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Douglas C. Sackman, Erik Loomis. Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1629–1630, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1629
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In Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests, Erik Loomis endeavors to write the history of Northwest forests as work environments. Since 1995, when Richard White issued his clarion call for environmental historians to take “knowing nature through labor” seriously (in a book chapter that incidentally referenced the spotted owl controversy, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’ Work and Nature,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature), a literature that has done just that has emerged, most notably in the arenas of mining and agriculture . It is fitting that Loomis, who grew up in a logging town in Oregon, has now brought that attention back to the forests, in his ambitious, sure-footed, and union-centered analysis. The book begins with the work of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the forests in the early 1900s and comes forward to the highly publicized conflict between loggers and environmentalists over the ancient forest campaigns of the 1990s—a conflict that Loomis wants to see as both exaggerated at the time and as hardly preordained given the longstanding worker concern for jobs and the environment that his narrative reveals.
