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Reviews
Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation
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By Richard W. Judd and Christopher S. Beach
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RFF Press, Washington, D.C., 2003. Illustrations, notes, index. 334 pages. $32.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
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Reviewed by William G. Robbins
Oregon State University, Corvallis
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| In seven evenly paced chapters, this study attempts to trace the development of an "environmental imagination" in the three decades following the Second World War to illustrate how Americans "connected with nature and place and how these connections gave rivers, coastlines, forests, and other distinguishing features transcendent meaning" (p. x). Coauthors Richard Judd and Christopher Beach focus on Maine and Oregon, two states where natural landscapes were closely linked to regional identity and where environmental issues transcended local settings. A complex, nuanced, and engaging attempt, Natural States posits the argument that state politics, with its special ties to local places, best expresses the emerging environmental conscientiousness of the postwar years. |
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As one who has lived in Oregon since 1963 — with a fifteen-month detour to Maine in 1965–1966 — I find this book especially provocative. In the mid-1960s, pulp and paper mills in Maine and Oregon dumped turgid waste liquids directly into waterways, pulpwood cutters in Maine and loggers in Oregon floated their harvests downstream to mills, and urban sprawl was becoming worrisome along the coastlines of both states and in Oregon's agriculturally productive Willamette Valley. Following the Second World War, popular writers were offering up literary representations that idealized folk cultures and local settings. Maine's Robert Tristram Coffin and Oregon's Richard Neuberger praised the intimate connection between folk and the land, emphasizing closeness to nature and the Edenic qualities of landscapes. Despite their urban centers — Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon — residents retained strong links to the countryside, epitomizing "the postwar quest for physical and spiritual freedom in landscapes" (p. 4). |
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The emergence of an environmental imagination in Maine and Oregon, according to the authors, can be traced to developers and a flood of newcomers who threatened pastoral ideals that local residents associated with a pristine and untrammeled outback. The politicizing of this ideal initially took the form of clean waters campaigns in both states, with Oregon's efforts focusing on the long-troubled Willamette River. Citizen activists from Portland upstream to Eugene worked with state and federal authorities to require cities and towns to install primary and secondary sewage treatment facilities and to prohibit paper mills from dumping waste treatments into waterways. Led by the local chapter of the Izaak Walton League and the Oregon State Sanitary Authority, the state slowly moved to curb point-source pollutants from entering its streams. Finally, under the administration of Governor Tom McCall, officials effectively used their enforcement authority to force pulp mills to clean up their act. The result was a restored Willamette River, national acclaim, and the initial grounding for Oregon's reputation as an environmental pacesetter. |
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In Maine, citizens living along the filthy and industrialized Androscoggin River initiated the state's crusade against water pollution. Maine's powerful pulp and paper industry assumed it "owned" the state's rivers as a matter of birthright. Eventually, a popular revolt against corporate power elevated Edmund Muskie to the governor's office in 1954 and set in motion a lengthy antipollution struggle. Although corporate, proindustry voices dominated the discussions for some time, local and statewide citizens' groups eventually gained a hearing in the press and in the halls of the state legislature. Citizens for Conservation and Pollution Control fought many of the early battles on the Androscoggin and elsewhere, but the appearance of an investigative weekly in 1968, the Maine Times, added a more aggressive statewide voice to the clean waters crusade. Judd and Beech argue that pastoral rhetoric in Maine and Oregon — idealizing the pristine headwaters of streams and comparing them with degraded waters downstream — infused the antipollution effort and altered citizens' perceptions of rivers nationwide. |
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By the late 1960s and early 1970s, officials in Maine and Oregon were taking the first halting steps toward comprehensive landuse planning, efforts that would empower governments to control urban sprawl, unsightly development, and industrial blight. What happened in the two states paralleled incipient movements across the nation where landuse commissions, zoning boards, and state and local agencies worked to control development along waterways, to protect rural landscapes, and to curb urban sprawl. Ultimately, Maine's planning achievements were modest in comparison with those in Oregon. Opposition to zoning ordinances, Maine's town-meeting culture, and less-than-robust development pressures in much of the state mitigated against strong planning initiatives. In contrast, officials in Oregon — led by charismatic Governor Tom McCall — crafted a delicate compromise between state planning and local input that put the state in the forefront of national landuse planning. The authors point to the state's 1973 legislative achievement, Senate Bill 100, as chiefly "responsible for Oregon's reputation as a leader in environmental politics" (p. 200). |
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Natural States is based on impressive archival research in both Maine and Oregon, and the authors make judicious use of those materials as well as the larger body of recent environmental literature. The one major shortcoming of this book, however, is the authors' penchant for shoe-horning those sources into illusive and vague intellectual constructs such as "the environmental imagination," "the pastoral ideal" and "utopian visions." Those who insist that historical narratives be rooted in the real, material world will find unsettling the authors' propensity to package all environmental issues and ideas into neat phrases. Hector Macpherson — Oregon dairy farmer, state senator, and author of the state's pioneering landuse planning system — was more interested in protecting working agricultural and forest land than in protecting the Willamette Valley's pastoral tradition. There was nothing utopian about citizen initiatives pushing for clean rivers or placing restraints on urban sprawl in either Maine or Oregon. Organizations and activists were simply employing a variety of strategies (and rhetoric) to protect the livability of two remarkable landscapes. |
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