Reviewed by: An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and The Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and The Public Interest by Adam M. Sowards Taylor E. Rose AN OPEN PIT VISIBLE FROM THE MOON: THE WILDERNESS ACT AND THE FIGHT TO PROTECT MINERS RIDGE AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST by Adam M. Sowards Oklahoma University Press, Norman, 2020. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 248 pages. $34.95 cloth. In December 1966, the Kennecott Mining Corporation announced plans to develop a copper mine in the rugged Cascade Mountains of northern Washington state. But, after extended deliberation, executives quietly shelved the proposal a few years later. It would have been, in the words of the project’s most high-profile opponent, Sierra Club executive director David Brower, a “man-made crater . . . so large it would be visible from the moon” — an open-pit mine scarring a remote ridgeline in Glacier Peak Wilderness Area “at what many have called the ‘scenic climax’ of the region,” according to environmental historian Adam M. Sowards (pp. 4–5). Wilderness preservationists considered Kennecott’s decision a victory. But things could have been different. By grappling [End Page 104] with the “contingency” of the years before the mine’s fate was sealed, Sowards hopes to recover the “sense of urgency” that nature-lovers in the Pacific Northwest felt when they heard that a favorite recreation spot was zoned for extraction (p. 4). It is a study of “the power of citizenship,” he writes, as well as “a book of stories, good stories about interesting people and beautiful places that matter” (p. 9). Riffing on the anthropologist Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), he suggests that “democracy sits in places — places like Miners Ridge” (p. 7). In eleven succinct chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, Sowards contextualizes the midcentury wilderness scene in western Washington. He narrates biographies of influential but relatively little-known figures from the state and details pivotal moments in the Miners Ridge controversy, such as the January 1967 San Francisco “summit” between conservation leaders and Kennecott representatives. In chapters 5 through 9, each main character gets his — and they are all men (also all White) — own chapter: the skeptical Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman; a Mount Vernon, Washington, doctor and activist named Fred Darvill; the Pacific Northwest’s first Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, an ardent conservationist from Yakima; and a student at the University of Washington named Benjamin A. Shaine, who wrote a thesis on the campaign against Kennecott, which he also helped organize. Chapter 1 serves as a helpful primer on proto-wilderness land-use categories, including Regulation L-20, the 1929 U.S. Forest Service administrative law creating “primitive areas.” Chapter 2 builds the local story of Glacier Peak “wilderness” as a legal and cultural construct on top of chapter 1’s “foundation” of pre-war preservation, culminating in the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act. The final two chapters, which make up the third — and shortest — section, provide “the resolution.” In chapter 10, Kennecott debates its plans for Miners Ridge in the midst of “troubles” caused by price fluctuations, labor strikes, and increasing costs of operation worldwide. And in chapter 11, preservationists nationwide celebrate the fight against the mine. (All quotes are from chapter/section titles.) The Wilderness Act looms large in Sowards’s telling of how and why the appropriately — or, given the outcome, ironically — named Miners Ridge remained undeveloped. It is a familiar tale that echoes themes from important works in U.S. wilderness history, such as Kevin Marsh’s Drawing Lines in the Forest (2007). Sowards stakes out an exciting historiographic intervention early on, arguing for the need to reexamine the wilderness bill’s extractive “compromise” between its citizen champion, Howard Zahniser, and ambivalent Congressional sponsor, western Colorado’s Representative Wayne Aspinall, who negotiated a twenty-year loophole for mineral exploration into the final law (p. 8). “This mining exception,” says Sowards, “made what happened at Miners Ridge important, controversial, and, above all, historic” (p. 8). The persistence of the 1872 General Mining Act is an overlooked part of public-lands history. A study of mining’s effects on wilderness areas is a welcome addition to...
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