| Book Review | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 109.2

REVIEWS

EMERALD CITY: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF SEATTLE

by Matthew Klingle

Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, index. 368 pages. $30.00 cloth.

Matthew Klingle believes that the self-styled Emerald City is less green than its residents think it is. In fact, as he makes clear, Seattle has always been about real estate. It could be about salmon — and the 1999 federal listing of Puget Sound chinook as a threatened species may have given it a useful nudge in that direction — but it is not yet. It could develop a true ethic of place, but only if the politically active class leavens its concern for fish and open space with a little more concern about places where poor people live. "At its core," Klingle writes, an ethic of place "links the necessity for social justice to the importance of protecting the environment" (p. 6).

Whether you are rearranging nature or saving it, he points out, there are winners and losers. Whose property value goes up? Follow the money. One tends not to think of environmental history in those terms, but Klingle believes that one should. Actually, social justice gets a lot of rhetorical play but little space or detail in Emerald City; it is not Klingle' s focus and sometimes seems a bit tacked on.

Klingle takes that follow-the-money approach to the cleanup of Lake Washington in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which has long been considered a great environmental success story. It has become an icon of the Seattle area's early environmental consciousness — and of the city's long-lost ability to get things done. Klingle views it more cynically. He notes that restoring the lake protected and enhanced real estate values of people in affluent suburbs and that, originally, a lot of the treated sewage stream that had been fouling the lake was dumped into the Duwamish River, where poor people lived and worked. He writes that Metro, the organization formed to manage the sewage, decided "to use the Duwamish as the region's toilet" (p. 218).

In the beginning, Klingle writes, Seattle residents made money by selling lumber and land. They cut trees to create lumber and filled tideflats to create more land. Before long, to enhance the value of downtown real estate, they also sluiced away the steep hills that kept Seattle from expanding easily to the north and east, using the same kind of high-powered water cannon that had re-shaped the watersheds of northern California and southern Oregon in the mid- and late-nineteenth centuries. The early regrades worked as intended: "Property values along First Avenue, now flattened to a reasonable grade, soared in an already hyperinflated market" (p. 100).

In the early-twentieth century, people replumbed the entire local drainage system, lowering Lake Washington, drying up the Black River, and straightening the Duwamish, which had meandered through a wide flood plain into a big delta at the south end of Elliott Bay. Lowering Lake Washington created new real estate now occupied by fancy homes along the lake shore. Dredging the Duwamish and dumping the dredge spoils onto the surrounding marsh created new industrial land.

Around the same time, Seattle created many of its parks — which, Klingle explains, were considered a good idea in part because they would enhance nearby property values. While the great park designers, the Olmsted brothers, saw parks as places where all classes of people could mingle, in practice, the better class of people tried from the beginning to keep the riffraff out. It all pre-shadowed contemporary debates about what to do with the homeless people who gravitate to public parks.

Where do the commons begin and end? Klingle spends a lot of time on maneuvering by nineteenth-century railroads and speculators who wanted to control tidelands, but he also focuses on the big social and political question: Were the tidelands going to remain part of the commons, open to all, or were they going to become private property? As Klingle points out, debate over how to treat tidelands after statehood took center stage at Washington's constitutional convention. The framers opted for private property.

With his exploration of the commons concept, it is surprising that he does not discuss the history of salmon fishing and the long battle over Indian treaty rights — which gets a good deal of space — in those terms. He explains that Indians used fish traps in the rivers but not that Euro-Americans moved commercial fishing offshore onto the commons of Puget Sound. Trap sites were limited, but, out on the Sound, all citizens believed they had more or less equal rights to catch fish. People who fished from little boats therefore resented — and ultimately got rid of — the cannery-owned fish traps that caught most of the salmon in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After the Boldt decision of 1974, a new generation of fishers resented the treaty tribes' right to half the fish.

Klingle also spends time on Seattle's tendencies to metaphorically dump problems and physically dump sewage and toxic wastes in the Duwamish River. Waste disposal was, of course, an almost universal use of the commons, whether it was a river, Puget Sound, or a patch of unfenced woods beside the road. Curiously, Klingle omits the early-1980s discovery that sediments in the Duwamish and elsewhere were laced with PCBs and other nasty substances, and that fish that lived among the sediments suffered from liver lesions, as well as the short-lived burst of enthusiasm in the mid-1980s for "saving" Puget Sound.

He starts his epilogue on "The Geography of Hope" with John Beal, the Vietnam vet who died in 200 6 after devoting the last three decades of his life to restoring natural areas along the Duwamish and protecting people who lived near the river from environmental hazards. He describes Beal's decision — facing what seemed to be imminent death — to use his last days cleaning up a junk-clogged Duwamish tributary named Hamm Creek and Beal's metamorphosis into the environmental conscience of Seattle's largest river. "It is easy to dismiss Beal's story as maudlin," Klingle writes, but he himself does not merely dismiss it (p. 266).

And he does not dismiss the Duwamish. Klingle argues that Seattle should start developing its ethic of place right there. "Mistreated and deserted, its man-made banks squeezing slack water to the sea, the Duwamish symbolizes the disharmonies of the Emerald City," Klingle writes. "The river, like the people who live along its banks, remains invisible to those people pronouncing judgment on Seattle's future. It is an impure place ... [and] to the residents of the Duwamish River valley, wedged between dumps, highways and a befouled waterway, Seattle is anything but benevolent" (p. 268). Even if Seattle becomes a good deal more benevolent, he concedes "[t]he new Duwamish will never resemble the old one. It will not be perfect, but it may be enough" (p. 280).

Daniel Jack Chasan

Vashon, Washington

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