Conversation, subsistence, and class at the birth of Superior National Forest

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Johnson, Benjamin Heber

In the United States today, anti-environmentalism-broadly defined as opposition to state regulation of natural resources and management of public lands-is a powerful political sentiment. Its proponents range from libertarians and corporate board members to grassroots organizations and workers in extractive industries. Its targets include national environmental legislation, environmentalist legislators, and local environmental activity. Anti-environmentalism finds some of its strongest support in communities on the edges of federal wilderness areas. Many residents of such communities, like their counterparts in developing nations, resent what they perceive as the control of outsiders through environmental regulations and public land bureaucracies. Contemporary U.S. anti-environmentalism is conservative in that it defines itself in opposition to the ideology and programs of the liberal state. Like other conservatives, anti-environmentalists argue that, rather than serving the interests of society as a whole, liberalism's expansion of the power of the state has in fact been used by elites for their own ends and in ways that conflict with the desires and needs of communities and "ordinary people."1

Historians have paid conservatism far less attention than its power and importance in U.S. history warrant. Environmental historians are no exception to this pattern. Scholars have been understandably too interested in environmentalism to spend much energy on detailing the motives and sources of its opponents; thus, the history of environmental politics has generally been told from the point of view of environmentalists and their conservationist predecessors. In his history of the concept of wilderness in U.S. thought, Roderick Nash laid the foundation for this approach in the early stages of environmental history. Nash writes as though the history of the wilderness aesthetic were synonymous with the history of appreciation of nature.2Such is also the case with major studies of conservationist and environmentalist efforts to create parks and wilderness areas. Most historians present these places as self-evident "wilderness areas," largely unaffected by humans and appealing precisely because of their distance from the pressures of modern life. From this perspective, rapacious exploitation is the always-present counterpart of the altruistic desire to protect them. Such accounts rely heavily on the documents of environmental and conservation groups, and as a result, are often triumphal accounts of the victory of environmentalism in which enlightened nature lovers do battle with their shortsighted, provincial, or merely greedy opponents.3

Recent scholarship provides some of the tools and information necessary to tell histories of environmentalism and protected areas that take anti-environmentalism seriously. Rather than assuming that a wilderness ethos is an obvious and "natural" way of expressing appreciation for nature, historians can now avail themselves of much more nuanced and contextual understandings of the intellectual history of the concept of wilderness. In U.S. culture, as William Cronon argues, the mystique of wilderness emerged from the Romantic notion of the sublime and from the nineteenth-century belief in the frontier as the breeding ground for democracy and national character. Despite its key role in rallying environmental sentiment, wilderness can be seen as an escapist fantasy better suited for individual therapeutic experience than for the daunting social task of making a living from nature in a sustainable and respectful fashion. Scholars have done a particularly good job demonstrating how wilderness ideology made it all too easy to overlook the long history of Indian inhabitation, and how it often clashed with native understandings and subsistence uses of nature.4

Recent accounts of conservation, more focused on social history, also avoid environmentalist triumphalism. They instead tell more complex and less moralistic stories of how state conservation created landscapes administered by experts on behalf of the bureaucratic state and the modern economy. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, game bureaucracies sought to replace a set of local commons with a national commons in which wildlife was the property of the state or federal government, an effort which enlisted the support of some locals, generally elite factions. More intensive management in an area directly under government control, such as the Adirondacks preserve, did not maintain a wilderness apart from the modern world, but rather created landscapes managed by professional bureaucrats in the interests of visiting tourists and national economic power.5

While much remains to be explored in the social history of American conservation, it is already clear that such studies will help to explain the sources, motives, and ideologies of anti-environmentalism. This essay reconsiders the history of environmental conflict in Northeastern Minnesota in light of the impact of Superior National Forest's establishment in, 1909, specifically by examining the effects of state conservation on local resource use and economic hierarchies in the nearby town of Ely.6 Local elites in Ely were the critical clients and beneficiaries of the expansion of state power that conservation embodied. The ability of the town's merchant elite to implement state conservation in its own interest posed a threat to important subsistence uses by the area's poorer residents. The result was a deepening of the gap between the way these two groups perceived the natural world around them and the bureaucracies that were increasingly regulating it. These early conflicts helped contribute to widespread local opposition to the management of the forest, an opposition that lasts to this day.