Preface 1999: The Urban Maelstrom

“The appearance of the ocean . . . had something very unusual about it, ” recounted one of Edgar Allen Poe’s narrators. As he watched from a cliff, the sea below began to move. “This current acquired a monstrous velocity. In five minutes the whole sea . . . was lashed into ungovernable fury. . . . Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion-heaving, boiling, hissing-gyrating in gigantic and innumerable velocities, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents. ” [1]

The abrupt shift in the sea’s appearance marked the opening of the Maelstrom, a legendary whirlpool off the west coast of Norway. Nothing that fell within the Maelstrom’s reach could resist the suction of the vortex or the transformation that it wrought on all that it swallowed. Ships vanished. Hapless whales and bears were dragged howling into the hole. The trunks of firs and pine trees, “after being absorbed by the current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon them. ”

What Poe describes as a self-generated phenomenon of nature can serve as a metaphor for the effect that great cities have upon the natural world. As a city grows, so does both its reach and its power to transform the nonhuman world on which its people depend. Imagine the surface of the globe over the past five thousand years puckered with a succession of vortices called not Maelstrom but Babylon, Thebes, Athens, Persepolis, Carthage, Rome, Chichen Itza, London, New York, Tokyo, Jakarta, Las Vegas. Some have faded, others diminished in their attraction, but their overall number, and their ability to pull in, change, and waste whatever they absorb, has accelerated exponentially with the technological innovations that they generate. Ecologically speaking, the earth’s surface is today one “phrensied convulsion” of competing whirlpools. No area on the planet is now free from the process of global urbanization. Wilderness has ceased to exist.

Scholars have long noted that cities are humanity’s transformers. Few, however, have observed their awesome destructive power. The majority of books on urban history celebrate the city-particularly the imperial cities of the past-as the locus of civilization itself, as the hothouse of technological, spiritual, economic, and artistic progress. Architectural monuments, lordly gardens, hotels de luxe, and the deeds and thoughts of great individuals have traditionally constituted the body of history classes. All of that is well worth study, for the city at its best transforms the human animal by civilizing it as it furnishes an escape from the harsh exigencies of nature. Moreover, the city provides valuable goods and services to both its citizens and the hinterlands upon which it draws. All this and more I grant. But to understand the city’s environmental impact requires one to abandon the usual anthropocentric perspective and to seek others overlooked or edited out of the record by those who write it.

The historian Tacitus quotes a British chieftain as saying that the Roman legions “make a desolation and call it peace, ” but being on the winning side gave Tacitus the final word. [2] Plants and animals must rely upon human advocates, and, with rare exceptions such as St. Francis, these have not existed until very recently. Felled forests, falling water tables, and soil quietly slipping to the sea or crusting with salt have never been as dramatic as war and revolution, though their ultimate effect is far more disruptive upon cities and nations in the long run.

Imperial San Francisco is a different kind of history. It owes much to Lewis Mumford. Mumford (1895-1990) was unquestionably a great lover of cities, especially turn-of-the-century Manhattan, where he grew up and which he called his university. He did not, however, ignore the shadows that cities cast across the land on which they draw, nor the pathological tendencies that develop within the urban core as their growth becomes cancerous. He well understood that there exists a critical ecological relationship between the city and the countryside, a relationship as applicable to modern San Francisco as to ancient Rome. For Mumford, the past was forever present as well as insistently instructive. Yet despite his voluminous writings on the subject and the urgency with which he expressed himself in his later years, Mumford’s ideas are today not much better understood by scholars than by laypeople.

 Italians, too, with their long experience with city states, have understood this relationship, though more in economic than ecological terms. For them, the civilized world was a duality made of the city and its contado – that is, the territory that the city could militarily dominate and thus draw upon. The contado provided the city with its food, resources, labor, conscripts, and much of its taxes, while its people (the contadini) received a marketplace and a degree of protection in return. The contado needed that protection, for Italian cities continually vied with one another to add more territory to their contados, often making neighbor synonymous with enemy. A medieval citizen could, therefore, wish that his fellow townsfolk would stop fighting among themselves so they could fight others: “If only envy would cease, ” one such citizen of Milan wrote, ”they could love one another and take thought in all good faith for their fatherland. Then I firmly believe that they could easily make all Lombardy submit to their domination. ” [3]

I have attempted in Imperial San Francisco to amalgamate and illustrate some of those ideas by examining the radical environmental impact that one city has had on California and the Pacific Basin during the brief century and a half of its existence. World-famed for the beauty of its setting and for its romantic history, San Francisco has largely escaped the harsh judgments to which less lovable cities are subject. Yet many of the processes that produced it are fundamentally identical with those that produced other cities throughout history. These include the extension of advanced remote-control technologies to extract food, minerals, timber, and, above all, water and energy from the contado, as well as the use of constantly improved military force to assure and expand that flow toward the center.

