Landscapes of Conflict
The Oregon Story, 1940-2000
Publication Year: 2004
Published by: University of Washington Press
Foreword - Still Searching for Eden at the End of the Oregon Trail
William Robbins' Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1941-2000 brings to completion the magisterial two-volume survey of Oregon environmental history that he began in 1997 with the publication of Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-940. There are very few books like this one. ...
The Oregon that we know today had its beginnings in mythic nineteenth-century stories of a restless immigrant population on the move to a proverbial green land of promise, a sweep of country that required only the dedication and hard work of a committed people to build a truly progressive society. ...
Prologue - A Time to Remember
Arthur Krock, a Times columnist, wrote the same day: "The bloody dream of the Japanese military caste vanished in the text of a note to the Four Powers accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945." The previous evening, after Japan's surrender announcement flashed on the electric sign at the Times Building at 7:03 p.m. ...
I. Postwar Promise
1. The Great Hope for the New Order
It may be said with some truth that the post-industrial age began on August 6, 1945, when three American B-29s took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas and directed their course 1,500 miles north to Japan. One of the best-known planes ever to fly, the Enola Gay, carried in its bomb bay the five-ton uranium bomb known as Little Boy. ...
2. Into the Brave New World
Few symbols more powerfully evoke the essence and meaning of the Pacific Northwest than salmon. Fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich argues that salmon are survivors, "living through volcanic eruptions, ice ages, mountain building, fires, floods, and droughts."1 ...
II. Making Agriculture Modern
3. Bringing Perfection to the Fields
If there were a storied beginning to modern Oregon, it would be vested in its agricultural bounty, especially the productive lush green valley of the Willamette. From its first white settlements, Oregon enjoyed a rich tradition of agricultural abundance that gave birth to stories creating an image of a bountiful land filled with promise. ...
4. The Wonder World of Pesticides
Because agriculture is important to Oregon's economic well-being, the industry has been a powerful institutional player in establishing state regulatory policies, including the use of chemicals to treat a host of agricultural problems. Oregon Department of Agriculture administrators...
III. Industrial Forestry Management
5. Planning and Technical Efficiency in the Forests
Social innovation and social experiments characterized many of the reform strategies of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration. The Resettlement Administration made a halfhearted effort to establish model communities for refugees from failed farming enterprises and disintegrating industrial centers...
6. Intensive Forestry and Citizen Activism
Before environmental impact assessments, court directives, and public access to information began to slow federal timber harvests, Northwest loggers cut a huge swath through the region's national forests between 1960 and the late 1980s. Bending to pressure from politicians and the forest products industry, the Forest Service developed...
IV. Of Rivers and Land
7. Richard Neuberger's Conservation Politics
Two major figures in both journalism and politics, Richard Neuberger and Tom McCall, played influential roles in Oregon's conservation and environmental communities in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Differing in journalistic talent and political temperament, Neuberger and McCall gained national reputations...
8. Tom McCall and the Struggle for the Willamette
For much of the twentieth century, nearly three-fourths of Oregon's population has lived in the Willamette Valley. Its 11,250 square miles have harbored the state's three largest cities, its major industries--sawmills, food-processing facilities, pulp and paper mills, flax-retting plants, p