How Portland Turns You Green

I landed in Portland at 8:45 Monday evening. By 5pm yesterday, I was picking spinach, chard, and lettuce out of a neighbor’s yard and transporting it home by bike. By 8:45pm last night, I was buying bulk muesli at the local Whole Feeds and taking it home in a backpack, no plastic in sight. Environment, it seems, is everything.

I’ve been pretty reactionary towards the whole green thing for a long time, but it’s different when the whole green thing isn’t just a thing. In New York, I’d get press release after press release about this green building or that green building, about how this one was LEED-certified and state-of-the-art and aiming for a platinum and recycling graywater and moving towards environmental considerations. I learned that most of the time that was code for “Sorry our building totally sucks design-wise. Please write about it anyway!”

When I was trying to figure out if I should move to Portland or not, I had lunch with a friend. He’d lived in Seattle for four years. I was surprised; he’s so entrenched in New York, on the board of the Met and the MoMA and the Drawing Center. But he’d lived in the Pacific Northwest, and lived to tell about it. What he told was about the environment, about how once you live in a place like this you’ll never throw a plastic bag away like you used to, never casually toss a bunch of paper in the trash because it’s just easier than sorting through it one last time. I tried to act like this would work on me too but really I believed that it wouldn’t. Once a not-environmentalist, always a not-environmentalist.

Which is why it was weird to find myself buying muesli in bulk and actually contemplating the “save and reuse your plastic bulk bag!” suggestion. Strange to put everything I’d bought right into my backpack, without first dumping it in a bag. Odd to look at a collection of plastic bags and see them as the trash that they are, rather than the helpful necessity I’ve so long believed.

Portland’s environmentalism runs deep. Even better, it runs obvious.

There are bike lanes everywhere. Crossing over onto the west side via the Broadway Bridge, there’s a dedicated bike lane with its own bike light. And then crossing back over Hawthorne and going up the esplanade, there’s another one that brings you back into the heart of the east. When I biked home last night down Tillamook Street, I saw what I know is going to become a familiar sight – two-wheelers criss-crossing blocks and blocks ahead, creating a rhythm for the city the way the subway rumbling under my Manhattan apartment used to do. 

It changes the feeling of the city to know that people are getting themselves around, changes the scale to know that it’s all manageable so long as you’ve got a little energy. I got a little lost a few times yesterday, but all I had to do was find the other bikers and get in line with them. They led me to the right place. And when I lost them, I just turned around.

People here don’t need to identify as bikers, the way they do in New York. It’s just how they roll.  

Photo of naked Portland bikers (who I haven’t found yet but plan to soon) by GregNotCraig