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Engineering Nature Oregon is the undiscovered Paradise of practical business men and women who are alive to the undeveloped resources of our country, and have the far-seeing eye of an Astor that looks into the future and sees spread upon time's unfailing scroll the things that are to be. - The Chamber of Commerce Bulletin (1908)1 en are born, not made," William Bittle Wells wrote in the Pacific Monthly in March 1905. "The qualities of manhood are inherent. A man masters his environment because there is stuff in him to do it, and it must come out." The achievement of manhood, of progress, he argued, required unending struggle against delay and discouragement, yet men were fully capable of mastering their surroundings. "Environment melts before the man who is in earnest. All things are possible to him who believes." 2 While those words combine elements ofsocial Darwinism, masculine bravado, and strong praise for the importance of individual enterprise , they also suggest, albeit in exaggerated form, the significant role that language plays in clarifying the perceptions and fundamental assumptions of culture. Although the sentiments published in Pacific Monthly were symbolic , they also included references that were weighty with meaning about human intentions. In the material world, they become a kind of social reality. Engineering Nature 239 "Language, by its very nature, even when it wants humbly to transcribe, must tell a story," contends William Truettner of the National Museum of American Art. "Stories are what we impose on the world." Because language is so heavily infused with cultural meaning and attribution, it is a powerful vehicle for assigning significance, purpose, and value to things and happenings in the material world. Human activity, William Cronon argues , takes place "within a network of relationships, processes, and systems that are as ecological as they are cultural."3 Because our language, our rhetorical expressions, are culture bound, reflecting the perceptions and values that influence human behavior toward physical nature, it is imperative that we pay close attention to the narratives that represent and give meaning to those realities. The stories associated with conquest and expansion into the American outback are deeply embedded in our national mythology. As such, they point to an almost transcendental belief that it is right and proper to engage in the unlimited manipulation of nature to promote the welfare of humankind. By the early years of the twentieth century the conceptual framework to that pragmatic, instrumentalist (and commercial) view of nature embraced the conservationism of the Progressive era, the assumption that orderly, systematic, scientific, and engineering approaches toward the natural world would bring greater material benefits to a greater number ofpeople. Progressives valued nature for its production ofcommodities for human use. As such, conservation ideology preached virtues that were consistent with the modernizing world of industrial capitalism: efficiency, the elimination of waste, and the development and scientific management of resources. As the historian Samuel Hays has argued: "The apostles ofthe gospel of efficiency subordinated the aesthetic to the utilitarian." 4 In that calculus, economic imperatives were transcendent, a reality that was especially apparent in resource-abundant regions like the Pacific Northwest. Early-twentieth-century conservation ideology in the Oregon country paralleled similar arguments at the national level, a discourse that was primarily utilitarian, instrumentalist, and development oriented. Gifford Pinchot , who established the ideological parameters for the national debate, stated the case for the federal forests - and by extension other resources as well: "The object of our policy is not to preserve the forests because they 240 EXTENDING THE INDUSTRIAL INFRASTRUCTURE are beautiful or because they are refuges for wild creatures or the wilderness , but the making of prosperous homes.... Every other consideration becomes secondary." An apostle of scientific efficiency and orderly administration , Pinchot, according to Donald Worster, "saw the world as badly in need of managing." Oregon governors George Chamberlain and Oswald West, who supported the conservation policies of Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt, both advocated federal control and management of natural resources "in the public interest." Oswald West's inaugural message to the Oregon legislature in 1911 illustrates that utilitarian ideology: It is most vital to the future prosperity of this state and of its people that its natural resources be conserved to the fullest extent in order so that they may be fully utilized and developed for the benefit not only of this but of future generations.5 The Oregon Conservation Commission, a quasi-public body appointed by Governor Chamberlain with a nonexistent budget, provides another example of...

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