Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910-30 (review)

Lawrence M. Lipin's Workers and the Wild is a trenchant examination of the ways in which changing attitudes toward the use of nature were directly related to the class antagonisms, conservation politics, and emergent consumerism of the early twentieth century. While the author's focus is limited to trade unions in Oregon, he addresses issues of national importance, specifically how changes in culture and society in the late Progressive Era, combined with technological innovation, removed ideological barriers to consumerism and reshaped attitudes toward nature. In short, through the agency of working-class individuals and organizations, the natural world became as much a place for leisure as it was a source for livelihoods; labor's embrace of mass consumer culture thus stimulated a broader social appeal for future environmental protection.

The author argues that prior to World War I, Oregon's labor movement was still largely devoted to the "producerist" tradition of a republic of independent workers who used natural resources for the productive use of humanity. It was a plebeian and utilitarian ideal that created urban-rural alliances, with trade union support for the Grange and farmer's need for arable land and access to markets, and for gillnetters in their struggles against the monopolizing power of fish wheels on Northwest rivers. Those who actually produced deserved the rewards of nature's bounty. Accordingly, labor resisted upper-class and state efforts to conserve natural resources for what were seen as nonproductive uses: spiritual renewal and the restoration of a masculinity debilitated by urban, sedentary life. Scenic roads and a rural landscape preserved for tourism were elitist and immoral extravagances, a refusal to make productive use of nature as divine gift to humanity.

But, in the 1920s, urban workers and trade unions "forged a more complex view of the natural world, a view that would include nonproductive uses that would fit the needs of a mass consumer society" (4). Labor placed less emphasis on producerist politics and more on "living wages" and leisure time. Central to this change was the affordability of automobiles that enhanced working-class access to rural areas and allowed them to discover that nature did indeed have uses incompatible with industrial production. Workers began sports fishing in record numbers and spent their vacations traveling to distant parks; their use—and overuse—of these outdoor resources compelled state officials to establish more hatcheries, stricter regulations, and more roads in wilderness areas. Urban–rural political alliances faded away, tax reforms intended to penalize elitist uses of lands were forgotten, and labor discourse increasingly assumed consumerist overtones that served to supplement producerist rhetoric in the continuing political challenge to capitalist domination. Working people, the state, environmental activists, and corporate America had together fashioned "a modern sensibility about nature" (14).

Lipin's book gives us a nuanced historical understanding of the cultural values and ideologies underlying social conflicts over natural resource uses in the early twentieth century. It is an exemplary synthesis of labor and environmental history—rare in current scholarship where treatments of wilderness infrequently address issues of class, and labor studies have only begun to deal with environmental problems. Here, we see workers as environmental actors of consequence, whose class experiences, aspirations, moral imaginations, and purchasing power shaped their lives and landscapes in and beyond the workplace. This expertly documented portrait of conservation and labor politics sets the stage for similar research in other—perhaps less "wild"—areas of the nation.

Historians will want to expand upon the author's focus on trade unions and their rich paper trail, and consider how unskilled and unorganized workers, the Industrial Workers of the World, women, and ethnic communities with old country environmental sensibilities, each participated in the wider discourse on nature. Other historians will want to explore the precise connections between workers' new geographic mobility as consumers of the wild and...