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Details:
Where Land and Water Meet: A
Western Landscape Transformed
Nancy Langston, University of Washington Press,
2003
230 pp.; $26.95 (cloth)
ISBN 0-295-98307-8
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February
17, 2005: In a field full of cautionary tales about
humanity's uncanny ability to bring about totally unintentional
environmental circumstances, Nancy Langston's scholarship
is unique. In her first book, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares
(1996), a sympathetic yet critical examination of forest management
in Oregon's Blue Mountain National Forest, Langston moved
beyond the tragic stock-narrative of environmental history
by sketching a program of practical management solutions to
the often disastrous interactions between humans and the non-human
world. Work to account for complexity, Langston urged her
readers. Her latest book, Where Land and Water Meet: A
Western Landscape Transformed, is in many ways the second
chapter in a larger project. Langston, an environmental historian
and professor of forest ecology and management at the University
of Wisconsin has produced a careful cultural, social, and
natural history of human management of wetlands in eastern
Oregon, specifically the riparian areas of the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge. The book is also a lesson in what Langston
calls "pragmatic adaptive management." To the theme
of complexity, Langston adds conflict as a necessary component
of sustainable natural resource management.
Birders and sportsmen familiar with great basin wildlife know
Malheur's marshes quite well; egrets, ducks, Canadian geese,
herons, and trout, are but a few of the animals that depend
on the refuge's riparian marshlands during the year. Langston
traces the history of this landscape from the arrival of the
first white settlers near the end of the 19th century to the
present day, identifying two overlapping eras of land management:
cattle ranching and federal wildlife management. In both eras,
Malheur residents tried to engineer the wetlands to produce
different empires. Ranchers shaped the land to create imperial
cattle concerns. Henry Miller, of Miller and Lux, set up an
operation in the basin, while Peter French and Hugh Glenn
used the marshes and surrounding area for their P Ranch. These
ranchers turned their visions of cattle empires into reality
by manipulating the wetlands and the flow of water across
them to create more and more property for cattle grazing.
Ironically, the story of federal refuge management is not
terribly different. Refuge officials, like ranchers, were
equally single-minded in their manipulation of the environment.
Once the federal government wrested control of Malheur Lake
and the Donner and Blitzen River from ranchers, creating the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, managers tried to create
an "empire of ducks," a vision based on their romantic
notions of the cattle empires of the "old West."
Refuge managers used complex science to engineer the wetlands
into "better" marshes capable of "producing"
more of what the marshes were famous for, ducks and trout.
The result, no surprise to environmental historians, was a
weird hybrid landscape, part human, part natural. Beavers
were trapped out, their dams replaced with concrete. Riverbank
willows were eradicated, planted, and eradicated again. Predators
were systematically eliminated and then reintroduced. Throughout
the story, Langston provides a nuanced account of the cultural
context in which the people of Malheur operated, drawing a
direct line between their perceptions of the land and their
actions.
At the heart of this story are the power relations between
competing social groups looking to control the wetlands and
dictate land-use policy. In the late 19th century and the
early 20th, ranchers had the upper hand, controlling the vast
majority of property in the basin. By the 1930s, after an
intense struggle between cattle barons and refuge managers,
the balance of power shifted, and the federal government was
increasingly able to shape land-use at Malheur. Both groups
tried to eliminate each other's influence in the basin, yet
at no point was the power held by either ranchers or refuge
managers very secure. Throughout Malheur's history, ranchers
and managers had to gain popular support for their policies.
Small farmers in the basin, urban bird-watchers in Portland,
and sportsman throughout the mountain West felt as if they
had a stake in Malheur as well. Both ranchers and wildlife
managers tailored their message to these groups, seeking to
build coalitions that might tip the balance of power one way
or the other.
This power struggle provides the story with dramatic tension,
but it also provides Langston's argument with necessary analytical
tension. Where Land and Water Meet shows how sustainable
management was only possible when no one single social group
monopolized the landscape and its use. "For generations,"
writes Langston, "first ranchers and then refuge managers
were able to gather enough power so that they did not need
to acknowledge viewpoints other than their own" (p. 9).
The solution to such narrow-minded management practices and
their resultant disastrous landscapes, Langston maintains,
is conflict. The story of Malheur teaches us that "both
environmental lawsuits and environmental change forced open
a door through which new stories, new perspectives, and new
assumptions could enter" (p. 9). Conflict is the key
to successful management policies. "For many people conflict
is a dirty word," Langston writes, "yet conflicts
among different users of Malheur Lake Basin eventually improved
refuge management [and] disrupted the hold of narrow orthodoxies
on resource management" (p. 9). Only by allowing for
conflict, for the messy social reality of multiple users,
perspectives, and voices, can we hope to manage the equally
messy world of multiple biological, climatic, and geological
forces.
Similar to Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares, Where
Land and Water Meet ends with a fascinating historical
essay and management methodology statement on how restoration
ecologists, wildlife managers, ranchers, sportsmen, local
residents, and recreational tourists might try to work together
to manage and account for the complexity of riparian areas
or any other landscape. The last chapter, "Pragmatic
Adaptive Management," is not so much a conclusion, but
a complex suggestion on how management should incorporate
conflict and complexity. Langston draws on the philosophical
foundations of American pragmatism to argue for a "democratic
process that creates a structure for useful conflict"
(p. 161). In short, Langston makes conflict and multiple perspectives
necessary for good management. Only by putting locals, such
as ranchers and small farmers, and non-locals, such as government
scientists and environmental activists, on an equal footing
can management succeed.
As a teaching tool for both undergraduate and graduate students,
this book reads wonderfully. Similarly, Where Land and
Water Meet will be easily digestible for those outside
of the academy. It is full of enlightening stories as well
as careful and accessible analysis. Where Land and Water
Meet is elegantly concise at 169 pages, and its six chapters
are divided into discussions of discrete historical episodes
or thematic discussions which run from about two to 15 pages
apiece.
For all of the book's strengths, its coverage could have been
broader. Ranchers and federal managers dominate Langston's
history of Malheur because they were the ones that actually
determined land-use policies. Homesteaders, small farmers,
and sportsman, for instance, play a much more marginal role
in her analysis because they never secured control over that
process. Yet the reader is left wondering if these more marginal
groups were more than just a constituency to be won over.
Langston argues that ranchers and refuge managers tailored
their rhetoric to appeal to these groups but took little of
it from them. In this story, those in power held the power
of cultural production. The narrative could have withstood
further discussion of the role played by other users. It would
not have altered Langston's larger argument, but it would
have provided a more nuanced telling of how different Oregonians
contributed to the creation of the rhetoric of nature so crucial
to the fights over Malheur.
Where Land and Water Meet is a sophisticated yet
accessible analysis of the intersection of nature and culture.
More importantly, however, it moves beyond simple criticisms
of the problems inherent in wildlife and natural resource
management and advances a nuanced program for those invested
in land management, outdoor recreation, farming, ranching,
and the environment.
Ryan J. Carey, Department of History, University of Texas
at Austin.
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