Book Review

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.	2
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this history lies in the cutover's cultural constructions and paradoxes. To sell their ideas, planners had to offer compelling reasons in readily identifiable themes. Much of the promotional propaganda, namely the work of best-selling novelist James Oliver Curwood, drew on antimodernist celebrations of frontier life. Kates explains the resulting paradox: "[T]he mythology of individualism would be used to garner public support for activities that were essentially collective in nature" (p. 53). And so, advocates of state planning celebrated mythic individualists at the same time that planners were legally prohibiting most frontier activities.	3
Some minor criticisms might be offered. Kates is occasionally repetitive in his language and argument. Additionally, the text begins and ends with several chapters exploring experts and their plans to remake the cutover, primarily by economic and legalistic methods, while the middle chapters focus on the cultural remaking of the region. Although all sections are related, Kates might have integrated them more skillfully. These weaknesses, however, are negligible.	4
Kates offers much, and several audiences will benefit from this fine work. First, residents of the cutover will find this local study insightful and may perceive their region in more complex ways. Second, professors of environmental or regional history will appreciate that this study allows intellectual side trips to investigate other significant areas of study, such as ideas of the frontier, antimodernism, and the changing nature of the state. Finally, specialists in environmental history will value this book's several contributions. In particular, Planning a Wilderness helps fill the historiographical gap between Progressive conservation and postwar environmentalism. In addition, by focusing on a landscape after its most notorious ecological devastation, Kates moves away from the typical declensionist narratives to a study of how people and their institutions confront an abused environment. In this rather short volume, Kates gives us much to consider; Planning a Wilderness merits attention.	5
Adam M. Sowards teaches history at Shoreline Community College in Seattle, Washington. He has published articles on national forests, and on environmentalists, and is currently revising his dissertation about the environmental contributions of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.