
During the mid-20th century, the river was at the center of a clash between early environmental advocates who wanted the river cleaned up and industry and municipal interests that resisted any change to the status quo.
Few narratives from this time in the river’s past have staked out a place in history, leaving much of this story buried deep in Oregon’s archives.
As a graduate student at Portland State University, James V. Hillegas-Elting began to unearth this nuanced story. His fascination with the river began as a 30-page paper, then his master’s thesis in 2009, and now his first book, “Speaking for the River: Confronting Pollution on the Willamette, 1920s-1970s.”
Hillegas-Elting will be at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25, where he’ll share some details from this lesser-known past.
His discipline as a historian is apparent in his book, as is his appreciation for Oregon’s once-pristine and ever-changing environment.
He grew up in Siletz, a small coastal town a few miles inland from Newport, and today he lives in Portland’s Concordia neighborhood with his wife and three kids.
As an independent consulting historian, Hillegas-Elting’s work continues to take him back to the Willamette River, only now he’s digging into site history for law firms representing different players in the battle over the Superfund site.
Street Roots sat down with Hillegas-Elting at a coffee shop in Old Town, not far from the river’s edge, to talk about his book and the relevance of the Willamette River’s past to Oregonians today.
Emily Green: What did you learn about the Willamette River’s history that most surprised you?
James V. Hillegas-Elting: There is the actual, physical watershed, and then there are stories that human beings tell themselves about that watershed.
One of the things I learned was how complex the river system had been prior to contact with European settlers – how much a braided, meandering system it was, and how many oxbows there were in the river and the bends and how dynamic it was over time, because there were no dams and headwaters. It was fascinating to see those kinds of changes.
I start the book tens of millions of years ago because it’s that foundation, layer upon layer of time, that got the watershed to a place where, when white people came, they looked at it and brought their values to it and said, “This is an Edenic place; we need to settle here; we need to have farmsteads here; it already has a lot of stuff that we want, but we need to modify it so it fits our cultural values.”
Another fascinating bit to me was how the Native cultures here managed the landscape for 2,000 years to get it to a place where when white people came and saw it, they wanted it. And how quickly the water quality degraded once white people came here.
Within a generation of white settlers coming here, the river was appreciably degraded. It was the cultural values that white people brought with them, and then the technologies and their relationship with the landscape that led to that.
But those values started to change, I propose, by the mid-1920s. There was a critical mass of prominent white folks who got together and said, “This is too much, this has got to stop.” So there was this conflict where you had the status quo European settler values that brought the degradation to begin with; then you had this other mindset.
E.G.: When was the river at its worst, and how bad was it?
Hillegas-Elting: That would have been in the late 1940s and into the ’50s. During that period, I describe water pollution as being on a treadmill. The combination of things got to the point where in the 1950s, sewage treatment was occurring, Portland was building a treatment plant, the Sanitary Authority really started to get the pulp and paper mills to stop dumping directly, and so society was doing enough to keep the river from getting any worse, but it wasn’t quite getting better yet.
There’s one resource that’s invaluable on the Oregon State University Archives website. It’s a 1940s color, silent film, where pollution advocates went from the headwaters of the Willamette, all the way down, and they show how the water goes from being pristine to being completely trashed when they get to Portland Harbor. And it’s fascinating. You can see sewer outfalls spewing raw sewage; you can see dead rats and dead fish floating with sawdust and toilet paper. This is just right out here.
E.G.: We should talk about the significance of former Oregon Gov. Tom McCall, who was a Republican, and his film, “Pollution in Paradise.” It comes up a lot in your book, but I doubt most Portlanders younger than 45 or 50 know much about the film or about McCall’s environmental impact on the state. In brief, what do you think people should understand about McCall and his relationship to the river?
Hillegas-Elting: Tom McCall was a very important person in the history of politics and the environment in the state of Oregon – actually, really, in the country. And the things he did, not just for water pollution and the Greenway efforts, but other aspects of environmental history in Oregon, they are very important and very foundational and, at the risk of overstating something, very significant in providing a voice, persona and an image and an impetus – because he was a governor – for environmental concerns that many Oregonians at the time had increasingly.
But to me, one does not need to overblow or put out of context what he’s done. I think he gets too much credit, and I think it’s because it’s easier to tell a narrative: “Not much happened with water pollution, and then Tom McCall came around and things got better.” It’s easier to tell that narrative than to say, well, there were all these groups involved, and it took them many decades, and they had to figure out how to finance it, and they had to figure out how to pass laws, and they had to create the Sanitary Authority. Suddenly people’s eyes start glazing over if they’re really not a wonk about it. So I think Tom McCall gets over-elevated. He came toward the end of the low-hanging-fruit era, which is the era of addressing specific point-source pollution discharges that were focused much more on dissolved oxygen and bacteria.
E.G.: When we say “point source,” we mean industry dumping waste directly into the river?
