Drawing Lines in the Forest: CREATING WILDERNESS AREAS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Drawing Lines in the Forest CREATING WILDERNESS AREAS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST Kevin R. Marsh University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2007. Illustrations, notes, maps, bibliography, index, xv + 229 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Kevin Marsh's book is a valuable addition to the Weyerhauser Environmental Books list, published by the University of Washington Press and edited by William Cronon. The series, now numbering twenty, has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of environmental history, particularly in the American West.

Drawing Lines in the Forest is an apt tide, for the book examines the long fight over wilderness area boundary lines in the states of Oregon and Washington between 1950 and 1984. Marsh's primary focus is on three Cascade Range regions: Three Sisters (Oregon), Northern Cascades (Washington), and Alpine Lakes (Washington). In each area, the theme for land use decisions was strikingly similar. All interest groups favored wilderness designation. The debate focused on where to draw the boundary lines. The U.S. Forest Service, backed by the lumber industry, was pleased to hand over the higher elevations of rocks and ice (above 3,500 feet) to the wilderness advocates. The wilderness supporters, however, hungered for some forest, including old growth, within these areas. Logging interests fought fiercely for the lower elevation valleys, arguing for maximum timber production. The most volatile clash came in the 1970s over the valley of French Pete Creek, which meandered west from the Three Sisters Wilderness Area and contained about nineteen thousand acres of valuable timber. Environmentalists, led by faculty and student activists at die University of Oregon, cared as much about saving French Pete Creek trees as they did about ending the war in Vietnam. Despite the objections of Oregon's powerful Senator Mark Hatfield, French Pete became wilderness as part of the Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1976.

In chronicling these land use debates, Marsh asserts that the Forest Service was the clear loser, caught in a philosophical time warp because it failed to understand that the concept of multiple use had evolved to mean more that economic productivity. By the 1970s, multiple use had come to mean aesthetic considerations, hiking, ecological diversity, and even water runoff to enhance salmon habitat. Unable to adjust, the Forest Service lost control, relinquishing its authority to Congress and the courts to determine winners and losers in the Northwest wilderness fights. The Forest Service's decline in land use authority began with the Wilderness Act of 1964, but its narrow view of multiple use and its insistence on the "purity doctrine" for wilderness areas doomed it to the sidelines. After years of debate and court action, two 1984 laws added 1.8 million acres as wilderness in Oregon and Washington but also released millions of acres to other uses. Marsh wisely notes that the laws added significantly to our wilderness legacy, but they also encouraged development by their release conditions.

Marsh limits his narrative to the Pacific Northwest, but in his concluding chapter he widens his lens to other western states that each struggled with similar wilderness boundary issues. Out of the numerous land controversies emerged similar 1984 wilderness laws that added 6.6 million acres to the national wilderness system while "releasing" 13.6 million acres to development. Since the 1984 laws, the movement to create new wilderness areas has cooled, but efforts to prevent new Forest Service roads under President Bill Clinton's "Roadless Initiative" continue to stir debate between logging interests and environmentalists.

One might wish that Drawing Lines in the Forest examined the wilderness process in such key states as California, Montana, and Colorado. However, the task would be challenging. The value of Marsh's work is in its detailed depiction of just how environmental and industry groups, such as the Oregon Natural Resources Council and the National Forest Products Association, lobbied, presented their views, and rallied their constituents to write thousands of letters and attend numerous hearings. It was messy, confusing, and very political, but it was local democracy in action. Marsh's book offers an excellent case study of a very complicated process. The details of the story provide insight into how committed people transformed the American wilderness system from idea to reality.

Robert W. Righter

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

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