Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia

Prologue: “The Battle in Seattle”

1 Prologue “The Battle in Seattle” On November 30, 1999, Seattle’s wet downtown streets echoed with chanting voices and festive horns. That fall, Seattleites looked up from their lattes to witness a carnival of protesters and impassioned street theater descending on their city. As Christmas drew near and shoppers filled the streets, dignitaries of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) ministerial conference converged on Seattle. The WTO conference drew together trade representatives and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from wealthy member-nations around the world to plan and negotiate far-reaching trade agreements affecting economies, large and small, across the globe. The proud metropolis on Elliott Bay had beat out forty other cities for the honor of hosting an event that would convene over five thousand delegates from 134 countries for the largest trade summit ever held in the United States.1 The host city, Seattle, offered a friendly venue that local leaders believed could contain both the expected protests and the business of world trade and its dignitaries, including a visit by President Bill Clinton. Seattle ’s mayor, Paul Schell, a former community development official instrumental in Seattle’s rise from a provincial West Coast backwater in the 1960s to a “world-class,” high-tech trade capital in the 1990s, captured the mood of anticipation. “Seattle likes hosting these kinds of things,” he told reporters. “We see ourselves as an open city, a center of creative debate.” Rather than close off Seattle’s grid of hilly streets to forestall trouble, the 2 P r o l o g u e mayor approved large demonstrations and even an area downtown near the main WTO venue, the Washington State Convention Center, as a meeting place for protesters. One of the many activists who came to Seattle then remarked how open the city seemed; “It’s almost like giving us a home field advantage,” he said, noting the city’s “great labor energy” and “all these environmentalists.”2 The first giddy moments of direct action politics that day culminated in a long-planned march through the heart of the business district among the gleaming skyscrapers and recently revitalized upscale shopping areas. Crowds filled the streets, not far from the shores of the busy international shipping hub on Elliott Bay. A collaboration between the AFL-CIO and environmental groups in particular, the procession filled the streets with over forty thousand people in the day’s main event.3 Marching in unity, trade unionists protested unfair global labor laws and sweatshops in solidarity with environmentalists dressed as sea turtles and stilt-walkers in monarch butterfly costumes decrying the rollback of environmental laws protecting endangered species.4 The unprecedented public alliance of such disparate groups impressed observers and defined the hopeful and unified tone of the first protest. The New York Times described the mixture: “The protest groups ranged from the well-known, like Friends of the Earth and the Humane Society, to the obscure, like the Ruckus Society and the Raging Grannies.”5 The direct action protesters were indeed a diverse and motley group, challenging aspects of globalization from multiple political positions .6 Journalists reveled in what they saw as an unlikely alliance of treehugging Sierra Club members and blue-collar United Steelworkers who, by the end of the day, would perform a “Seattle Tea Party” by throwing imported Chinese steel and hormone-treated beef, “goods they viewed as tainted by the trade body’s decisions,” into Puget Sound, just blocks from tourists shopping at the Pike Place Market. Echoing another famous anticolonial economic resistance movement, the crowd shouted, “No globalization without representation” as they heaved away.7 The quickening pace and geographical disparities of globalization were appearing increasingly stark to many activists by 1999, and the protesters in the streets of Seattle suggested new connections, the contours and potential power of a contemporary environmental movement that would resist it. In their diversity, these critics of globalization manifested the “three Es” of the post-1990s sustainability movement: the overlapping 3 P r o l o g u e concerns for environment, economy, and equity. The United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development articulated this conception of environmentalism officially in 1987; it was later reaffirmed by the socalled Rio Conference (or Earth Summit) in 1992.8 Each body’s official language stressed the idea of “sustainable development.” While journalists may have been confused about the strange bedfellows marching together in Seattle, these protesters...