How they drew lines in the Northwest's forests
An environmental historian traces the century-long evolution of a government-managed patchwork in the Cascades. In the end, designating wilderness areas was as much about cutting down trees as preserving them.
Wilderness boundaries matter because the process of defining them is a distinctly human endeavor that deeply shapes — and is shaped by — our history. This is true for all the borders, walls, fences, frontiers, lines, and boundaries that humans impose on the landscape. Referring to Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," legal scholar Eric Freyfogle suggests an additional meaning for its most famous line, "Good fences make good neighbors." The poem tells the story of two New England neighbors who meet every year in the spring to repair portions of their adjoining stone wall that "the frozen-ground-swell of winter" has brought down. Nature, Frost suggests, does not recognize the wall as a boundary. Humans do recognize the wall, however, and "good fences make good neighbors" has become a proverb to justify individual property rights. Freyfogle, though, asks us to think about the cooperative process of building and repairing that wall rather than the divisive presence of the wall as a barrier. Good fences make good neighbors because a solid, strong fence requires neighborly cooperation in maintaining communal property lines.
Rather than being a closed and elitist process, as critics have often portrayed it, political conflicts over public land have encouraged countless citizens to become more involved in decisions over their own resources, thus challenging the previously exclusive authority of the U.S. Forest Service in these matters. Since the 1960s, the question of wilderness is among the issues that have elicited the greatest public input to government decision-making in American history. So this is not a story of political elitism, nor is it solely a heroic tale of a growing grassroots political movement for wilderness overcoming the obstacles of powerful industrial interests. Rather, it is a story that demonstrates the growing complexity of the political process in the post-war era and the much broader public participation in that process.
Wilderness and non-wilderness lands on the national forests represent different patterns of land use. The boundaries themselves, however, are a joint product of competing interest groups, far more than is explained by the traditional interpretation that preservation was imposed upon public lands by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. In the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the timber industry has had a powerful influence over where those boundaries lie. In the history of Cascade wilderness, the proverbial neighbors have done far more than just repair walls; they have moved them, taken them down, and built new ones around different areas.
The drawing of lines around wilderness areas also illuminates significant historical conflicts in the history of the American West. According to Patricia Nelson Limerick, one of the leading interpreters of the West, "Western history is a story structured by the drawing of lines and the marking of borders." Competing imperial land grabs, nations, Indian reservations, private land, mining claims, homestead claims, railroad land grants, forest reserves, and territories, states, counties, and municipalities are all important examples of land designation in western history.
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How they drew lines in the Northwest's forests
