Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (review)

Environmental history accommodates a broad spectrum of approaches to the relation between society and nature, and over the last three decades its practitioners have made rewarding forays into older fields like history of technology and urban history. Following on pioneering work by Joel Tarr, Martin Melosi, and Christine Rosen, Matthew Klingle applies the discipline’s tools to the history of a city, using as example an annual run of salmon swimming “out of nature and into culture” (p. 3) through an artificial canal into the heart of Greater Seattle. The city’s builders leveled hills, entombed creeks, shaved away forests, filled tidelands, and channeled rivers, but nature remains at the heart of this narrative, a thread of continuity linking pre-contact times to the present.

Arriving in the area in the wake of the British fur traders, Americans displaced the native inhabitants and created a vision of place based on mastering nature and ordering society. Seattle quickly grew into a bawdy lumbering town, dependent on local Indians as laborers and as a benchmark for its own progress toward civilization. Klingle’s argument hinges on defining a sense of place contingent on class and professional or economic interest. Engineers, for instance, acted on their own vision of place by regrading, filling, and draining the original landscape. On the waterfront they used pilings to transform tidelands into solid, fungible property, clarifying the boundary between land and water and between common and private. Contending interests, destructive fires, and new technologies kept this vision of place fluid throughout the city-making process.

Seattle’s challenging topography and hydrology attracted nationally known civic planners, including Hiram Chittenden, who tamed the city’s rivers and connected Lake Washington to the sea; William Sedgwick and George Waring, who tackled Seattle’s waste and water problems, and John C. Olmsted, who beautified the city’s hybrid landscapes with parks, parkways, and boulevards. Together they defined a new ethic of place, even while upstream farmers and loggers were busy disassembling the natural landscape and creating even greater challenges for downstream planners and engineers. Sewer lines and water pipes cracked, tracks warped, creeks overflowed, and other forms of natural and social disorder threatened this sense of place. Engineers prevailed, using giant water cannons to level hills and obliterate dilapidated neighborhoods. Reforming nature went hand in hand with reforming society.

As Seattle’s population grew, nature reasserted itself in the form of algal blooms in the city’s overtaxed lakes and rivers. At the same time, citizens learned a new ethic of place by reconnecting with nature through play. Salmon emerged as a contested symbol of ecological consciousness, and a new, equally contested sanitation district rationalized wastewater treatment. By the end of the century Seattle was vaunted as an ecotopian land of people-powered transportation, green spaces, liberated rivers, electric buses, and curbside recycling, but the “Emerald City,” like its Land-of-Oz namesake, revealed flaws up close: ecological successes came with social costs for those on the bottom rungs of Seattle society.

Klingle might have offered a sharper environmental perspective if he had used a broader ecological canvas—one that included the geological past and the upstream changes wrought by forestry, farming, and road-building—but his narrative focuses on a more localized theme: the social implications of reconfiguring nature in Seattle proper. He successfully traces nature’s ongoing influence in this most artificial of environments, but more important, he traces the relation between ordered landscapes and disordered lives, making an eloquent argument for linking environmental change to questions of social justice. Progressive reformers ignored the class implications of their projects, and as Klingle makes clear, environmental reformers were equally blind to the inequities in their ethic of place. This point is important in a discipline that so often ignores the class consequences of environmental progress, and there is no better place to drive this point home than in Seattle, where lattes and land-use planning are, as Klingle shows, so intimately connected...