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Reviews
Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West
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Edited by Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey
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University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. 368 pages. $24.95 paper.
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Reviewed by William L. Lang
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| A few years ago, scholars at the Centerof the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder, published The Atlas of the New West (1997), a book that graphically represented demographic, social, and economic changes that transformed the Old West into the New West. Many of the themes highlighted in that book — gentrification of played-out mining towns, yuppie tourism, high-tech sports developments, and real-estate boomlets — are taken up in Imagining the Big Open, an eclectic anthology that the editors promise departs from the "New Western History, which focuses on presumptions of loss and seems in the end to invert the positivist spin of the 'Old Western' history"(p. xiii). |
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The book includes contributions from young scholars and established analysts, with particular emphasis on how specific places in the West have become re-imagined and reshaped during the past three decades. Divided into five sections, Imagining the Big Open includes essays on wolf recovery in Yellowstone; salmon restoration on the Columbia; fly-fishing western rivers; the remaking of Moab, Utah, Red Lodge, Montana, Reno, Nevada, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and pieces on the idea of a Buffalo Commons in the Great Plains and how Dodge City became a metaphor for the Wild West. The writing is lively, incisive, and full of thought-provoking observations about how much of the Old West remains in the New West, even though social and economic changes have profoundly altered western places. |
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Readers of the Oregon Historical Quarterly will find Joseph Taylor's article on the historical geography of salmon recovery in the Pacific Northwest and Gordon Sayre's insightful review of climbing on Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, and Mount Shasta particularly rewarding. Taylor persuasively argues that support for salmon restoration is defined by geography. Salmon are iconic west of the Cascade mountain divide, where fish harvests are most remunerative and environmental restrictions require fewer economic sacrifices. East of the Cascades, where salmon numbers have declined most precipitously and where alterations designed to manage rivers for the benefit of fish threaten agricultural economies, enthusiasm for salmon recovery is nearly absent. Taylor argues against an essentialist understanding of the iconographic standing of salmon in the Northwest; but by tying the salmon's political fate to specific natural resource geographies, he in effect substitutes a different type of essentialism. |
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Gordon Sayre argues that the accepted idea that the search for solitude animates mountain climbing was a product of mid–twentieth century wilderness and environmental advocacy. The origins of mountain climbing in the Pacific Northwest, Sayre points out, came from highly social adventures organized by outdoor enthusiasts in Seattle and Portland, who embraced Mount Rainier and Mount Hood as their peaks. Recent attempts to limit mountaineering on both mountains have met stiff public resistance, which Sayre interprets as a return to an earlier ethic when hundreds of climbers gathered on mountain summits. |
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The collection concludes with three essays by the editors on the influence of Robert Redford and his Sundance Institute. Their postmodern argument critiques Redford's contrived New Westernisms, while they approve his valuation of western environmental protection. Although these pieces on Redford are less convincing than others in the volume, the editors are true to their purpose. Imagining the Big Open avoids singular and positivist interpretations of the American West in this era. |
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