| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

*Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000.* By William G. Robbins. Weyerhauser Environmental Books Series. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. xxiii + 414 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)
Oregonians, like other westerners, live in a state where imagined landscapes often outweigh reality in political arenas. The second of William G. Robbins's two-volume, state-level synthesis, Landscapes of Conflict picks up where the first volume, Landscapes of Promise (Seattle, 1997), left off—amidst optimistic visions for Oregon's promise after 1940. It ends with an epilogue that recounts how one native-born child of Oregon leaves but cannot stay away. Commitment to place, Robbins argues, offers hope in a conflicted era, and he directs our attention to "... those individuals and groups who valued civic commitment and stewardship over raw profiteering..." (p. xx).	1
Robbins's environmental history traces conflicting federal, state, and local priorities for Oregon landscapes through the present, using mostly newspaper accounts, official reports, and secondary works. Blind optimism, he argues, facilitated post-war patterns of accelerated rural-urban migration, industrialization, mechanization, and chemical dependencies. William Finley's activist coalition of biologists, treaty tribes, fisheries workers, and recreationalists tried but failed to shake that optimism, unsuccessfully challenging federal proposals for damming the Columbia. The triumphalist, technocratic vision of the Portland Oregonian, and of journalist Richard Neuberger better suited the postwar mood.	. . .

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