Where the Wild Things Are (with apologies to Sendak)

World's Fair note: This post was written by guest blogger Michael Egan, whom you might recall was the subject of our first author-meets-blogger contribution. See here for background on Egan.

Another tour of author-meets-blogger, though with a twist: here we have an author-meets- guest-blogger-and-former-author.

Affection for wilderness, Roderick Frazier Nash and others have told us, is as American as apple pie (which, as a Canadian, I never really got--the apple pie part, not the wilderness part). The point is: it's key. And now there's a new book on the history of wilderness creation in the Pacific Northwest by Kevin Marsh, an assistant professor of history at Idaho State University and the great sage of the Palouse School.

I sat down with Marsh (in a cyber-kind-of-way) to talk about his new book, Drawing Lines in the Forest: Creating Wilderness Areas in the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, 2007).

The book is described on the UW Press website thusly:

"Drawing boundaries around wilderness areas often serves a double purpose: protection of the land within the boundary and release of the land outside the boundary to resource extraction and other development. In Drawing Lines in the Forest, Kevin R. Marsh discusses the roles played by various groups--the Forest Service, the timber industry, recreationists, and environmentalists--in arriving at these boundaries. He shows that pragmatic, rather than ideological, goals were often paramount, with all sides benefiting."

This is good stuff. See below the fold for part I of a three-part series. Keep in touch throughout the week for the other two parts.

Michael Egan: Tell us a little bit about the book. What is it about?

Kevin Marsh: This book is about a series of places that the U.S. government has labeled as wilderness areas and the people involved in determining what areas of land in the U.S. receive such protected status. It is an account of changing political processes which reflect much of the broader change in American politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, but I have tried to ground those stories in particular places. The book follows a series of case studies in overlapping chronological order of debates over specific wilderness areas in national forest lands in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and Washington.

ME: Where does it start?

KM: It begins with a local effort on the part of the Willamette National Forest in Oregon in 1951 to redraw the boundaries of the Three Sisters Primitive Area in order to open up more forest lands to logging operations as a way to supply the booming demand for lumber in the post-war years. A local contingent of hikers, scientists, labor organizers, and university faculty organize in an effort to stop the reduced protection for these forests. Although public hearings and a series of articles draw national interest to the debate, the U.S. Forest Service moves forward with its plans unaltered. Not even the timber industry has much say in this process, even though it is carried out ostensibly for its own interests. This was an era when federal agencies made decisions for "the greatest good" with little oversight from the democratic process. In the case of national security and nuclear development, that era of unchecked bureaucratic authority would continue into the 1970s, but for the Forest Service, it was quickly coming to an end. Some observers at the time noted that the public outcry against institutional arrogance demonstrated in the Three Sisters case led directly to passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Howard Zahniser, the executive secretary of the Wilderness Society and main author of the Wilderness Act testified at the Oregon hearings in 1957 and later pointed to that debate as a turning point, leading to passage of a national wilderness system controlled by Congress.

ME: Is there a thread through the book?

KM: Yes. In each case study I use--the North Cascades and Glacier Peak region of Washington State, the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness Area, the Alpine Lakes, the battle over French Pete Creek Valley, and the 1984 wilderness legislation for both Oregon and Washington--I emphasize a series of themes: wilderness debates focused on precise areas of land and how to use those places rather than on abstract ideological concepts, and that through these decades, the process of defining wilderness areas was increasingly controlled by growing numbers of involved citizens (including those in the timber industry) at the expense of the bureaucratic autonomy of the Forest Service, which dominated the story prior to 1964.

ME: "Drawing Lines" is suggestive of a rather complex dance between different players, but also the distinction between what counts as wilderness and what counts as exploitable resources...

KM: I think it is important to look at both sides of that line to fully understand the complex dance and the various players you mention. Most accounts--popular and scholarly--of wilderness have emphasized only what ends up inside those boundaries. In these stories, the timber industry or other groups interested in resource extraction from public lands becomes a simplified opponent to wilderness protection. The documents I looked at from leaders of the timber industry in the Northwest and their lobbyists in Washington, D.C. show that they rarely took the position of blanket opposition to wilderness. Mostly, they got involved in promoting wilderness bills as a way to increase their influence over where the final boundaries would be drawn. Putting those boundaries on the map protected some remarkable areas from development, but doing so released far more acres to resource extraction. This, the industry hoped, would promote long-term stability for them, a supply they could rely on, free from the administrative limbo of roadless or de facto wilderness. When Gerald Ford signs the law creating the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in Washington despite the recommendation of his advisors and the Forest Service for a veto, the lead lobbyist for the timber industry writes to him in "deep appreciation" for his decision "which reaffirmed the desirability and necessity for timber management in the lands surrounding the actual wilderness area."

It's important to understand all the players involved in these debates partially to help realize how important those boundaries have been. All sides invested a lot of time, resources, and creativity in lobbying to get the final boundaries where they wanted them. The values represented on both sides of those lines are not arbitrary; they are very real and distinct. But they also represented two incompatible forms of land use, so there was a need for a boundary dividing them. The crux lay in where to draw the lines.

Continues with Part II here....

Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism.
Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy.
Author-meets-bloggers III: Saul Halfon on population policy, demographic science, and women's empowerment.