Book Review

In this lively and well-written book, Susan Kollin examines the different ways in which Americans have pictured Alaska from the time of its purchase in 1867 by Secretary of State William Henry Seward to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound. She opens her narrative by pointing out that the oil spill "threatened to disrupt" the carefully-constructed image of Alaska as "pure wilderness" and the "last frontier" that had been cultivated and promoted for more than a hundred years, and discusses how the Alaskan tourism industry responded to this threat (p. 2). In the following four chapters, Kollin argues that this image of Alaska was available only to middle-class American men of European descent, and the experiences of the state's Canadian neighbors (discussed in chapter two), of white women (chapter three), and of Native Americans (chapter four) were excluded from the dominant vision of Alaska.	1
In the first chapter, which is the strongest and where the bulk of Kollin's theoretical perspective is explicated, she examines the work of nature writers such as John Muir, Robert Marshall, John McPhee, and Barry Lopez. She shows how the first two nineteenth-century writers established the idea of Alaska as America's last frontier after its Western frontier had vanished, a "sacred site" which needed to be isolated and protected from human contact, including that of the Native Americans living there. McPhee and Lopez are left to struggle within this framework, refuting and rejecting it with only partial success, by pointing out that Alaska is a site of industry as well as nature, a place enmeshed in global markets, not isolated. In the next three chapters, Kollin discusses how the stories of adventure-writers such as Jack London, Rex Beach, and James Oliver Curwood dominated the American imagination of Alaska, excluding the counter-narratives of the state offered by women naturalists like Margaret Murie, and the native voices of the poets Mary TallMountain and Robert Davis. This story is not a surprising one, and parallels in some ways Mark Spence's Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford, 1999), but Kollin's use of literary sources, especially her treatment of the native poetry, is original and thought-provoking.	2
As a scholar of English literature, not a historian, Kollin's approach is to analyse fewer texts in more detail than readers may expect; the chapter on women only deals with Murie and Lois Crisler, a nature photographer employed by Disney to make a wildlife film in Alaska in 1953. While more sources might have been desirable, her critique of the current scholarly separation existing between ecocritism and cultural studies is on the mark (pp. 25–28), and her call for an "environmental cultural studies" (pp. 173–178) is but one of the many exciting collaborations that environmental historians are and should be making. The author's final assertion, that "nature is a product of knowledge, something which is not just out there to be found but that is created within particular social contexts for particular purposes" (p. 177) may not strike readers of Environmental History as uniquely a product of the "interdisciplinarity" that Kollin is interested in, since it echoes the claims of—among others—William Cronon and Gregg Mitman (whom she cites). Still, Nature's State is a welcome addition to the field of cultural studies, and overall an engaging and informative read.	3
Karen Oslund received her Ph.D. from the History Department at UCLA and is an instructor in the Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. She is working on a book about the cultural and environmental history of Iceland, Greenland, and the Arctic as an European frontier from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

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.