Nancy Langston

This book is an eloquent case study about the management of the Blue Mountains in eastern Oregon. Langston interweaves ecology and history, practice and theory, management and science to discuss how and why the forests of this region have transformed in the wakeof European settlement. She uses archival materials, such as the journals of Lewis and Clark, government documents, scientific research articles, interviews, and more to describe the area's ecology; land use history, including Native American traditions, fur trapping, logging, grazing, farming, burning and fire suppression; the origins, ideals, and practices of the Forest Service; the cultural assumptions behind all of these practices; and the potential for ecological restoration. An illustrative quotation from the closing chapter: "All attempts to manage are attempts to tell a story about how the land ought to be, and by definition, all these stories are simpler than the world itself." It's an engaging and thought-provoking read. Traditional ecological restorationists may dispute her arguments that it is neither possible nor reasonable to attempt to restore an ecosystem to a specific historical condition and that all visions of the land are products of human desire and intervention. However, they will likely support the proposal to "figure out some way of working with dry lands and dry forests by forming close connections to a place but also being willing to adapt to the character of the place." And one side note: I can't help being amused every time that this is a Weyerhauser Environmental Book.… (plus d'informations)

This is an intriguing case study of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, showing what can go wrong when resource managers focus on only one thing. In the pre-refuge days of the late 19th Century, the focus was on cattle. As the refuge grew in the 20th Century, the focus switched to ducks. Neither single-minded focus worked well in a world where riparian health depended not just on grazing policies or nesting habitat, but included native fish populations, native vegetation, and the yearly variations of snowfall, runoff, flooding, and evaporation in the Malheur Basin. Langstrom's focus on adaptive management techniques which began to be implemented in the late 20th Century, including conflict resolution and experimentation, offers a key to how lands can and should be managed to provide satisifactory outcomes to multiple stakeholders, how human engineering and natural systems can be made to work together.… (plus d'informations)