Collective responsibility: ‘Things can be different if we look beyond biases’

When I moved to Oregon from the industrial East Coast in 1981, Eugene was a large town. Today it is a small city, with all the good and bad that entails.

Back then, the air was clean and clear, except for a brief period in August when they burned the harvest residue in the commercial grass fields north of town. Today, field burning is gone and the air is still relatively clean, but we could be smothered in wildfire smoke at any time from June to October.

In the 1980s, downtown was empty storefronts and an empty pedestrian mall covering the central blocks. It was so quiet that according to an account in the local newspaper, a naked hippie showered in the water fountain at the center of Willamette Street and Broadway, and hardly anyone was around to notice.

Today, the fountain is gone and the streets reopened to auto access. Downtown is more vibrant but also struggling with a different problem of too many people with nowhere else to go. The irony of customers sitting at an outdoor cafe, partaking in the latest Pacific Northwest cuisine while 50 feet away a broken human being slumps in a doorway surrounded by detritus should not be lost on anyone.

Forty years ago, there was plenty of affordable housing; the cost of rent or mortgage was relatively commensurate with a person’s earnings. Today, the disparity would be laughable if it weren’t so cruelly large.

College students in the 1980s (such as myself) could pay for their education with a part-time job and extra work in the summer. Today, tuition and fees are so high that even the thought of working your way through school without debilitating loans is absurd.

I could go on, but my point is not to air a list of grievances. Rather, I submit that things can be different if we are willing to look beyond our immediate biases.

This is not the first time we have faced difficult questions. Oregon has a unique legacy, somewhat different from most of the country, and it might be worth taking a look at how seemingly insurmountable challenges were faced by those who came before us.

In the early 1960s, the Willamette River was so polluted from industrial waste that it was deemed unsafe for swimming. Tom McCall, a former Portland newscaster, produced a film called “Pollution in Paradise,” which led to a massive cleanup effort lasting a decade, and was featured in a 1972 cover story for National Geographic.

McCall served as governor from 1967 to 1975, a period that saw innovative legislation and programs such as the Bottle Bill, the Willamette Greenway, land-use planning, the urban growth boundary and the Beach Bill — actually an extension of the early 20th century law in which Gov. Oswald West declared the entire coastline a public highway so that it could not be taken over by private interests.

Oregon became known as such a far-thinking state that in 1974 Newsweek magazine published an article titled “Where the Future Works.” What motivates Oregonians, Newsweek observed, “is no antipathy to private enterprise, progress or growth, but something subtler — a long-building and overriding sense of collective responsibility that doesn’t seem to exist in many other places.”

That same collective responsibility was expected from those thinking of moving here. Gov. McCall took some flak in 1971 for his comment that people coming to Oregon should visit but not stay — a comment that, just like so many viral clips of today, was taken out of context.

McCall was saying that Oregon needed people and business coming in, but not at any price. “Industry must come here on our terms, play the game by our environmental rules, and be members of the Oregon family,” he said. “We lose some this way — and we want to lose that kind of company.”

Today, much of what makes Oregon attractive comes from its livability, a legacy of that far-thinking legislation and collective responsibility. As a result, there are more people, more cars, more visitors with more money and less available land.

The timber industry no longer drives our economy, high tech has never quite lived up to its initial promise and global corporate ventures have arrived with great fanfare, then disappeared after a few years. Some say that the laws from earlier decades need some changes, and perhaps they are right. But that doesn’t mean we have to lose the vision.

As we move forward into the challenges and opportunities for our region — whether it be housing, urban development, energy resources, public services funding, technology use, safety or even pickleball courts — we might think well on our unique Oregon legacy.

What does collective responsibility look like in 2025?