The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History ed. by Debbie Lee, Kathryn Newfont (review)

As a person who delights in walking in the woods and sitting on old tree trunks to listen to birds even on a cold, wintry day, I found this book very interesting indeed. As an oral historian, however, I will not suggest that you take your recorder with you to record the birds reminiscing about their lives. Nevertheless, the birds have no trouble communicating with other birds, and if I watch closely and listen, I can guess what concerns them. The Land Speaks shows us how to look at a plant and discover what its life is like. The authors and editors Debbie Lee and Kathryn Newfont, as well as other naturalists included here, describe this careful attention to the land and the creatures that live on it, and declare that “the land itself speaks.” It is this possibility of discovering what various animals and plants mean by what they do that makes this book unusual and fascinating.

Oral history interviews with people who have lived close to the land and have been involved in working to save or document changes in it have much to teach us. The book’s authors remind us that “fruitful listening to the voices of people who interpret the lessons of the land” can help us understand what needs to be done and what should not be done to preserve this natural resource and to comprehend its place both in history and in contemporary society (11). For example, those undertaking the Selway-Bitterroot History Project, a joint project of Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, with help from the US Forest Service, worked together to locate records about the area’s history and to create new primary sources for a deeper understanding of its history. An important aspect of the project is Deborah Lee’s oral history interviews that revealed the experiences and aims of wilderness workers, and thus made accessible human experiences about which we knew little. This is only one of the projects that have been undertaken to capture a nuanced understanding of the nature laid bare around us and discussed within this edited volume. These findings and others document information that will be preserved for the use of generations of land managers and environmental scientists. Ordinary citizens who care about the environment will profit from the information, too.

The Land Speaks also raises an awareness of other kinds of projects that may have contributed to what some would deem progress or a benefit to society but ultimately ones we could have done without. In 1944, for example, the Army Corps of Engineers made the decision to erect a dam on the Georgia River, destroying the natural landscape. An oral history interview with a local farmer, Joe Miller Holloway, gives us an idea of what human life was like before the dam was built. With this narrative, the reader begins to understand how much was lost in the act of creating something new, something artificial. Government documents and some newspapers had described the lands along the river as mostly vacant and without usefulness, but as Holloway described them, they were valuable for farming, stock grazing, and timber cutting. The local farmers fished in the river and used the fish they caught to help feed their families. The community had a place to swim and go boating. All this is now out of sight: only oral history tells us what their life was like.

Other authors in this volume discuss their and other oral historians’ work to record the experiences of, for example, Native Americans and of people who regularly backpacked in the national parks. We read about people who fell in love with nature’s beauty and kept returning to it as part of their life course, and about others who came back to the places where...