Daniel Kemmis
Utne Reader
Daniel Kemmis is the mayor of Missoula, Montana and author of
Community and the Politics of Place. He is a thoughtful
observer and essayist on the notion of what it means to be a
citizen. Kemmis is one of the first city officials in the U.S. to
put the principles of 'communitarianism', a movement that
emphasizes personal responsibility for and participation in the
resolution of community problems, into practice.'A lot of people are working in good faith to improve the
world,' says Daniel Kemmis, the 50-year-old mayor of Missoula,
Montana. 'In fact, they may be working too hard at it.'
It's not the sort of thing a responsible American politician,
particularly a progressive one, is supposed to say. But then Kemmis
has a subtly different understanding of political power and an
unapologetic faith in nature. 'I believe that the world is working
on improving itself,' he says. 'Good cities have a kind of
wholeness and life force of their own, and it behooves us not to
believe that the whole motive force for improvement comes from
us.'
It's a political philosophy hostile to the centralized schemes
for civic development that swell the egos of urban planners but
often render cities sterile. Kemmis likes localized, incremental
improvements that, as he puts it, 'tend to complete themselves.' A
case in point is the development of trails and greenways along
Missoula's Clark Fork River. Rather than push a grand plan, Kemmis
and his allies built a park here, a trail there. 'Then, the more
complete it became, the more people used it,' he recalls. The more
they used it, the more frustrated they became at the gaps in it,
and a very natural kind of political pressure came into being.
Landowners who were holding out came to see that it was
inevitable.'
Projects that unfold 'naturally' within a community, of course,
require a type of consensus building that's sharply different from
political infighting. Kemmis learned a lot about the old politics
when, seven years out of Harvard, he entered the Montana
legislature in 1975. 'I came in as a fighter, an advocate,' he
recalls. 'But the further I went, the more I began to feel that
simply forging a majority and pushing an agenda along wasn't the
answer.'
In 1984 he took a four-year break from the political whirl,
worked on a book called Community and the Politics of Place
(1990), and did a lot of thinking. When he was elected mayor in
1990, he was an unabashed consensus builder. 'At one point I
supported a bridge across the Clark Fork that the business
community wanted and my natural constituency, the
environmentalists, saw as clutter. But I believe the long-term,
sustainable protection of the environment is best served by
building a broad consensus--so no group goes off nursing a
grudge.'
Kemmis sees his new politics as just one part of a broad
movement across the country and the world. 'Even in the face of
violence and decay, I believe a powerful healing is going on,' he
says. 'You can see it in the movement toward mediation rather than
litigation, in neighborhood organizing, and even in a new
willingness here in the West to work out disputes over water
rights. It's nothing less than a reclaiming of the human capacity
for cooperation.'