Across the inland West, forests that once seemed like paradise have turned into an ecological nightmare. Fires, insect epidemics, and disease now threaten millions of acres of once-bountiful forests. Yet no one can agree what went wrong. Was it too much management - or not enough - that forced the forests of the inland West to the verge of collapse? Is the solution more logging, or no logging at all? In this gripping work of scientific and historical detection, Nancy Langston unravels the disturbing history of what went wrong with the western forests, despite the best intentions of those involved. Focusing on the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, she explores how the complex landscapes that so impressed settlers in the nineteenth century became an ecological disaster in the late twentieth. Federal foresters, intent on using their scientific training to stop exploitation and waste, suppressed light fires in the ponderosa pinelands. Hoping to save the forests, they could not foresee that their policies would instead destroy what they loved. When light fires were kept out, a series of ecological changes began. Firs grew thickly in forests once dominated by ponderosa pines, and when droughts hit, those firs succumbed to insects, diseases, and eventually catastrophic fires.
I am an environmental historian and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology with a joint appointment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I served as president of the American Society for Environmental History from 2007-2009. You can visit my website at www.nancylangston.com and the website for Toxic Bodies at www.toxicbodies.org
My initial training was as an ecologist rather than a historian. While on a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington, I researched the evolutionary ecology of Carmine bee-eaters nesting along the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. My experiences in African conservation persuaded me that to understand (and reverse) environmental degradation, we needed to pay much closer attention to human communities. Understanding the historic roots of environmental change became my primary research focus.
My first book, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (University of Washington Press, 1995) examines the causes of the forest health crisis on western national forests. My second book, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (University of Washington Press, 2003) focuses on dilemmas over riparian management in the West. My third book, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES, has just been released by Yale University Press.
My current project is Changing Lake Superior: Forest, Fisheries, Global Warming, and Environmental Health.
Four months of the year, I live in a tiny cabin on Lake Superior, near Cornucopia. While the university is in session, I live with my husband (Frank Goodman), two pit bulls (Tiva and Vanya), eighteen chickens, and 100,000 (more or less) honeybees on the Little Sugar River Farm, a small farm south of Madison. I am an avid sea kayaker and cross-country skier.
