Willamette Week
December 3, 2008
By Ethan Smith
The world is staring down a double-barreled disaster. Economic and environmental crises are threatening to blast apart our way of life, if not life itself. President-elect Obama campaigned on the idea of tying America’s economic recovery to its environmental salvation, an idea Portland’s own Spencer Beebe has been preaching for two decades. With a deep green pedigree and a belief that the environment and economy are tightly intertwined, Beebe founded Ecotrust, a collection of Northwest-focused sustainability projects, in 1991 and promptly began proving conservation can be profitable. Seven years later he partnered with community lender ShoreBank Corp. to open ShoreBank Pacific, an eco-minded bank bent on funding environmentally responsible enterprises in the Pacific Northwest—lending money to everything from bamboo hardwood companies to Hot Lips Pizza. WW sat down with this local visionary to talk about banking, politics and saving the world.
-- Ethan Smith