Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in the Pacific Northwest Timber Country

Following several decades of intermittent wars of conquest against Indigenous peoples and war and negotiation with rival European claimants, the American government asserted sovereignty over western parts of North America around the middle of the nineteenth century. Such assertions became concrete mainly through possession and occupation. In Strong Winds and Widow Makers, Steven Beda explores aspects of the history of occupancy and industry in one such claimed space, focusing on Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Here as in many other parts of North America, a central aim for state and capital alike was to profit by commodifying nature. In the context of the Pacific coast, vast forested areas were the focus, and by the last years of the nineteenth century the main strategy for this region was to transform trees into lumber, reaping immense returns in realized value by selling this product in markets in North America and beyond. As Beda shows, felling and moving the trunks of ancient trees across the land and into sawmills, and from the region to the wider world, was a herculean task. It required technological expertise, logistical capacity, and much labor power. Capitalists' profits varied inversely with the rates paid for labor employed. Accordingly, the waves of migrants who populated camps and communities in the western woods endured highly dangerous working conditions in return for meager remuneration.Others have described the danger and exploitation central to timbering and other extractive industries. Beda does not revisit well-worn ground for its own sake. Instead, he explores links between exploitation, community, place, and the origins of a class-based environmental consciousness. He argues that in his study area, rates of pay were insufficient to afford working families a satisfactory subsistence. Accordingly, hunting, gathering, and growing vegetables, among other activities, supplemented wages as families bridged the gap between insufficient earnings and income requisite for an acceptable existence. Vibrant forests, then, were essential to survival, and Beda argues that workers developed a strong impulse to steward spaces and resources on which personal and communal well-being depended. The lean years of the 1930s were important in crystalizing these links for workers in the region, with the desperation of the Depression years underscoring the connection between vibrant forests and vibrant communities. From that point until the postwar years, the stewarding of the forests was central to workers and their organizations in the region. Beda argues that such a disposition remains central to many timber workers and other working-class residents of timber country. He also sees a diminishing of the class basis of environmentalism in the timber industry, as a cadre of small-scale capitalists share a commitment to the preservation of the forests and the rural communities and lifeways dependent on them.According to Beda, this vernacular, industry environmentalism is underappreciated. Blindness to it reflects shifts in popular understandings of rural working people in the later twentieth century, and the rise of a new movement-oriented environmentalism at about the same time. Often urbanites, and often more accustomed to standing desks than stands of trees, movement-oriented environmentalists disparaged timber workers and others in the timber industry, insisting on the principle of the preservation of forests in an untouched state. Beda claims that this approach to environmentalism misunderstands the forests and leads to counterproductive approaches to their management. Forests, he reminds, have never been pristine places. Lightning has struck in the past, just as it strikes now, resulting in forest fires and a cycle of destruction and regeneration. The region's Indigenous peoples had also long conducted controlled burns to encourage the different flora and fauna that occurred at different stages of the regenerative process. Proceeding as though long-standing forests should remain unchanged or untouched, forest managers may prevent or delay the destruction of trees. They also, however, do not allow for the vibrancy and diversity that Indigenous residents had encouraged through burning. Fires also are not indefinitely staved off, and in a context of a warming climate, a buildup of tinder results in more catastrophic conflagrations. Pointing to his case study, Beda counsels that the most effective systems of forest management included those who lived and worked in the woods. In his estimation, any effective system of management going forward will draw on such people as well.There is much to recommend this book. Thoroughly researched and well written, it provides much insight into changing technologies and labor processes in the timber industry in the coastal Pacific region. It also offers a nuanced account of the social history of timbering communities, highlighting the importance of place for working people and their movements. Beda admirably weaves these details together with wider developments in the international capitalist order. Finally, his vivid descriptions of people and places make clear that Beda has explored the territory he writes about and that he has taken the time to know those who have and do live there. He displays a deep respect for both.That said, this work is not without faults. Beda cogently explains how US policymakers on different scales have shaped life and labor in timber country. The same cannot be said of the Canadian parts of his study area. At times these sections of the book seem like afterthoughts. Perhaps more serious is the manner in which Indigenous peoples figure in this account. The author mentions Indigenous inhabitants and their practice of controlled burning periodically (e.g., 58, 71, 220). At one point he connects timber workers' vocabulary to language forms partly derived from Indigenous peoples (95). In terms of the more general theorization of capitalism, class, and community formation central to this book, Indigenous people disappear from the scene. Settlement and dispossession are two halves of the same coin. In this age of reconciliation, surely we must acknowledge that a fulsome account of the former requires that we conceptualize and explore its history as necessarily premised on the latter.