The Battle for Fort Lawton: Competing Environmental Claims in Postwar Seattle

Abstract

Focusing on Seattle in the 1960s and early 1970s, this article argues that the postwar environmental movement grew out of concerns among urbanites about physical and social changes in the metropolitan context. The “battle of Fort Lawton” was a series of protests over the conversion of an old army fort to a “wilderness park.” In these protests, women and urban Native Americans offered competing arguments about the meaning and uses of nature in the city. This article traces a growing constituency of environmental activists, broadly defined, whose goals ranged from “beautification” in the early 1960s to “ecology” in the early 1970s. These struggles over open space demonstrate how definitions of nature and of environmentalism often reflected competing visions of politics and of citizenship in the emerging postindustrial city.