Kalama Methanol Refinery Case Study

Jasmine’s comments about the OEC at the Stop Fracked Gas PDX meeting raised many questions for me about the organization, and I decided to pursue the question of their participation in the Kalama Methanol Refinery issue with the OEC itself. After spending several minutes on hold after asking for someone who could talk with me about the Stop Fracked Gas PDX coalition and the Refinery in particular, the OEC operator connected me to Jana Gastellum, the climate program director at the council, who was better equipped to answer my questions than her. After asking a few cursory questions about the issue, Jana deflected the question yet again to a list of Riverkeeper, 350PDX, and Sierra Club activists who were more versed on the issue. I changed

tack and asked about the OEC itself and the major energy issues that they had worked on, and she happily opened up about the Clean Electricity and Coal Transition Act of 2016, an anti coal emission bill passed by the Oregon State Senate, which was headlined by the Renew Oregon Coalition of which the OEC was a leading member. Her only answer when I asked why they supported coal and not fracked gas reform was they did not want to do work where good work was already being done, and that they focused on bigger picture, legislative reforms as an organization. I immediately thought back to the ideas of frontiers, the transportation of expertise, and specifically questioned why the OEC did not take a stand on this issue? How do the frontiers of the region, specifically for the OEC, inhibit the transportation of their expertise and select how and where they work? This conversation of resources and frontiers is intimately to how the modern OEC does business, and by examining these factors in the OEC with both Riverkeeper and Mitchell in mind, the implications that expertise and geography have on environmental action as a whole becomes clearer.
The OEC’s work for Renew Oregon against coal seems like night and day when compared to the organization’s response to the Stop Fracked Gas PDX movement, and I plan to use the two as case studies to compare how geography, frontiers, and expertise worked in each situation. The Renew Oregon campaign was one that was focused on a legislative approach from the outset, and the OEC revealed the power and influence that they have over this arena, specifically in the course of the public hearings for HB 4036, the bill that would eliminate coal entirely from use by electrical companies in Oregon. While Renew Oregon was a coalition of politicians, environmental nonprofits, and local businesses (Downeysmith 2015), over the course of the four public hearings surrounding the bill on February 2nd, 4th, 17th, and 22nd of 2016, the OEC had a representative speaking at each of these meetings except for the meeting on the 17th which was significantly shorter than the other ones (Oregon State Legislature 2016). Other environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, were only represented at one meeting, and other groups such as Columbia Riverkeeper and 350PDX were not represented at all (Oregon State Legislature 2016). These meetings and the politics surrounding HB 4036 is innate connected to expertise and frontiers, mainly by looking for the “unprecedented ways” that transportation across frontiers occurs for Timothy Mitchell. The abstraction of the OEC’s previous legislative victories in both Portland and at the state level to this new issue was no problem for them at all. By defining themselves as a political and legislative organization, the transportation of their expertise is then contingent on those types of borders. Both Portland and Salem are in Oregon, and therefore the OEC’s shocking amount of hegemony over the discussion in Salem as compared to other environmental nonprofits can be attributed directly to that. They do not have to cross any true frontiers, unlike Riverkeeper, who defines their expertise around the Columbia, and the Sierra Club and 350PDX, who are Portland specific organizations. It is also important to look to the issue itself: an Oregon State Law that stemmed from issues with Oregon power companies. In other words, this is an issue that occurs strictly within the OEC’s frontiers, and is therefore a no brainer for them, as it is an easy way to abstract and transfer their expertise on legislative issues into yet another arena.
But what of Kalama and Stop Fracked Gas PDX? Jana’s answer was that the OEC did not want to do work where good work was already being done, and Jasmine thought that the OEC were unwilling to stick their necks out for a more uncertain and disputed cause. By looking at this issue through a lens of expertise and frontiers, an entirely new story comes to light. As argued above, by nature of framing their goals and expertise in the Oregon legislative arena, the OEC creates the frontiers beyond which abstraction and transportation of expertise become significantly harder and more complicated. Kalama, as a small town in Washington, is beholden to the legislative power in Olympia, not Salem, and therefore I argue that the OEC does not want to expand themselves across this boundary. Look to the discomfort of the Riverkeeper lawyers in the room of flannel clad retirees. Crossing a frontier is uncomfortable, requires compromise on a significant scale, and even then can still lead to failure. The OEC, a powerful, successful organization with double or triple the annual revenue of Riverkeeper or 350PDX sees no reason to go through this trouble. In the process of securing themselves as the de facto environmental organization in Oregon, and in Salem in particular, they have unwittingly boxed themselves in, and unlike Riverkeeper, are unwilling to struggle with the discomfort that comes with abstracting outside of that area of expertise.
ⅠV
Frontiers are demarcated as fixed lines, the movement of a population and goods across those lines is controlled in unprecedented ways. (Mitchell 2002:12)

Timothy Mitchell’s definition of frontiers gives them an almost axiomatic quality, that they are something for organization to work around, and that they are created by some entity that we cannot truly grapple with.

I hope that over the course of my analysis, I have shown that in the case of environmental activism in the Pacific Northwest, that could not be further from the truth. The process of choosing what expertise a group wants to be able to transport and the infrastructure that is required to create that expertise in the first place limits how it can travel, specifically, that it cannot be transported outside of these thematically cohesive spheres without significant compromises and discomfort, or in the case of Riverkeeper—whose natural expertise is founded on and therefore constrained by the Columbia—who were forced to destroy the traditional delineation between expert and lay person. For the Oregon Environmental Council, these sacrifices are too significant a burden to bear, and they instead are focusing on work within the framework of their expertise. This not to reprimand the OEC for how they stay within their sphere of expertise, or to commend Riverkeeper for their efforts to work outside of it, but to illuminate the complexities inherent in the creation of frontiers, expertise, abstraction, and environmental

strategies.