Last year, I wrote about the effort of a small environmental organization based in Seattle to create a quality-of-life index that will rival, or at least act as an alternative to, economic indexes such as the gross domestic product (GDP) and the Dow Jones industrial average.
Well, by George, they've done it. Called the Cascadia Scorecard, it measures seven trends in British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, the historic Oregon Territory -- a region often called Cascadia by cross-border visionaries.
Keeping an eye on this part of the world is not new for Northwest Environment Watch founder and executive director Alan Durning. Since 1994, he has used numbers in fascinating ways to tell us what condition our condition is in. He's just getting more sophisticated, zeroing in, like a 21st-century numerologist, on numbers with real power.
The scorecard measures health, economy, population, energy, sprawl, forests and pollution. But it ends up doing more than that -- it measures the difference between the United States and Canada.
"It's a fascinating natural experiment," says Mr. Durning, who, speaking of sprawl, is tall and rangy, and sprawls across one of my office chairs like an ungainly suburban development. "What if you take a region with so many similarities and put them under two political regimes and see what you get?"
Good question. It's a West Coast cliché that Vancouver and Seattle are twins, but it's our differences that turn out to define us. Take health, for instance. One of the best measures of health is life expectancy, and it turns out that B.C. residents have the second-longest life span in the world. A B.C. baby born in 2002 can expect to live for 80.7 years, and if the trend continues, we'll catch up to Japan by 2006. While people in the U.S. part of Cascadia live 12 months longer than other Americans, British Columbians live 2.5 years longer than their Cascadian counterparts below the 49th parallel.
The authors of the scorecard admit it is tempting to attribute our longer life span to universal health care, but studies show health insurance doesn't guarantee health, and spending on medical care doesn't correlate with health. They are inclined to focus on some of the other numbers that define us. In Oregon and Washington, deaths from diabetes, which is closely linked to obesity, have tripled and doubled respectively. Here in B.C.? The scorecard makes a surprising contention: "British Columbia's more pedestrian-related urban design may explain why obesity is about one-third less common in the province than in the Northwest states."
Sprawl is a point of differentiation that Alan Durning finds particularly powerful. In the United States, the federal interstate freeway system has led cities, and that includes Seattle and Portland, to spread out. As Vancouver has avoided committing itself to a freeway system, its core has become one of the mostly densely populated in North America, which means fewer car trips, more pedestrian traffic, greater use of mass transit, less pollution and healthier people. Because of all those factors, we consume one-third less energy than our neighbours directly to the south -- but twice as much as German citizens, so we shouldn't feel smug.
Maybe I find this stuff fascinating because it helps me get in touch with my inner nerd, but I think Alan Durning and company have found a way to get at some home truths that are obscured by the daily noise from The Donald, Martha Stewart and Todd Bertuzzi. The authors call it "slow news" that "shapes the future more than fleeting, headline-grabbing events: the routine . . . building of new houses that happens citywide on a day, for example, usually has more lasting effects than a house fire that draws TV cameras."
In the research, they have also found hard news that has made big headlines in the United States: The researchers found levels of toxic flame retardant in the breast milk of Puget Sound mothers they were monitoring to be 20 to 40 times higher than in mothers' milk in Japanese and European women. The retardants, known as PBDEs, close chemical relatives of banned PCBs, have been found to impair memory, learning and sexual development in laboratory animals. So far, only one of 10 stations has reported in B.C., and the levels are a 10th of those in the United States. We'll have to wait until the summer for the final figures.
On balance, B.C. has a better report card than its U.S. counterparts. We fall behind on median income and unemployment numbers, which the scorecard puts down to the decline in resource industries, struggling Asian trading partners, and trade disputes with the United States.
Still, as he adds up the numbers, even Alan Durning, a deeply entrenched Seattle denizen, would rather live in Vancouver than Seattle, and that's despite Todd Bertuzzi. The numbers don't lie.