Emily Brock

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to Enviromental History online. About 698 words from this article are provided below; about 10973 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to Environmental History, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Environmental History, you can:: • get subscription information here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of Environmental History (8.1-present).
Instititutions can:: • get subscription information here to receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Emily Brock | The Challenge of Reforestation: Ecological Experiments in the Douglas Fir Forest, 1920–1940 | Environmental History, 9.1 | The History Cooperative

The Challenge of Reforestation: Ecological Experiments in the Douglas Fir Forest, 1920–1940

SINCE THE seventeenth century, writers have linked the economics of lumber to the natural history of forests and trees.¹ Understanding how a forest grows was seen as the first step in understanding how one could harness the forest's production of lumber. I examine one place where the intersection of the economics of lumber and the biology of trees is especially tightly coupled: the regeneration of forestlands. If a reliable flow of lumber is to be assured, the regeneration of forests is an obvious necessity, but recreating a forest after it has been obliterated by clear-cutting requires more than simply planting new seeds where the old trees had been. In the Pacific Northwest, the complexities of this problem first were realized in the early 1920s, as the region's lumber industry began to falter economically. Despite efforts to control the flow of lumber, reforestation of Douglas fir forests in this period were generally not successful.	1
Examining forest and range management in the ponderosa pine forests of eastern Oregon, Nancy Langston concluded that "there is no way to work with the land and not end up changing it;" there is no way to reassemble the forest as it once had been.² By definition, sites of reforestation are no longer "wild." Clear-cutting and other human activity on a site made reforestation necessary, and even if reforested, that site never can regain its original wildness in the eyes of many observers. Such a site, no matter how natural it appears or how sophisticated its restorers' technique, has been permanently altered by human intervention. Langston and others have examined reforestation as a component of forest management, and as such have argued that anything less than a successful recreation of the original forest is a failure of management.³ However, reforestation efforts most often have not been intended to recreate the primeval forest, but to stave off erosion, retain game animals, or prepare for another harvest of trees in decades to come. Marcus Hall recently has termed such partial reforestations, rehabilitations, and restorations as "repair." Even if they are imprecise or ineffective, such repairs can be important for their impact on both the landscapes and the people involved. Environmental historians often have neglected stories of reforestation, restoration, and rehabilitation of damaged ecosystems. Conversely, historians of ecology often have neglected the effects of ecological science on the interactions of humans with their landscape. Recently, historians and others from across the environmental-studies spectrum have begun to examine these imperfect repairs more carefully.⁴ These writers generally have looked at either the environmental effects or the ecological basis of reforestation and restoration. Yet both are important to explore. By bridging the distance between environmental history and the history of ecology, a more complete understanding of the history of the Douglas fir forests of the northwest can be gained.	2
This article considers the process of establishing techniques and theories for repairing Douglas fir forests as important as how successful these techniques were. Theories of plant ecology intersected with the practical concerns of forestry in the 1920s and 1930s, and in turn both deeply affected the Pacific Northwest lumber industry. Academic plant ecologists' theories informed foresters' expectations of Douglas fir regeneration. Pacific Northwest foresters experimented with reforestation techniques that were rooted in ecological theory but branched out in directions ecologists had not considered. This article examines some of the most important attempts by forest workers to develop a viable system of reforestation in the Douglas fir forest in the 1920s and 1930s. These men, trained in scientific forestry, struggled with finding a balance between artificial intervention and natural regeneration. The demands of corporations and federal, state, and local governments were also important in shaping reforestation techniques, since these parties determined the techniques' implementation. I argue that the unsuccessful and partially successful reforestation efforts of this period deserve not just to be lamented but examined for their own sake. By looking at how and why reforestation failed, we can better understand the motivations driving the foresters and lumbermen, and begin to understand their conceptions of the forest as a whole.	. . .

There are about 10973 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.