Drawing Lines in the Forest: Creating Wilderness Areas in the Pacific Northwest

Notes

introduction 1. Gilligan, “Forest Service Primitive and Wilderness Areas”; Keyser, Preservation of Wilderness Areas, 23–26. 2. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 69–78; Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 1–7. 3. Thomas R. Vale finds “no appreciable difference between ‘wilderness’ and ‘wild’ and between the various meanings (statutory and cultural) of ‘wilderness’” (AmericanWilderness, 7). I believe the recent debates over wilderness are inadequate partially due to the lack of precise definitions. 4. The romantic idea of wilderness as a place apart from humanity, which has deep cultural roots, has been thoroughly discounted, yet such a strict and unrealistic definition continues to arise in wilderness debates. Labeled “the purity doctrine,” such a definition is used by opponents to wilderness to argue that the lands in question do not qualify. Chapter 4 focuses on the use of this strategy in Oregon in the 1960s. 5. Some of the most effective criticism of the idea of a pure wilderness has come in recent years from non-Western and postmodernist critiques. See particularly Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation ,” Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” and other essays republished in Calicott and Nelson, Great New Wilderness Debate. In the recent criticisms and traditional celebrations of the wilderness idea, 153 notes I object mainly to the habit of applying the nineteenth-century ideology of pristine and sublime landscapes to late-twentieth-century debates and negotiations over land use boundaries. Although ideological traditions were employed as tools by all sides of the debates, they were among the least effective in shaping the final decisions on wilderness boundaries. Critics of wilderness have also too often equated postwar deliberations in the United States over wildlands with wilderness as an imperial tool for displacing native peoples in both the early American West and colonized regions such as British Africa. In the following case studies, wilderness designation did not displace people. That process had already occurred in the Cascades through treaties, wars, and industrial development. Looking at specific case studies helps to clear away some of the problems caused by universalizing assumptions about the concept of wilderness. 6. This description is not meant to be a thorough catalogue of the range but rather is given as an aid in locating the areas discussed in the case studies in the following chapters. Especially (and regretfully) neglected in these descriptions is the drier, east side of the mountains. For sources on the Cascade Range see Mathews, Cascade Olympic Natural History; Beckey, Cascade Alpine Guide, 3–12; Schwartz, Cascade Companion; McKee, Cascadia. 7. Catton, Wonderland, 45–47, 63–69. Neither the Forest Service nor the National Park Service existed at this time, but transferring forest reserves to the national park still upset many foresters. 8. George Draffan, Ken Favrholdt, Mitch Friedman, and Bob Mierendorf, “History of the Greater North Cascades Ecosystem,” in Friedman and Lindholdt , Cascadia Wild, 30; see also Beckey, Range of Glaciers, 27, 41–45. 9. Wilkeson, Wilkeson’s Notes on Puget Sound, 10, 18. 10. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise, 229; J. Granville Jensen, “Commercial Timberland Resources,” in Jackson and Kimerling, Atlas of the Pacific Northwest , 103–7. 11. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence. Paul S. Sutter also notes a shift in the broader debate itself in Driven Wild, 248. 12. Hirt, Conspiracy of Optimism, xx–xxiv; Steen, U.S. Forest Service, 280–85. 13. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 13–39; Hirt, Conspiracy of Optimism, xxv–xxvi. 14. Brock Evans, interview by author, 28 July 2001. Evans was responding directly to the historiographical emphasis on the intellectual history of wilder154 Notes to Introduction oject MUSE (2024-04-24 04:37 GMT) ness ideology when he discounted the ideology of wilderness as the underlying conflict in wilderness debates. 15. A. W. Greeley to M. Brock Evans, 3 June 1969, bep, box 15, folder: Oregon–Mt. Jefferson Wilderness, 1961–69, Incoming Letters U.S. 16. Sutter, Driven Wild, 248; Beierle and Cayford, Democracy in Practice , 2–6. 17. Langston, Where Land and Water Meet, 9. Striking parallels emerge in the same era in the history of nuclear power, as documented in Balogh, Chain Reaction, 16–20, 221–301. Also see Caldwell, Hayes, and MacWhirter, Citizens and the Environment, xi–xxx. 18. For the intellectual development of wilderness ideology, see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness. For the development of the political movement, see Allin, Politics ofWilderness Preservation; Roth, Wilderness Movement and the National Forests,1980–1984; Doug Scott, EnduringWilderness; Sutter...