Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (review)

In Emerald City, Klingle traces more than 150 years of Seattle’s natural history, from the arrival of American settlers to the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization, showing, among other things, that salmon and the history of Seattle are intimately entangled. More specifically, he examines how Seattle, a city renowned for its outdoor life and breathtaking landscapes, transformed and refigured its hills, rivers, and lakes with often tragic consequences. Importantly, the author goes beyond the typical diatribes about human destruction of nature to see the impact of such actions on the region’s inhabitants.

Seattle residents’ efforts to “improve” upon the region’s natural blessings began with the first sawmill constructed on Puget Sound. By the early 1900s, city leaders had filled in tidelands to make room for railway yards and carved a channel to connect the waters of the Sound with Lake Washington. Klingle continually emphasizes the consequences—intended or not—that manipulating the landscape had on poor and marginalized residents. Tidelands and waterways, he argues, were vital to the subsistence economy upon which immigrant fishermen and local native populations depended. Creating property and profit may have enhanced Seattle’s identity, but not without significant cost in terms of environmental degradation and social inequality.

Emerald City offers a refreshing contribution to the story of human interaction with the environment by paying specific attention to the role of middle-class professionals. This tale is less about the exploitive endeavors of local business elites than about the progressive-minded actions of municipal engineers and landscape architects. Seattle municipal engineer Reginald H. Thompson, for example, believed that flattening the city’s daunting hills would remove natural barriers that segregated neighborhoods and impeded social unity. Alas, such goals proved elusive. Likewise, when attempting to enhance the city’s quality of life by securing ample water from the nearby Cedar River, Thompson’s efforts instead brought deforestation, flooding, and declining salmon runs. Klingle concludes that the good intentions of professionals like Thompson and renowned landscape architect John C. Olmsted notwithstanding, nature stubbornly resisted these efforts, producing both new problems and exacerbating older ones.

By the late twentieth century, Native American activism, sympathetic courts, a booming economy, and modern environmentalists together helped to focus attention on Seattle’s emerging symbol, the salmon. Klingle, however, seems less sanguine about postwar undertakings to protect salmon, which he suggests suffer from many of the same misguided beliefs that produced the problem. He argues that a “sustainable ethic of place must face the legacies of history, providing redress for wronged communities in some cases, ensuring equity for the future in others, and the principle should apply not only to human communities but to the non-human as well.” (275)

Emerald City successfully weaves urban history and environmental history into a narrative that shows how much we are a part of nature and nature is a part of us. Some might quibble with Klingle’s singular focus on waterways at the expense of air quality or other environmental issues that might change the Seattle story. However, since salmon swim, not fly, such a criticism might be unfair. More important is the author’s passionate plea to move beyond a binary view of culture and nature to develop what he calls an ethic of place that “links the necessity for social justice to the importance of protecting the environment” (60). In short, as Klingle suggests, we can learn much from salmon.