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Reviews
Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000
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By William G. Robbins
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 416 pages. $35.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by Richard W. Judd
University of Maine, Orono
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| Ever since David Brower taught us to think globally and act locally, environmental historians have pondered the relation between politics of place and the national themes that make up the environmental movement. In his pioneering Beauty, Health, and Permanence (1987), Samuel P. Hays addressed the history of environmentalism as a national phenomenon, but in fact his book is mostly a survey of place-specific campaigns. By contrast, Robbins begins at the state level and follows the ripples of political dissent outward into the national mainstream. With roughly half of Oregon's land base in the federal domain, this seems an appropriate place to begin exploring relations between the global and the local. |
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Robbins began his history of the Oregon environment with Landscapes of Promise (1997), which ends at 1940. Picking up from there, Landscapes of Conflict asserts the same bold themes: conservation is a clash of essentially economic interests; Edenic visions and technological optimism are dashed on the rocks of corporate resistance and a spiral of unintended consequences. Although Robbins never clearly explains his methodology, his book stands as a model for doing environmental history on a different scale and with different premises. His focus on one state provides an integrated narrative of the environmental movement and clarifies the relation between seemingly separate battles over fish, forests, and other values. |
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Robbins begins with Oregon's optimistic outlook at the end of World War II and distills from this expansionary mood a sense of anxiety brought on by environmental problems linked to agriculture, suburbs, logging, and pollution. Threatened by a gauntlet of dams and irrigation works, salmon declined in the postwar years, becoming the most visible indicator of Oregon's coming environmental battles. Agriculture and forestry followed similar trajectories. Bolstered by rural electrification, irrigation projects, land-grant research, and new chemical applicants, farmers faced a bright future, but field-burning resulted in public protests and awkward compromises. Rapid timber liquidation under the guise of encouraging more vigorous second-growth forests brought environmental and economic dislocations. In both industries, concern about chemical spraying mirrored national trends following publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). Despite these and other problems, agricultural experts and foresters maintained a steady faith in technological solutions. |
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Robbins gives this history a human quality by weaving it around two legendary figures: Senator Richard Neuberger and Governor Tom McCall. Both moved into politics following careers in journalism, and both gained national reputations for their environmental stands. Neither was absolutely consistent, however, and Robbins casts this ambivalence as a central feature of Oregon's environmental record. Success brought national recognition, but problems persist, a legacy of land and water use over the past 150 years. Robbins ends with a discussion of Oregon's response to unplanned growth, culminating in the path-breaking S.B. 100, a legislative resolution to McCall's famous admonition to "come visit us again and again.... But for heaven's sake don't come here to live." Despite repeated challenges, S.B. 100 remained, Robbins says, the nation's only truly comprehensive system for managing growth. |
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Even at this focused level, Robbins's history is selective; he treats only in passing the recreational forms of environmental politics that emerged in wilderness and wild-river protection and in "green city" campaigns. This reflects his understanding that economic imprints dominate the landscape. While true, this narrow explanatory structure neglects the cultural factors that made Oregon unique nationwide in its commitment to quality of life. Still, this may be the only way to handle the complicated mix of global economic forces and statewide politics, which Robbins does brilliantly and with surprising balance, given his passionate commitment to the environmental integrity of his home state. |
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Landscapes of Conflict ends as it begins — on an ambivalent note — with declining support for land-use planning, rivers still laced with toxins, and timber harvests moving toward an uncertain future. What worries Robbins most is a generation of Oregonians unfamiliar with these earlier struggles and no charismatic Tom McCall to invoke their legacy. Indeed, this fear is shared by environmentalists across the nation: if sense of place determines our collective responsibility for the land, then Robbins's concerns ring true. Yet, history teaches us to view trends like these as historically contingent. In the long run, Oregonians will stand by their landscapes of promise, even though, as Robbins shows, protecting them will not be without its gains and losses. |
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