| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region. By James Kates. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001. xix + 207 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $29.95.

What happens to a forested landscape after industry has cut all the trees? How should governments manage the land and people who live or wish to live on it? What cultural meaning can one infuse into such an environment? These are the main questions James Kates pursues in this fine book. 1

Kates, an editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, investigates the "increasing synergies between technical forestry, social engineering, and conscious mythmaking" of the cutover in the 1920s (p. xviii). After the intensive deforestation of the nineteenth century, university and governmental experts sought to revive the region. A search for continuous production emerged as the dominant ethos in the 1920s. This management approach grew simultaneously with the bureaucratic penchant for planning. Reformers such as Richard T. Ely and P. S. Lovejoy confronted the cutover's poor land and weak economic prospects by using the power of the state to manage the region's resources. The collective hope of planners was to apply the state's technical expertise to the cutover and make the region prosper. Through the course of the 1920s, planners eventually recognized new values in recreation and making land unavailable for farming—unique directions in land use at the time. . . .

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