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Summary
Summary
Author Jeff Forester describes how humans have occupied and managed the northern borderlands of Minnesota, from tribal burning to pioneer and industrial logging to evolving conceptions of wilderness and restoration forestry. On the surface a story of Minnesota's borderlands, The Forest for the Trees more broadly explores the nation's history of resource extraction and wilderness preservation, casting forward to consider what today's actions may mean for the future of America's forests. From early settlers and industrialists seeking the pine forests' wealth to modern visitors valuing the tranquility of protected wilderness, the region known today as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness has offered assorted treasures to each generation. By focusing on the ecological history of the BWCAW's Winton watershed, Forester shows how the global story of logging, forestry, conservation, and resource management unfolded in the northern woods of Minnesota. The result is a telling exploration of human attitudes toward wilderness: the grasp after a forest's resources, the battles between logging and tourist interests, and decades of conservation efforts that have left northern Minnesota denuded of white pine and threatened with potentially devastating fire. The result of a decade of research, The Forest for the Trees chronicles six phases of human interaction with the BWCAW: tribal, burning the land for cultivation; pioneering, harvesting lumber on a small scale; industrial, accelerating the cut and consequently increasing the fire danger; conservation, reacting to both widespread fires and unsustainable harvest levels; wilderness, recognizing important values in woodlands beyond timber; and finally restoration, using prescribed burns and other techniques to return the forest to its "natural" state. Whether promoted or excluded, one constant through these phases is fire. The Forest for the Trees explores how tribal people burned the land to encourage agriculture, how conservationists and others later fought fire in the woods by completely suppressing it, and finally how scientific understanding brought the debate full circle, as recent controlled burns in the BWCAW seek to lessen significant fuel loads that could produce fires of unprecedented magnitude.
Author Notes
Jeff Forester is a freelance writer whose work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Whole Earth Review, Rolling Stone, Oregon Quarterly, and Timberline. He studied creative writing at the University of Illinois and the University of Oregon, where he contributed, with Ken Kesey and eleven other students, to the novel Caverns. A Jerome Foundation Study and Travel Grant recipient and a composition instructor at Concordia University, he lives in Minneapolis and spends as much time as possible camping with his family in the Boundary Waters.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
This is a well-researched historical account of six periods of human utilization of the forests in the Boundary Waters region of northeastern Minnesota: tribal, pioneer, industrial, conservation, wilderness, and restoration. Forester (an independent scholar) describes the social context of each period, including technological and economic development, and the consequences for forest management. The importance of fire is evident throughout: first as used in Native American agriculture, then as something feared as a threat to timber and wilderness, and finally as a prescribed tool to restore "natural" forest dynamics. The author documents the rapid growth of the timber industry through exploitation of the region's extensive old-growth white pine forests, and resulting changes to forest species composition and fuel-load. Public reaction to unsustainable logging and changing social values led to the creation of the US Forest Service and Superior National Forest, and finally to designation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Although less authoritative, this book belongs on the shelf with Canadian Forest Policy (CH, Sep'02) and Forests in Time (CH, Oct'04), since it provides an understanding of current forest structure and dynamics by examining the evolution of society that led to changes in forest utilization over time. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. J. King Michigan Technological University
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments | p. xi |
Introduction | p. 3 |
1 Rock, Water, Tree | p. 11 |
2 Pioneer Lumbering | p. 25 |
3 The Cut Increases | p. 41 |
4 Lumberjack Life | p. 67 |
5 Labor in the Northland | p. 87 |
6 Conservation Gains Traction | p. 101 |
7 Foresters Under Fire | p. 123 |
8 Defining a Wilderness | p. 141 |
9 The Big Blow Down | p. 155 |
Epilogue | p. 173 |
Notes | p. 193 |
Bibliography | p. 201 |
Index | p. 207 |
Credits | p. 215 |