For years the logging industry and the rich timberlands of the East and West coasts have evoked images of Jigger Jones and Paul Bunyan, lusty lumbermen of folk history. Behind these myths, however, lie the realities of ruthless competition, heedless exploitation of forestlands, and massive overproduction that once threatened to destroy the lumber industry.

This book integrates class, environmental, and political analysis to uncover the history of clearcutting in the Douglas fir forests of B.C., Washington, and Oregon between 1880 and 1965. Part I focuses on the mode of production, analyzing the technological and managerial structures of worker and resource exploitation from the perspective of current trends in labour process research. Rajala argues that operators sought to neutralize the variable forest environment by emulating the factory model of work organization. The introduction of steam-powered overhead logging methods provided industry with a rudimentary factory regime by 1930, accompanied by productivity gains and diminished workplace autonomy for loggers. After a Depression-inspired turn to selective logging with caterpillar tractors timber capital continued its refinement of clearcutting technologies in the post-war period, achieving complete mechanization of yarding with the automatic grapple. Driviing this process of innovation was a concept of industrial efficiency that responded to changing environmental conditions, product and labour markets, but sought to advance operators' class interests by routinizing production. The managerial component of the factory regime took shape in accordance with the principles of the early 20th century scientific management movement. Requiring expertise in the organization of an expanded, technologically sophisticated exploitation process, operators presided over the establishment of logging engineering programs in the region's universities. Graduates introduced rational planning procedures to coastal logging, contributing to a rate of deforestation that generated a corporate call for technical forestry expertise after 1930. Industrial foresters then emerged from the universities to provide firms with data needed for long-range investment decisions in land acquisition and management. Part II constitutes an environmental and political history of clearcutting. This reconstructs the process of scientific research concenring the factory regime's impact on the ecology of the Douglas fir forest, assessing how knowledge was utitized in the regulation of cutting practices. Analysis of business-government relations in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon suggests that the reliance of those client states on revenues generated by timber capital enouraged a pattern of regulation that served corporate rather than social and ecological ends.

Scott Prudham investigates a region that has in recent years seen more environmental conflict than perhaps anywhere else in the country--the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Prudham employs a political economic approach to explain the social and economic conflicts arising from the timber industry's presence in the region. As well, he provides a thorough accounting of the timber industry itself, tracing its motivations, practices, and labor relations.

Dr Williams begins by exploring the role of the forest in American culture: the symbols, themes, and concepts - for example, pioneer woodsman, lumberjack, wilderness - generated by contact with the vast land of trees. He considers the Indian use of the forest, describing the ways in which native tribes altered it, primarily through fire, to promote a subsistence economy.

"In The Defoliation of America, Amy M. Hay profiles the attitudes, understandings, and motivations of grassroots activists who rose to fight the use of phenoxy herbicides (commonly known as the Agent Orange chemicals) in various aspects of American life during the post-WWII era. First introduced in 1946, these chemicals mimic hormones in broadleaf plants, causing them to, essentially, grow to death while grass, grains, and other monocots remain unaffected. By the 1950s, millions of pounds of chemicals were produced annually for use in brush control, weed eradication, other agricultural applications, and forest management. The herbicides allowed suburban lawns to take root and become iconic symbols of success in American life. The production and application of phenoxy defoliants continued to skyrocket in subsequent years, encouraged by market forces and unimpeded by regulatory oversight. By the late 1950s, however, pockets of skepticism and resistance had begun to appear. The trend picked up steam after 1962, when Rachel Carson's Silent Spring directed mainstream attention to the harm modern chemicals were causing in the natural world. But it wasn't until the Vietnam War, when nearly 40 million gallons of Agent Orange and related herbicides were sprayed to clear the canopy and destroy crops in Southeast Asia, that the long-term damage associated with this group of chemicals began to attract widespread attention and alarm. Using a wide array of sources and an interdisciplinary approach, The Defoliation of America is organized in three parts. Part 1 (1945-70) examines the development, use, and responses to the new chemicals used to control weeds and remove jungle growth. As the herbicides became militarized, critics increasingly expressed concerns about defoliation in protests over US imperialism in Southeast Asia. Part 2 (1965-85) profiles three different women who, influenced by Rachel Carson, challenged the uses of the herbicides in the American West, affecting US chemical policy and regulations in the process. Part 3 (1970-95) revisits the impact and legacies of defoliant use after the Vietnam War. From countercultural containment and Nixon's declaration of the "War on Drugs" to the toxic effects on American and Vietnamese veterans, civilians, and their children, it became increasingly obvious that American herbicides damaged far more than forest canopies. With sensitivity to the role gender played in these various protests, Hay's study of the scientists, health and environmental activists, and veterans who fought US chemical regulatory policies and practices reveals the mechanisms, obligations, and constraints of state and scientific authority in midcentury America. Hay also shows how these disparate and mostly forgotten citizen groups challenged the political consensus and were able to shift government and industry narratives of chemical safety"--