Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (review)

Eight years ago I published a review essay about the emergence of a literature focused on the environmental history of cities that identified five primary themes: the study of the impact of the built environment and human activities on the natural environment of cities; societal responses to these impacts and efforts to alleviate environmental problems; exploration of the effect of the natural environment on city life; analysis of the relationship between cities and their hinterlands; and the investigation of gender, class, and race in regard to environmental issues.¹ Few, if any, of the books in the existing literature at that time incorporated all these themes. In addition, other themes, especially land use patterns and choices, city-hinterland relationships, and environmental justice, required attention.

Since that time the literature of the field has greatly increased and now includes a book series devoted to the History of the Urban Environment, edited books on specific cities featuring essays by different authors, works on particular themes such as environmental justice, “natural” disasters, urban infrastructures, and various environmental phenomena in an urban setting.² No single author, however, has tried to incorporate all of the above themes in the history of a specific city until publication of Matthew Klingle excellent work, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle.

These themes emerge from Klingle’s historical narrative. One continuous focus is the attempt by Seattle developers and politicians to readjust the natural landscape to fit city building needs, complicated by the clash between the idea of property as public good and as private gain. These controversies were especially spirited along the waterfront where land speculators, commercial interests and railroads fought about how to develop Puget Sound’s wetlands. These conflicts were also reflected in the battles over construction of the Ship Canal, which involved altering the hydraulics of Lake Washington and Lake Union as well as of local rivers. Such changes affected hundreds of businesses and houseboats as well as local Indians and squatters who asserted their rights to the tidelands and waterfront through subsistence use. Making land in Seattle thus faced human, institutional, and non-human obstacles. This lesson was repeated again with the failed attempts of city engineer R.H. Thomson to alter the natural environment with technology and to link “social progress to the ability to improve nature.” (119)

Klingle finds the same struggle between public and private power in the design and use of Seattle’s parks. Here the park designs of the well known landscape designer John C. Olmsted, stepson of the famous Frederic Law Olmsted, who believed like his stepfather in creating pastoral refuges that would alter human behavior, came into conflict with the opinions of the engineer R.H. Thomson. Olmsted, for instance, opposed Thomson’s pragmatic approach to road building in order to protect scenic woodlands. He also opposed the construction of playgrounds, desired by Seattle residents. He was, says Klingle, “a nineteenth-century Romantic who lived and worked as a twentieth-century Progressive.” (151) He and his stepbrother Frederick had inherited their father’s vision of creating a harmonious city promoted by idealized landscapes, but, observes Klingle, such harmony had seldom existed-there were “limits to the idea of the urban garden.” (152).

In the decades after World War I Seattle’s middle class enthusiastically embraced outdoor leisure and recreation, but also insisted that such recreation fit their standards of behavior and decorum. This involved pushing the working poor out of Seattle’s playgrounds, driving houseboats and shacks from the lakes and rivers and from their banks, and banning local commercial fisherman and Indians from fishing in the waterways. Thus, in a new consumer age Seattle had developed an outdoor-oriented middle class leisure society that valued nature but which wished to limit it to those who shared its values. Class conflict revealed itself in several domains but especially in the fight over Seattle metropolitan government (Metro). Like similar battles in other metropolitan areas, this...