I only became aware of Oregon's Measure 37 when I heard an ad on local radio hawking "How to" kits for bringing Measure 37-like initiatives to "your town." This is a very big deal here in Red America.
In his New Yorker review of Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Malcolm Gladwell suggests just where such actions might lead:
Supporters of the law spoke entirely in the language of political ideology. To them, the measure was a defense of property rights, preventing the state from unconstitutional "takings." ...The thing that got lost in the debate, however, was the land. In a rapidly growing state like Oregon, what, precisely, are the state's ecological strengths and vulnerabilities? What impact will changed land-use priorities have on water and soil and cropland and forest? One can imagine Diamond writing about the Measure 37 debate, and he wouldn't be very impressed by how seriously Oregonians wrestled with the problem of squaring their land-use rules with their values, because to him a society's environmental birthright is not best discussed in those terms. Rivers and streams and forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their history and culture and deeply held beliefs...that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is gone.
Diamond looks at the Norse and Inuit colonies in Greenland. The Inuit survived, the Norse didn't. Why? Diamond thinks its because they clung to their Norwegian ways. They farmed and used the forests for fuel and construction. They didn't adapt to the land they lived on and so they stripped it bare. They clung to their cultural survival without concern for the biological. And in the end, they starved to death. Gladwell again:
The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death... To call Measure 37--and similar referendums that have been passed recently in other states--intellectually incoherent is to put it mildly. It might be that the reason your hundred-acre farm on a pristine hillside is worth millions to a developer is that it's on a pristine hillside: if everyone on that hillside could subdivide, and sell out to Target and Wal-Mart, then nobody's plot would be worth millions anymore. Will the voters of Oregon then pass Measure 38, allowing them to sue the state for compensation over damage to property values caused by Measure 37?
If a Measure 37 could happen in Oregon, where enlightened land-use restrictions successfully limited suburban sprawl and protected coastal habitats, it could happen in my town. And yours. That's what the ad on the radio promised. We best believe it's true.
