|
|
|
Reviews
Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed
|
By Nancy Langston
|
University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2003. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 248 pages. $26.95 cloth.
|
Reviewed by Karl Brooks
University of Kansas, Lawrence
|
|
|
| The harsh high desert of southeastern Oregon's Harney County holds one of the nation's most informative experiments in ecological management, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Nancy Langston relates the history of the refuge — founded in 1934 to salvage the wetlands mosaic on which millions of migrating waterfowl depended — as the product of the landscape itself and its various human inhabitants. Part of the University of Washington's Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series edited by environmental historian William Cronon, Where Land and Water Meet offers nuanced interpretation, rich with "shifting, constructed identities," and cautious, even diffident, policy prescriptions (p. 162). |
1
|
|
Langston, one of the historical field's best new practitioners, presents the refuge as a "transformed" place in which people's contacts with natural forces have created a "new nature" (p. 115). Like all wetlands, the Malheur includes murky, unsteady physical boundaries. Langston writes beautifully of this high-desert absurdity, where broad sheets of water are pooled beneath rocky hills amid rolling sage plains. The Malheur's human history presents a series of contested, sporadically violent interventions into a mysterious realm. A very modern construction, the Malheur Refuge illustrates the folly that comes when humans sever natural connections before studying them. |
2
|
|
Although Paiutes first inhabited the Malheur, Langston skims their distinctive adaptations to commence her story with the 1872 arrival of California ranchers, led by diminutive, combative Peter French. By 1880, with help from the U.S. Army, ranchers had expelled the Indians and begun building what Langston, following a long Oregon historiographical tradition, calls "an empire of cattle" (p. 17). During the remainder of the nineteenth century, French and rival "cattle barons" manipulated Donner und Blitzen Creek and the Silvies River to grow grass for hay and to drain wet meadows for pasture. Within a generation, their adroit manipulation of nature — buttressed by relentless evasion of federal land laws — had created a tense, unstable, hierarchical human society in the shadow of Steens Mountain. French's land-management and water-control techniques, in Langston's judgment, anticipated some of contemporary ecology's most important insights, especially the use of natural melt—floodwater cycles to irrigate fields without intensive use of capital and technology. By introducing readers, accustomed to pigeonholing big ranchers as environmental heavies, to these early adaptive strategies, Langston reminds us that unexpected lessons emerge from the West's contested past. |
3
|
|
Where Land and Water Meet aims to rehabilitate the great ranchers' environmental reputations, since by contrast later Malheur inhabitants — homesteaders, reclamationists, federal managers — generally ignored nature's lessons in favor of the fad of the decade. Yet Langston's evidence admits a different assessment, and she herself acknowledges that the ranching empire proved unsustainable, environmentally as well as politically and socially (p. 63). No better, though, did succeeding regimes appreciate the Malheur's complex ecological processes. By the Depression, when both ranchers and reclamationists had nearly scalped the landscape bald and mostly evicted the waterfowl, "a desperate situation" gripped the basin (p. 157). Passionate conservationists led by Stanley Jewett and William Finley would try infusions of science and federal money to save the Malheur. |
4
|
|
Langston's surest chapters detail how wildlife refuge managers tried to make water do varied jobs, usually without closely watching the effects of their multiple interventions. She closely analyzes the Malheur's most durable boss, John Scharff, who single-mindedly machined land and water to pursue his "empire of ducks" (p. 99). By Scharff's retirement in the early 1970s, Fish and Wildlife Service "orthodoxy" and "arrogance" had unleashed almost as many unfortunate consequences as had French's similar attitude a century earlier (p. 158). In the 1980s, criticism of the refuge — emphasized by volleys of lawsuits and administrative appeals — dislodged Scharff's engineering empire. Because "some environmentalists" also believe too firmly in their own righteousness, Langston concludes that recent conflicts only point the way toward replacing elitist management blueprints with pluralist discourse (p. 155). |
5
|
|
Where Land and Water Meet argues that the Malheur should be governed by "pragmatic adaptive management," a concept loosely anchored in the Deweyite philosophical tradition (p. 151). Federal refuge managers cannot simply "let nature take its course" because humans have fundamentally redesigned the basin over the past 125 years. Instead, they should invite stakeholder input, confess humility, and let their techniques be informed by changing scientific understandings that explain connections among land and water, fish and fowl. |
6
|
|
This book will help public resource managers see how their work fits into Oregon's recent history. Readers interested in Oregon's agricultural history will read it profitably, as will readers with an interest in ranching, reclamation, waterfowl hunting, and desert ecology. Langston's scientific credentials make her work useful for scientists working on a range of biological and ecological fronts. |
7
|
|
|
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.
|