Metronatural: Inventing and Taming Nature in Seattle - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 120

“Just like the Progressive agenda, Metro's agenda benefi ted those with
power.” 126 The triumph of cleaning up Lake Washington involved shift-
ing environmental risk and aesthetically undesirable conditions to a dif-
ferent locale, the Duwamish River, with particularly detrimental impacts
on low-income populations who lacked political power to protest this
strategy.
Beyond the inequitable conditions created by Metro's sewage diver-
sion projects, the regional agency failed in its original mission to control
and direct growth. By limiting its authority to sewage treatment, Metro
promoted a “technical fi x” to resolve the regional growth problem by
creating a mandate for universal sewage treatment and, ironically, facili-
tated more growth in the distant suburbs that could rely on the new inter-
ceptor sewers to serve new community development. Klingle argues that
“Metro's sewers spared the lake but did not rein in unbridled growth. They
merely pushed the waste elsewhere and let the building continue.” 127 The
implicit message of Metro's approach was that environmental problems
could be overcome with a comprehensive regional infrastructure network.
Meanwhile, the region's residents continued to be wary of regional plan-
ning and governance, as evidenced by voter rejection of several efforts
by Jim Ellis and Metro supporters to expand their authority to mass
transit, park management, and other public services in the 1960s and
1970s. 128
Conclusions
The history of Seattle's development from its origins in the nineteenth
century to the 1960s suggests that the city is not as close to nature as its
contemporary Metronatural reputation suggests. Time and local narratives
about the “naturalness” of the city have hidden the massive engineering
projects of Thomson and the municipal government that transformed
Seattle from an organic city of the nineteenth century into the rational,
planned city of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the creation of this
hybrid landscape centered on one overarching goal: economic growth.
Progressive proponents at the turn of the century justifi ed the big engi-
neering projects as a way to improve society by improving their physical
surroundings, but in the process exacerbated existing social inequalities
by benefi ting some while discriminating against others, particularly low-
income, transient, and Native American populations living in the low-lying
areas of the city. Even the triumph of solving Lake Washington's pollu-
tion problems through the creation of a regional governmental body had