Abstract

Richard Rajala's Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest is a thoughtful examination of how North Americans treat their forests and those who work them. He ably demonstrates how both were increasingly exploited from 1880 to 1965 in the Douglas fir habitat of British Columbia and the states of Washington and Oregon.The book is divided into two parts that examine separate aspects of the exploitation of the forests and forest laborers. The first part—“Machines, Managers, and Work”—chronicles the technological changes that transformed this heavily forested area into the equivalent of a factory floor. Rajala chronicles the myriad new technologies seized on by lumber companies as hand tools and animal power gave way to steam donkeys, aerial skidders, chain saws, Caterpillar tractors, aerial photography, grapple yarders, and IBM punch‐card computers. For the reader who is less than proficient in silvicultural technology, informative illustrations and photos accompany Rajala's lucid descriptions. All of these technological changes, Rajala claims, were an attempt by larger lumber companies to implement a factory regime on the previously chaotic forest floor. For Rajala the efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor is at least as important as the pioneering conservationist Gifford Pinchot for understanding North American forest history. Rajala is clearly more interested in economic determinism than environmental determinism.The second, more substantive, part of the book—“Clearcutting, Conservation, and the State”—examines the social, scientific, and political context that allowed the clearcutting of the Pacific Northwest Douglas fir forests. In his tripartite historical division, Rajala chronicles the emergence of clearcutting as the dominant lumbering method between 1880 and 1930. The forest “researcher” J. V. Hoffman did immeasurable harm in this era with his 1913 “seed storage” theory of Douglas fir recovery. Hoffman's claim that clearcuts and a quick slash and burn would lead to a natural seed regeneration of Douglas fir was eagerly seized on by lumber companies and their forester allies. These self‐serving justifications led to an expansion of clearcutting until the combined economic and environmental disasters of the 1930s derailed the trajectory of exploitation. In the 1930s clearcutting gave way to selective logging and nascent efforts to regulate lumber extraction. Regulatory attempts eventually came to naught owing to determined opposition and, eventually, wartime exigencies. Rajala's description of regulatory failure at the federal level in the U.S. and the provincial level in Canada is the one section of the book in which the comparison between the two countries offers some truly novel insight. From 1940 to 1965 the grim march toward sylvan destruction reemerges. Patch logging , at best a partial solution, eventually gave way by the mid 1950s to broadscale clearcuts quickly replanted with economically valuable species. These forest plantations represented the epitome of efficient lumber extraction and the nadir of habitat for hikers, spotted owls, and others dependent on biodiversity.Of particular interest to historians of science is the manner in which the forestry sciences were directed by corporate needs. In Rajala's overview, good forestry science consistently fails to drive out bad science. The forest researcher Leo Isaac discredited “seed storage” and by 1943 had developed a workable theory of natural reseeding of certain cut areas. Yet his work was routinely ignored by regulators, foresters, and, of course, large lumber corporations—who, one is led to believe, would advocate phlogiston theory if it increased their profits. Rajala uses Harry Braverman's theory of “deskilling” and the neo‐Marxist school of labor process analysis to bear hard on the actual work of lumbering and to argue strongly that the exploitation of workers and of trees is connected. This thesis, although not a perfect mesh, does strongly suggest that contemporary logging problems may have much longer roots than is currently expressed in the rather simplistic formulations of “jobs vs. owls.” Rajala's application of labor process theory to the forest floor is illuminating in the same manner as the suggestions of an earlier generation of historians that the exploitation of women and of natural resources might have a common ideology. As such, Rajala has written a keystone book for anyone interested in the context of natural and human exploitation