The Clean Water Act Turns 40

I highly recommend this Paul Greenberg editorial.

The Clean Water Act Turns 40: Is the Law Still Protecting Our Waters? | | AlterNet

Conservation Ethos

My Pacific Northwest history class watched Clearcut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon (2005) last night. This film never fails to generate enthusiastic and contentious discussion. The film is ostensibly about timber, the decline of the prosperous timber industry, and community dissension that resulted from the spotted owl controversy. But, the film hones in on community controversies in the early 2000s that are as much about dress code, religious values, gay awareness groups, body piercings, and a real estate exchange that resulted in litigation.

That film was part of the entry point for tonight's lecture and discussion concerning the construction of the Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railways in the late nineteenth century, the land grants given to the Northern Pacific to facilitate construction, the sale of many of these lands by Jim Hill to George Weyerhaeuser, and the advocacy of environmentalists Derrick Jensen and George Draffan in Railroads and Clearcuts: Legacy of Congress's 1864 Northern Pacific Land Grant (1995). I bought Jensen and Draffan's book in Republic, Washington in 2001, emailed Draffan to receive additional supporting materials a week or so later, and have been developing a critical narrative response to this text ever since.

Jensen's and Draffan's contention that the excessive land grants claimed by the Northern Pacific in the late nineteenth century were a breach of the public trust is hard to contest. Nor is it easy to set aside their claim that such land grant claims were unlawful abuses of a law that had expired. However, their contention that Congress can and should restore these lands to the public domain is more difficult to swallow. In any case, it is the job of a historian studying such texts of environmental advocacy to investigate the historic claims.

A central claim of this text, other papers by Draffan, Jensen, and others writing for Endgame Research and similar groups, and of critics of the timber industry generally is that the timber companies have irresponsibly over-harvested our national forests, and private forests.

In assessing these claims, as well as historicizing the spotted owl controversy of the early late 1980s and early 1990s, it seems necessary to understand some of the history of notions of forest conservation. Such an inquiry led me to reading the early chapters of John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920). This text reviews federal and state legislation affecting forests from the beginnings of English colonization of New England to the time of writing in the early twentieth century.


A Lesson in Sourcing

Ise offers a remarkable passage attributed to Richard Upton Piper, The Trees of America (1855):

When Canada has exhausted her supply, which she must at some time do, where are we to go? In our enjoyment of the present we are apt to forget that we cannot without sin neglect to provide for those who are to come after us. It is a common observation that our summers are becoming dryer and our streams smaller, and this is due to forest destruction, which makes our summers dryer and our winters colder.
Ise, United States Forest Policy, 28

That over-harvesting might have been an issue in the mid-nineteenth century is less surprising than Piper's anticipation of the science of climate change. Naturally, I went looking for this passage in Piper's book. The absence of a footnote and page number in Ise did not facilitate my quest. Even so, I can confidently assert that the quote is spurious. All of the words appear in Piper's book, but in four paragraphs spread across three pages. The punctuation has been altered in the third sentence, and the words are not Piper's, but are words he quoted from some letters of William C. Bryant (the poet). Ise crystallized Bryant's comments into a briefer statement.

"When Canada has exhausted her supply, which she must at some time do, where are we to go?" appears after (8) "In our enjoyment of the present we are apt to forget that we cannot without sin neglect to provide for those who are to come after us" (6).

The third sentence derives from a longer passage:

"It is a common observation," says this correspondent [Bryant], "that our summers are becoming dryer, and our streams smaller. Take the Cuyahoga as an illustration. Fifty years ago large barges loaded with goods went up and down that river, and one of the vessels engaged in the battle of Lake Erie, in which the gallant Perry was victorious, was built at Old Portage, six miles north of Albion, and floated down the lake. Now, in an ordinary stage of the water, a canoe or skiff can hardly pass down the stream.

"Many a boat of fifty tons burden has been built and loaded on the Tuscarawas, at New Portage, and sailed to New Orleans without breaking bulk. Now the river hardly affords a supply of water at New Portage for the canal. The same may be said of other streams — they are drying up. And from the same cause — the destruction of our forests — our summers are growing dryer, and our winters colder." Or perhaps it should be stated, the seasons are becoming subject to greater extremes of heat and cold — of dryness and moisture. Humbolt says, "The clearing of a country of trees has the effect of raising the mean annual temperature; but at the same time greater extremes of heat and cold are introduced." These very extremes are the great sources of mischief to vegetation, and also to the health of man and animals.
Piper, The Trees of America, 51 (emphasis added)

Piper's science, or Bryant's, may differ from science in our day, but both a conservation ethos focused upon the affects of deforestation and incipient concerns about global temperatures were present in the mid-nineteenth century. Piper's book was published the same year that Isaac I. Stevens, who had led previously the Pacific Railroad Expedition to survey a northern route for a rail line, conducted treaties with the Makah, Nez Perce, Yakama, and other tribes.

American Wealth: Timber

The history of the United States is fundamentally a history of rapid exploitation of immensely valuable natural resources. The possession and exploitation of these resources have given most of the distinctive traits to American character, economic development, and even political and social institutions. Whatever preeminence the United States may have among the nations of the world, in industrial activity, efficiency and enterprise, in standards of comfort in living, in wealth, and even in such social and educational institutions as are dependent upon great wealth, must be attributed to the possession of these great natural resources; and the maintenance of our preeminence in these respects is dependent upon a wise and economical use of remaining resources. Thus the question of conservation is one of the most important questions before the American people ...
John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920), xix.

Remember this: this text criticizing wasteful over-cutting of timber and other wanton exploitation of the sources of American wealth was published in 1920. Its criticism of wrong-headed government actions was published a dozen years prior to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the office of President of the United States. Long before publicly funded welfare existed for the poor and destitute, it existed for the railroads. These railroads, and companies with which they made sweet deals (Weyerhaeuser), came to own most of the nation's timber resources.

The three largest timber holdings in the United States— those of the Southern Pacific, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, and the Northern Pacific—aggregated about 9,000,000 acres of timber land—since the forfeiture of the Southern Pacific lands in Oregon, only about 7,000,000 acres—some of it among the finest in the world. The five largest holdings in the country included 12,794,000 acres, an average of 2,560,000 acres each. Among holdings smaller than these were 9 of from 500,000 to 1,500,000 acres, averaging almost 1,000,000 acres each; 27 holdings of from 300,000 to 500,000 acres each; 48 holdings of from 150,000 to 300,000 acres; 124 of from 75,000 to 150,000 acres; and 520 holdings of between 18,000 and 75,000 acres. Thus 733 holders owned in fee a total of 71,521,000 acres of timber land and land owned in connection with or in the vicinity of this timber land—an average of nearly 100,000 acres each. There were also 961 smaller holders owning a total of 6,731,000 acres, an average for each of 7,000 acres—the equivalent of forty homesteads. This makes a total of over 78,000,000 acres owned in fee by 1,694 holders—nearly one twentieth of the land area of the United States, from the Canadian to the Mexican border.
John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920), 317.