Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia

4. Ecotopia

131 4 Ecotopia In the spring of 1974 Richard M. Nixon stood on a platform on the glimmering Spokane River where he addressed a crowd of over 50,000 people at the opening ceremonies of Expo ’74. Thousands of miles from the scandal that dogged him in the other Washington, Nixon took refuge at this mini–world’s fair deep in the Republican territory, Washington’s vast agricultural hinterland once proudly dubbed the “Inland Empire.” In his speech Nixon told fairgoers, “The time has come to get Watergate behind us and get on with the business of America.” Spokane’s local boosters surely agreed with his sentiment. They themselves had put up at least $6 million to build the fairgrounds and bring in acts including the Carpenters and Bob Hope. “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh New Environment” was the vaguely hopeful environmental theme that boosters chose for the fair, which they hoped would revitalize downtown and their fortunes. Expo ’74 brought quickly dwindling federal urban renewal money to the downtown business district, near the river, helping to clean up a polluted industrial area for a waterfront park, a site that had suggested technology’s failures. In the 1970s Spokane was flush with a temporary boom in agriculture, thanks in large part to Nixon’s policy of selling wheat and other agricultural commodities to the Soviet Union. By the fair’s opening day, however, Nixon’s farm policies had in fact already begun a decade-long process that would undermine small farmers in favor of larger, consolidated op- 132 E c o t o pi a erations. Farmers in Washington, as in other parts of the country, had also begun to feel the brunt of the oil crisis. Eastern Washington, no less than Seattle, with its Boeing bust economy, felt the hard times.1 Spokane’s modest fair contrasted sharply to Seattle’s 1962 fair. The tumultuous years between the two world’s fairs help to explain the starkly different utopian visions of urbanism in Seattle and Spokane. At the beginning of the 1960s Seattle’s fair had exuded a kitschy, space-aged technological enthusiasm. Its high-modernist symbols still define the Seattle skyline: the Space Needle, the popular monorail, and a lavishly funded “science pavilion.” Seattle’s fair, the Central Association’s miniature version of Seattle’s possible future, celebrated the promise of Kennedy’s “New Frontier”: the corporate and government alliance of the military-industrial complex that made the Boeing boom possible. Even Elvis Presley came to town to use the exposition as the background for his film It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963).2 Demonstrating less enthusiasm, Expo ’74’s hokey environmental theme underlined the dampened trust in technology and, though only implied, a flaccid critique of the technological society that Seattle ’s fair never questioned. Even the fair’s motto seemed to acknowledge that the damage had been done. Expo ’74’s lowered expectations paralleled the erosion of public faith in large-scale federal solutions, diminished urban spending, and a public’s growing criticism of the enthusiasm for science and technology featured during the Seattle fair a decade before. The fair embodied Nixonian environmentalism. By 1974 the environmental movement had made important strides, in no small part because of Nixon’s efforts to co-opt a popular movement and outflank his Democratic political rivals. The president had signed into law far-reaching environmental legislation.3 Nevertheless, most mainstream environmentalists viewed the fair’s theme and the president’s rhetoric with suspicion. They criticized the Expo for not living up to its muddled environmental image. Even the New York Times noted this co-opted environmentalism: “Visitors find displays that range from sobering messages of man’s mutilation of nature to sales pitches for recreational vehicles.” According to the Times, “no major environmental protection groups” showed up for the fair, and some called it a “disgraceful commercial sellout.”4 Fair officials felt that many of the environmental themes “distressed some visitors,” and they placed musicians and clowns near “doomsday” displays to soften their effects.5 At the same time, mainstream environmentalists complained that the fair’s 133 E c o t o pi a principal exhibitors—Ford Motor Company and General Motors—sent the wrong message for an environmentally themed fair in the middle of an energy crisis. With federal money no longer nearly as available as it had been in the early 1960s, the decentralized...