Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region

Abstract

One of the least appreciated and most distinctive regions in the United States is the broad arc of land that reaches from the northern portion of Michigan's Lower Peninsula across the Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin to northwestern Minnesota. This region, which covers more than fifty-seven million acres and is divided into eighty-six different counties, is known to contemporary residents of the Midwest as “the north woods.” But for the handful of historians who have investigated the region's past it is known as the Great Lakes Cut-over Region. As James Kates has demonstrated in his fine new study, the “cutover region” was the cultural invention of a group of elite writers and scientists in order to manage the devastated forestlands of the upper Great Lakes. Between 1900 and 1939 foresters, novelists, and land economists waged a war of words to move the American public from its commitment to pioneer individualism to the embrace of a collective, scientific management of the region. While remaining centered on the particular challenges of the region, Kates skillfully presents this story within the context of the national growth of the conservation movement. This is a genuine contribution to environmental history.