Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas Fir Country (review)

Knock on Wood is not primarily a study of technology and culture, although shifts in the technology of timber extraction play a role in its arguments. Neither is it a conventional historical narrative. As a work of economic geography, with data presented in complex but impressive tables and graphs, the wealth of detail here provides powerful evidence for what environmental historians have long argued, but not fully proven: that the political dichotomy of "jobs vs. owls" in the Pacific Northwest forest is not only false, but a fundamental misreading of the history of the twentieth-century timber industry in the communities and forests of the Douglas Fir region. Historians willing to wade through the sometimes impenetrable jargon will be rewarded with a compelling analysis of post-1940 industrial restructuring and job loss. As we gain perspective on the spotted-owl wars, Scott Prudham declares, we must stop blaming owls and start blaming capitalism. This echoes Donald Worster's central argument concerning a different region in Dust Bowl: the Northwest timber crisis came about because capitalism worked exactly as it was supposed to.

Prudham bases his analysis on Karl Polanyi's and James O'Connor's theories of nature and labor as fictional commodities in a capitalist economy. Neither trees nor human workers can be real commodities—uniform inputs rationalized at an ever-increasing scale of production. That commodification remains false, fictional. Despite genetic manipulation, Prudham demonstrates, trees remain natural. They grow in all different shapes and sizes, far apart from one another and very slowly. Human beings, in turn, remain social and political; they need meaningful work, stable communities, safe working conditions, health care, and an acceptable standard of living. They contest the terms of their place in economic production.

Since its earliest days, the Northwest timber economy, with help from the federal government, operated as if these fictions were real, expecting both nature and human beings to conform to market expectations. Timber companies liquidated old-growth forests, then used sustained-yield management to replace them with even-aged, normalized tree crops. Both projects faced unpredictable obstacles rooted in the contradictions inherent in reducing nature to a predictable production system. The destruction of old growth led to ecological problems, and sustained-yield forests grew too slowly, if at all. Neither sustained harvests nor stable communities resulted. At the same time, the industry replaced human workers with technology, so that by the mid-1980s the region faced economic crisis. Prudham's tight analysis of data from the Illinois Valley in Oregon's Josephine County clearly demonstrates that the economic downturn blamed on government enforcement of the Endangered Species Act was well under way long before 1990. The social and legal controversy that swirled around the owls politicized a crisis caused by false assumptions and fictional understandings of how both natural systems and human societies function.

While much of Prudham's argument will come as no surprise, his book provides a skillful synthesis of much new and valuable information. Along with a concise history of Northwest forestry, it presents detailed histories of plywood and other industrial wood products, genetic tree improvement, and industrial consolidation in the timber industry as well as the spotted-owl crisis itself. Technology, Prudham argues, played a role in the timber industry's shift from numerous small, geographically scattered mills, to fewer large-scale, steam- and electric-powered ones. The nature of trees, however—the fundamental problem of turning round, heterogeneous trees into uniform square boards—limited technology's role in industrial consolidation. Large corporations solidified their economic control not through processing technology, but through extensive land ownership that ensured steady supply to industrial mills. The more crucial role for technology lay in producing a hybrid nature, turning Douglas Fir tees into organic machines, genetically altered to grow taller, faster, and straighter.

Despite its theoretical language, this book belongs alongside Nancy Langston's Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (1995) and Paul Hirt's Conspiracy of Optimism (1994) in...