Reviews Where Land andWater Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed ByNancy Langston University ofWashington Press, Seattle, 2003. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 248 pages. $26.95 cloth. Reviewed by Karl Brooks University of Kansas, Lawrence The harsh high desert of southeastern Oregon sHarney County holds one of the nations most informative experiments in ecolog ical management, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.Nancy Langston relatesthehistoryof the refuge ? founded in1934to salvage the wetlands mosaic onwhich millions of migratingwaterfowl depended ? as the product of the landscape itselfand itsvarious human inhabitants. Part of theUniversity of Washington s Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series edited by environmental historian William Cronon, Where Land andWa ter Meet offersnuanced interpretation,richwith "shifting,constructed identities,"and cautious, even diffident,policy prescriptions (p. 162). Langston, one of the historical field's best new practitioners, presents the refuge as a "transformed" place inwhich people's contacts with natural forces have created a "new nature" (p. 115).Like allwetlands, the Malheur includes murky, unsteady physical boundaries. Langston writes beautifully of thishigh-desert absurdity, where broad sheets of water are pooled be neath rockyhills amid rolling sage plains. The Malheur 'shuman history presents a series of contested, sporadically violent interventions into a mysterious realm. A very modern con struction, theMalheur Refuge illustrates the folly that comes when humans sever natural connections before studying them. Although Paiutes first inhabited theMal heur, Langston skims theirdistinctive adapta tions to commence her storywith the 1872 ar rival of California ranchers, led by diminutive, combative Peter French. By 1880, with help from the U.S. Army, ranchershad expelled the Indians and begun building what Langston, following a long Oregon historiographical tradition, calls "an empire of cattle" (p. 17). During the re mainder of thenineteenth century,French and rival "cattle barons" manipulated Donner und Blitzen Creek and theSilviesRiver togrow grass forhay and to drain wet meadows forpasture. Within a generation, theiradroitmanipulation of nature? buttressed by relentless evasion of federal land laws ? had created a tense,unstable, hierarchical human society in the shadow of Steens Mountain. French's land-management and water-control techniques, in Langston s judgment, anticipated some of contemporary ecology's most important insights, especially theuse of naturalmelt-floodwater cycles to ir rigatefieldswithout intensiveuse of capital and technology.By introducing readers,accustomed topigeonholing big ranchers as environmental heavies, to these early adaptive strategies, Langs ton reminds us that unexpected lessons emerge from theWest's contested past. Where Land andWaterMeet aims to rehabili tate the great ranchers' environmental reputa tions, since by contrast later Malheur inhabit ants? homesteaders, reclamationists, federal managers ? generally ignored nature's lessons in favorof the fad of thedecade. Yet Langston's evidence admits a differentassessment, and she herself acknowledges that the ranching empire Reviews 633 proved unsustainable, environmentally as well as politically and socially (p. 63). No better, though, did succeeding regimes appreciate the Malheur 'scomplex ecological processes. By the Depression, when both ranchers and reclama tionists had nearly scalped the landscape bald and mostly evicted thewaterfowl, "a desperate situation" gripped thebasin (p. 157).Passionate conservationists led by Stanley JewettandWil liam Finleywould try infusions of science and federalmoney to save the Malheur. L?ngstens surestchaptersdetail howwildlife refuge managers tried tomake water do varied jobs, usually without closely watching the ef fectsof their multiple interventions.She closely analyzes the Malheur 's most durable boss, John Scharff,who single-mindedly machined land and water to pursue his "empire of ducks" (p. 99). By Scharff's retirement in the early 1970s, Fish and Wildlife Service "orthodoxy" and "arrogance" had unleashed almost as many un fortunate consequences as had French's similar attitude a century earlier (p. 158). In the 1980s, criticismof the refuge ? emphasized by volleys of lawsuits and administrative appeals ? dis lodged Scharff's engineering empire. Because "some environmentalists" also believe too firmly in theirown righteousness, Langston concludes that recent conflicts only point theway toward replacing elitistmanagement blueprints with pluralist discourse (p. 155). Where Land and Water Meet argues that the Malheur should be governed by "pragmatic adaptive management," a concept loosely an chored in theDeweyite philosophical tradition (p. 151).Federal refuge managers cannot simply "let nature take its course" because humans have fundamentallyredesigned thebasin over thepast 125years. Instead, theyshould invitestakeholder input,confesshumility,and let theirtechniques be informedby changing scientificunderstand ings...
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Dec 29, 2024
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