The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters with a Northwest River

Abstract

knowledge. Environmental historians have written about the abstraction and subsequent commodification of nature as the principal sources of environmental destruction.6 But the replacement of experiential modes of understanding with abstract representations has been uneven and incomplete. The direct sensory, subjective experience of individuals persists alongside the impulse toward abstraction. This has been true on the Skagit, where individuals-even scientists and engineersnever fully disavowed their personal experience of the river. While language and culture shape perception and dictate the possible forms of representation, we need to ask whether the experience of nature may nonetheless exceed such cultural limits. Of course, it is not only perceptions of the river that have changed but also the river's physical features. Most of the material changes on the Skagit have been similar to those studied in regard to other rivers. The contemporary river, while still considered wild in its upper reaches, is quite different from the river that European Americans encountered in the mid-nineteenth century. Upon settling the Skagit Valley, Americans began to clear the riparian forest and to dike the lower reaches of the river to curtail the flooding of potential farmland. The river's channel was cleared of downed trees and branches, and portions were dredged and straightened to facilitate navigation by steamships. Deforestation all along the river's banks altered its streamflow patterns, increased erosion, and decreased fish habitat. The installation of fish hatcheries on a tributary stream in 1912 and on the main channel in the 1940s further altered ecological relationships in the river. The most significant changes, however, took place between 1919 and 1949, when a series of dams and powerhouses were built on the upper river to supply electricity to the city of Seattle. The dams dramatically altered the river's flow and destroyed salmon-spawning grounds as they made Seattle's growth possible.7 5 See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rozcewica and Andre Schuwer (Boston, 1989), 421. For a work on the history of science using this approach, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and theAir-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). On the possible relationship between phenomenology and environmentalism, see David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York, 1996). 6See, for example, Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the American West (New York, 1985); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); William Cronon, Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Opening of the Great West (New York, 1991); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle, 1980); and Merchant, Death of Nature. 7 On environmental change along the Skagit River, see Envirosphere Company, Study of Skagit Dams Original Impacts on Wildlife and Fish and Populations: Final Report (Bellevue, Wash., 1988); United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Office of Hydropower Licensing, Final EIS for Eight Hydroelectric Projects Proposedfor Skagit River Basin, Washington, FERC/EIS-0083-F (Washington, 1998); Saul Weisberg and J. Reidel, From the Mountains to the Sea: Guide to the Skagit River Watershed (Sedro Woolley, Wash., 1991); Cindy L. Halbert, Historical Analysis of the Effects of Changing Land Use on Channel Morphology in the Skagit River Basin, Washington (USA), With Implications for Salmon Habitat (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1995); and Roland L. de Lorme, ed., Of Man, Time, and a River: The Skagit River, How Should It Be Used? (Bellingham, Wash., 1977). On the fish hatcheries, see E. Victor Smith and Melvin G. Anderson, A Preliminary Survey of the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.223 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 05:13:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1604 The Journal of American History March 2000 These material changes unquestionably shaped human experience of the river, but the material changes themselves proceeded in part from changes in language and forms of mediation. For example, the development of the science of hydrology and its measuring techniques made possible the construction of dams and reservoirs. Cultural and material change were intertwined. My focus is primarily on language because so much of environmental history has ignored discourse as a subject of study. By focusing on the language that individuals have used to describe the Skagit, we can begin to chart the changing ways people experienced nature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8