In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910-30
  • Richard W. Judd
Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30. By Lawrence M. Lipin (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2007) 224 pp. $60.00 cloth $25.00 paper

Too often, the relation between working people and the environment is reduced to a simple and static "jobs-versus-environment" dichotomy. This book demonstrates the complexity of this relationship and its inherent dynamism. Lipin is not the first to situate ordinary people within the conservation story, but he is the first to focus on urban workers and their reaction to natural resources and landscapes. His fusion of labor and environmental history has a number of important implications. [End Page 147]

Lipin laces three topics into the Oregon conservation story—the fate of the labor movement, the rise of outdoor recreation, and the spread of consumer consciousness. He begins by describing a pre-World War I labor theory of value that united urban workers, farmers, and commercial fishers and defined nature's place in the workers' vision of progress. This producer ideology was steeped in the Populist campaigns orchestrated by single-tax proponent William S. U'Ren, who vilified monopolists for tying up natural resources and dashing the ordinary citizen's dream of a small farm or house lot. Implicit in this producers' republic was an understanding that resources would be shared widely and made as productive as possible—a standard Progressive ideal but hardly compatible with the Progressives' cozy relation to big landowners.

The 1920s brought campaigns for fish conservation and scenic highways along the coast and up the Columbia River Gorge. Opposing these projects, farmers and workers sided with commercial fishermen against elite anglers and denounced highway plans because they had no potential for expanding agriculture. This opposition changed, however, when Henry Ford designed an automobile for the masses, which put these recreational resources at the disposal of the working family. Faced with a more conservative political climate, the labor movement softened its rhetoric, adopted the language of leisure and mass consumption, and became more receptive to conservation goals. The shift was by no means clear, but it had important implications for the conservation and labor movements.

From a labor-history point of view, Lipin shows that consuming nature had a mixed effect on working-class consciousness. Auto tourism privatized working-class leisure but at the same time liberated workers—for a time—from their bosses. For environmental historians, Lipin achieves a great deal by placing workers at the center of Oregon's conservation history. He challenges the neat dichotomy between conservation as a concern for efficient production and environmentalism as an aspect of American consumer culture. His perspective on ordinary fishermen and upper-class sportsmen, identified earlier by historians like Jacoby, is equally important.1 He advances this discussion by linking battles about fish and game to broader ones about timber, water power, and irrigation, and by weaving urban class and ethnic divisions into the mix.

Thus does another twist enter the conservation story: Workers in automobiles increased pressures on fish and game resources and touched off a movement to restrict road building in pristine forests. These initiatives were driven in part by middle-class reformers' contempt for working-class forms of leisure, a pattern identified long ago by Rosensweig in his study of park-building in Worcester, Massachusetts.2 "There is no small [End Page 148] degree of irony that an influx of workers into the countryside would stimulate the movement to establish wilderness" (11).

This book ends with a vague sense of inconclusiveness. Admittedly, the worker's engagement with nature was—and is—complex. But the narrative's end seems more ragged than necessary, and battles over fish, game, timber, dams, wilderness, income-tax reform, fish-stocking, predator control, and the Ku Klux Klan are not always clearly grounded in the author's main argument, further clouding the worker's trajectory regarding conservation. Nonetheless, to his credit, Lipin provides an invaluable foundation for discussing the troubled relationship between organized labor and the environment, and he clearly has much to say about how this relationship has changed over time. In...

pdf

Share