Hillegas-Elting: Or municipalities. Basically, when you’re going down the river and you see a pipe, that’s a point source. The runoff from agriculture or a parking lot is much harder to deal with. So Tom McCall came at the end of that phase, and he helped push it over the finish line. But there were 40-odd years of advocates – David Charlton, Edgar Averill and others who I write about in the book, who spent many, many decades and hours of their life pushing to get it to a place where it could be pushed over the finish line.
It’s a disservice to democracy itself, to citizen activism itself, to the empowerment of a broader community of people who are all agents. It’s disservice to that whole idea, if suddenly people can prop up a savior – whether that’s a great white male savior or not – but an individual above everyone else, when actually that individual’s work is beholden to the whole base of the pyramid upon which he or she is doing the work.
(Other notable advocates included in his book include William J. Smith, Byron G. Carney and Dorothy McCullough Lee.)
E.G.: Are there any other myths or misgivings that you would like the opportunity to talk about?
Hillegas-Elting: My book really covers those early advocacy efforts, the point source stuff, and from that perspective, the river is drastically cleaner than it had been at any time since circa 1860. But, that’s not to say – and the Superfund is an example of it – how many persistent toxics still reside, particularly in the sediments.
E.G.: Do you let your kids swim in the Willamette?
Hillegas-Elting: I wouldn’t say no to that. We haven’t. I personally wouldn’t swim in the Willamette, up here. I have upriver of Springfield. It’s more of a personal thing. I know how relatively clean it is; I still would prefer not to – I mean it’s not as clean as the Siletz River was in the ’80s (where he swam a kid). It’s not as clean as it is above Springfield. So I just personally make a decision not to, but I know plenty of people who do.
FUTHER READING: What the experts have to say about swimming in the Willamette River
E.G.: It struck me how industry reps were defending pollution, saying it wasn’t harmful, back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s – things like dioxin, DDT, Agent Orange. We’re hearing a lot of the same things today about aerial pesticide spraying and agricultural runoff. We can look back now and see that those chemicals we were debating 50 years ago were harmful. Do you think in another 50 years, we will look back at the dialogue that’s going on now in the same way we look at the dialogue from 50 years ago?
Hillegas-Elting: It was fascinating to me, seeing those reports, where the pulp and paper industry is saying, “Our wastes are not harmful. In fact, they are probably beneficial to fish because they have all this organic material in it.”
In hindsight, we can say it was harmful. But the advocates at the time couldn’t have said that because there was no empirical evidence one way or another.
A fundamental part of our American culture, that I personally think is an extreme detriment to all of us then and now, is rather than using the “at least do no harm” perspective, our capitalist society says, let’s go ahead forth into this, whether it’s genetic modification, pesticide spraying, dumping x, y, z substance into the watershed – we’ll default to doing it, and then if there is a harm to it later on down the road, we’ll think about changing it.
Industry didn’t have the evidence to disprove the pollution was harmful, but they didn’t need that evidence because the default mechanism is to say unregulated capitalism is the way to go. That’s our country’s default, then and now. That’s one of the reasons advocates picked up that mantle, starting in the mid ’20s, and said, you know what? We have to get quantitative empirical evidence about this stuff so we can go back and force the polluters to stop doing it. And that’s what they did.
Denial about climate change, CFCs, the tobacco industry and acid rain – it’s a pattern that capitalist industry has. It’s part of the very DNA of that worldview that I think as Americans we at least contribute to. Yes, 50 to 100 years from now, yes, people will be looking back and their minds are going to be boggled at how myopic and heads-in-the-sand we were about all kinds of stuff.
E.G.: Do you think the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to clean up the Superfund site is sufficient?
Hillegas-Elting: My perspective is society would never tolerate how much it would really cost to clean it up. Even in the most liberal interpretation of “let’s get in there and really clean it up,” you quickly get to a place where you’re talking tens of billions of dollars, and the economics themselves cannot support that.
I think the breaking point is fairly low because as a society, we don’t truly value that, because if we did, then it would be different. What we truly value is comfort, convenience, cheap stuff.
E.G.: I watched “Pollution in Paradise” on YouTube, and below it, a viewer going by “Mack Pines” posted this comment: “Amazing how in 50 years Oregon went from polluting rivers to one of the greenest places in the country.” What comes to mind when you hear a comment like that?
Hillegas-Elting: Self-congratulatory propaganda for people to convince themselves that things are all right.
Yeah, Oregon did some good stuff, but Oregon wasn’t the only place where good stuff was happening in terms of addressing environmental issues that were affecting human health and well-being. Other municipalities, other states, other regions, other countries were starting to do more proactive, bigger-picture holistic type stuff from circa 1960s forward, so Oregon is not unique in that regard.
But the work is by far not done, so when I see comments like that, I just think someone needs to feel good about something, and I see that and I say to myself, that person isn’t looking at it from a historical perspective. It’s a self-congratulatory or wishful-thinking sort of perspective.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
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