The city does nothing of its own accord, however; it is driven. The public knows little about the linked dynastic elites that, through their control of information, create the unifying beliefs and blindnesses that motivate truly imperial cities and, in more recent times, the nations that are their secured contados. By controlling the flow of information to the populace and blacking out that which concerns itself, an urban aristocracy makes both city and contado collective tools to perpetuate and expand its wealth and power. However elites may disagree and vie among themselves even to the point of murder, they can all agree that the city must grow-and its land values rise-to assure the continuation of their dominion. This theme came to intrigue me when, as a journalist and TV producer in San Francisco, I discovered what could not be said in public but which the elite commonly discuss among themselves. The importance of growth to the urban aristocracy is introduced in chapter 2 and expanded upon in the core section, part 2, “The Thought Shapers,” and is literally illustrated by newspaper and magazine graphics throughout the book.

By examining the long-ignored costs of city building, Imperial San Francisco necessarily violates some of the most cherished myths of both the city and the nation that its leaders have sought to use for their own advantage. In the following pages, I will attempt to reveal a structure that, I believe, precedes and supersedes the economic system known as capitalism-an invisible structure that I call the Pyramid of Mining. Because this artifice is so vast and complex in its operation, I have tried to embody it in a series of stories that can only hint at the dynastic, corporate, and political alliances that enable some cities to claim and acquire empires as their rightful due.

The moment that San Francisco’s expansive impact began can be fixed with precision. With a maximum population of about eight hundred, the Mexican village called Yerba Buena near the mouth of San Francisco Bay had as negligible an effect on the Pacific as a coastal eddy. On January 30, 1847, the alcalde Washington Bartlett changed the village’s name to that of the famous bay on which it faced. Less than a year later, James Marshall picked a nugget of gold from the American River in the Sierra foothills, and, in doing so, initiated the great California gold rush that gave instant value to San Francisco’s real estate. The city that shared the name of the gentle St. Francis of Assisi then began to act like Poe’s Maelstrom, drawing everything from the Rockies to China, and from Alaska to Chile, into its growing maw. Far more than whales and bears were pulled toward extinction as the city’s transformative power grew. Forests were leveled on all Pacific shores, rivers and lakes vanished, and the bay from which the city took its name was filled, poisoned, and plundered, while wildlife and natives within the vortex were speedily exterminated. Secondary cities were established to feed San Francisco. Rival cities would be literally incinerated with the latest developments in military hardware.

This remarkable disruption has long been veneered by a romantic myth that historians have only recently begun to chip away. Only recently, too, has a tiny fraction of the deferred bill for a century and a half of urban expansion come home in the form of Superfund cleanup costs. Seldom, if ever, are those costs traced back to the city’s financial district, and their actual extent can never be known or translated into the radically impoverished criteria of money value. The environmental consequences of building San Francisco have merged with the costs of other cities to the ever-growing peril of the earth’s life-support systems. Cities are humanity’s most complex artifacts. As they grow, their internal processes and external effects become so intricate that no human mind or computer can follow them. Yet, by modern standards, the brief history of San Francisco provides a somewhat manageable example of the consequences of urban conquest. For all the imperial pretensions of its leaders, San Francisco’s population has never exceeded eight hundred thousand nor, since r 8 5 6, a land area of more than forty-seven square miles-meager by comparison with New York or London. Even at that size, however, it is an extrdordinarily complex creation. That complexity obscures the city’s subjugation of the contado that sustains it and the consequences of its simultaneous domination of and dependence upon that land.

Before examining San Francisco in detail, it will therefore help to look at the city that spawned it, Washington, D. C. The art and architecture, as well as the political rhetoric, of Washington, look back, in turn, to the eternal model of Rome itself, as have the leaders of imperial San Francisco from its very inception. Like the great cities of the past that it hoped to emulate and surpass, the self-styled Mistress of the Pacific was conceived and born of the union of iron and gold.

A note on the word contado

The Italian word contado has no exact English equivalent, though country derives from its Latin root. Countryside, territory, and hinterland all approximate its meaning but do not capture the symmetrical relationship of the contado to the city that commands it. The contado contains other cities and villages that owe tribute to the dominant city. Providing the essential resources and labor that power the capital, the contado is the outer ring of the urban whirlpool, but very much of it. For this reason I have used the word throughout the book to convey that relationship.

In the case of a small city such as Siena, the contado is merely local. As a city grows in strength, the nation becomes its territorial emanation. For an imperial city such as ancient Rome or modern Washington-which San Francisco sought to become-the contado is national, continental, or even planetary. The difference is one of size as well as of consequence, just as the mighty Maelstrom differs from a mere eddy.